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Score

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Posts posted by Score

  1. 11 minutes ago, Marian Schedenig said:

    So Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, and the two Blue guys are all Olorin?

     

    Was the character in the show specifically named Olorin? If so, I must have missed it, and I take my hypothesis back. 

     

    In any case, it's just my guess, I have no inside info on Amazon's writing processes! For sure, such a solution would significantly infuriate the die-hard Tolkien fans, so (based on the previous events) I consider it as a likely possibility :lol:

  2. I think the character has some aspects of all the Istars (not just Gandalf; there are also bits of Saruman and Radagast in his behavior and characteristics), so he could even be a sort of composite character that will magically separate himself into the five guys. I would not be surprised should they go down that way.

     

  3. 7 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

    I still think the "Galadriel problem" is blown out of proportion. Yes, her characterisation so far is somewhat overblown and one dimensional, but being more impulsive, stubborn, and less ultimately wise than a few thousand years later are very much character traits that I expected from Tolkien's very limited writings on her earlier years. And she didn't completely overcome that until near the end of FOTR. Given that she's stubborn and sour in 90% of her scenes, I think Morfydd Clark does an admirable job. That I noticed halfway through she reminds me of Liz Truss and can't fully get that association out of my head anymore isn't hear fault. (Disregarding the one inexcusable scene where she threatens Adar with genocide, making arguments that Tolkien himself actually struggled with in his later years when he realised that by his own beliefs, not even Orcs could be considered irredeemably evil. The illusion works only as long as you don't start drawing attention to it).

     

     

    I agree with almost everything you wrote. Regarding this point, I think the quite shocking dialogue between Galadriel and Adar can be explained by the fact that, as confirmed in the last episode, Galadriel had already spent a fair amount of time in strict contact with disguised Sauron, and his influence on her mind (of which is clearly capable, as in episode 8) has put evil in her. Adar nearly says as much in his reaction ("It seems I'm not the only elf who has been in contact with darkness" and "your search for Sauron's successor should probably end in your mirror", or whatever was the original phrasing). When I saw the scene, I actually thought that was the definitive hint that Halbrand was Sauron, although there had been many others.

     

    Totally agree that Morfydd Clark did a great performance with the material that was given to her.   

     

  4. 3 hours ago, Monoverantus said:

    So, I’ve booked an interview with Bear in December, where the two of us will dig deep and talk about Easter Eggs and nerdy stuff. Naturally, I already have a few questions that I want to ask him, but I think you guys have many suggestions too.

     

     

    Very interesting! Although this might not be of interest for everybody, I would ask if he has any plan to publish the full scores (sheet music) of his work for ROP. Since he considers himself a "professional film music nerd", you might tell him that he cannot truly boast that title until he does the nerdiest possible thing in film music, which consists in publishing the written scores.   

     

    1 hour ago, Nick1Ø66 said:

    Mr. Bear, on page 720 of The Lord of the Rings, there is a quote from Frodo, he says “In a world full of mirth and magic, you lose time within yourself”.  Do you agree with this comment?

     

    I'd rather go with the more appropriate: "Mr. Bear, what does Frodo say on page 720 of The Lord of the Rings"?

  5. 11 minutes ago, Disco Stu said:

    Pointless random fact:  Bear is the same age that John Williams was when Jaws was released: 43.  Is ROP his Jaws?  (meaning: the project that vaunts him to the next level of industry importance and respect)

     

    I noticed that too, although I had not dared to make the direct comparison :lol:. One of the reasons I got excited about ROP's score is precisely that I had the distinct feeling that Bear might be... on the right track. We will see.

     

  6. 7 hours ago, Biodome said:

    In their Facebook post, they also mention that the only way to get official tickets is through Vivaticket. I assume they are referring to the possibility of tickets being returned and resold in that website. So keep checking the event page regularly until December 12th, and you might be lucky enough to get tickets.

     

    Here is the complete translation of the Filarmonica's Facebook post:

     

    "John Williams's concert is Sold Out. In a few minutes of selling, we have sold out all tickets. In order to buy tickets, there are no alternatives to the official circuit vivaticket.it .

     

    As a clarification on what was reported in the comments to this post, we inform that today at 14:00 more than 1600 tickets were sold.

     

    The pre-emption on the purchase, which could have been exercised before the opening of the online sales, was reserved only for supporters of Filarmonica della Scala for the 2022 season, and for the professors who are members of Filarmonica della Scala.

     

    The sale on the Vivaticket circuit, which took place in total transparency and fairness, involved a huge number of online users, who ran out of available seats in a very short time.

     

    We are sorry for those who could not finalize their purchase due to the intense online traffic."

     
    :(
     
     

     

  7. A nice interview with the three orchestrators who worked with McCreary on Rings of Power:

     

    https://screenrant.com/lotr-rings-power-orchestrators-interview/

     

    They talk about several interesting aspects of the score production. It's quite funny that the members of the orchestra did not know what they were playing for, although some of the choir members had suspicions because of the lyrics :lol:. Even the orchestrators could not see the movies, and had to rely entirely on McCreary's instructions.

    1 hour ago, Jay said:

    Sadly, I don't think we'll see any other shows following in the footsteps of this though, as Bear talks extensively in his blog posts about how long it took him, and the physical and mental toll it took on his body 

     

    That left me wondering - how are they going to deal with the next expected 4 seasons? Will it be completely on McCreary's shoulders? It surely seems like a daunting task. Suppose they shoot a new series, comparable in size and scope to the first one, every two years until the end. That would require McCreary to write 9 hours of new music for the same project each time, for a grand total of about 45 hours of ROP music to be delivered in just a few years. Such an amount of music on the same general subject, at that level of complexity, would be unprecedented in the history of music; I'm not even sure it would be humanly possible! 

  8. 5 hours ago, JohnTheBaptist said:

    All of the songs on this album have been misfires because they refuse to use professional singers. 

     

    In the case of "This Wandering Day", I think it was done on purpose to recreate the untrained quality of singing that a harfoot would have. They let it be sung by the actress herself, and I think she exaggerated the "untrained feeling" with that intent. If you wish to hear it sung by an elf instead, check this:  :lol: 

     

     

     

    For "Where The Shadows Lie", I had an impression similar to yours about the sample, but I'd like to hear the whole song before judging, which I cannot do at the moment. 

     

  9. 1 hour ago, TolkienSS said:

     

    Not really.

    If you're an artist of any kind, I'm a fan of the wise saying "let the work speak for itself."

     

    Talking about your own work in spades - even without having been asked to do so, in a blog - presents the danger of appearing narcissistic.

     

    As a general rule of thumb, which not only applies to art but any work, if you talk so much about your own work, there is a good chance it's compensation for the work not being able to speak for itself as loudly as you wish it did.

     

    Even today after 20 years, you'd be hard pressed to find Howard Shore talk publically about all six of his Middle-Earth films as elaborately as Bear did these past few weeks about a few episodes.

    And when he does - and this is key - he doesn't proceed to flip out over his own music like "I did this brand new theme!" or "look at this long battle cue I did!"

     

    In short, there is barely any humility in Bear McCreary.

    In my experience, the composers who talk about having created something special, create nothing special, and the ones who simply STFU and keep their head in the work are the ones producing lasting music.

     

    In a post above, you just put completely wrong words and intentions in McCreary's mouth. Probably you didn't even watch the video that was linked. That's independent of what you wrote here.

     

    What you wrote in the post that I'm quoting now, is just your opinion, and it is not based on anything objective, nor on what actually happened in the history of music. The point of writing music, for any medium, is to let people listen to it. Every composer who has ever lived has always tried to promote his works and let them be known / played / recorded / listened to, with the means that were available to them - from playing a new cantata in a church every week in Bach's case, to writing a film score for a movie that is seen by billions of people in some extreme cases happening in today's world. McCreary is of my same generation, he grew up with internet, so it is very natural for him to use the internet to talk about his work. He has described himself as a "film music nerd", so he knows that there are people of our generation who like to talk about film music online, he identifies himself as one of them, and that's what he's doing. I don't see any lack of humility on his side, just a rightful use of the means that he has to promote his work.  

     

    Whether a composer is talkative or not about his works, is just a matter of personality, and has nothing to do with quality (whether you see it or not in their works). In the past, several great composers wrote extensively about their compositions; e.g., Wagner wrote plenty of essays on his aesthetical views and on analyses of his works (and also on other unrelated stuff, as it is sadly known); Messian wrote the treatise "Technique de mon langage musical"; Boulez wrote essays bashing all those who did not adhere to his own aesthetical principles (among other things); and the list could continue. Of course, I'm not comparing any of these to McCreary, but it is obvious that being talkative does not imply being unable of doing something special. Your "rule of thumb" has absolutely no generality.

     

    Do you have anything personal against McCreary? It surely looks like that.

     

     

     

     

     

  10. 1 hour ago, Roll the Bones said:

    Which approach is similar to Tolkien's? ;)

     

    Neither, of course! ;)

     

    1 hour ago, Richard Penna said:

    A recent interview covering a lot of what was in his latest blog.

     

    Interestingly:

     

    - Elrond's theme was revised several times after they watched his scenes and weren't sure if Elrond had a theme.

    - After episode 2 they didn't do spotting sessions. He just scored the episode and they gave some notes in return. Apparently they realised that they were in sync in terms of what the music needed to do and really didn't put any creative restrictions at all on Bear, so that pretty much all choices were down to him.

     

    Detractors, check out around 44 mins in for a couple of minutes, and then I dare you to send Bear hate mail telling him how much you hated his score - he's pretty much asking you to! (although if anyone still accuses him of treating it as 'just a job', you're beyond hope)

     

     

    I saw this earlier today and was about to post it as well. It's clear from what he says that he actually has put thought into the kind of thematic connections that detractors are accusing him of having ignored. I expect they will become clearer as the (multiple) series progress. He also made clear that he's trying to achieve a musical continuity between the series and the movies. 

     

     

  11. 59 minutes ago, TheUlyssesian said:

    He says the concert arrangements came AFTER the score had been written. Someone correct my if I am wrong. 
     

    like he said the Galadriel concert arrangement is composed of 2 cues, 1 from Ep 1 and 1 from later in the season.

     

    I don't know about the actual CD tracks, but I was referring to this paragraph taken from his blog:

     

    Quote

    I wanted to build these themes into fully-realized symphonic structures. Each theme would usually consist of a signature ostinato (repeating musical figure, often serving as a backdrop), a primary A Theme, a secondary B Theme, often a developmental variation, and a Finale. Some of these themes evoke a narrative arc that represented the first season. But, others were more ambitious, imagining the narrative ahead. For these, I challenged myself to compose music that captured the dramatic arc for the entire series. “Elendil and Isildur” and “Elrond Half-elven” are examples of themes with this type of foreshadowing. When the narrative finally arrives at the climactic Last Alliance of Elves and Men, presumably several seasons from now, I wanted to make sure my melodies would still fulfill the story’s dramatic needs.

     

    I interpreted (maybe wrongly) this as meaning that he first wrote some fully developed pieces with a structure, instead of just sketching the themes before applying them to the movies. 

     

     

     

  12. 9 hours ago, blondheim said:

    Here are my problems with his methods:

     

    Thanks for expressing your point of view in a clear way. I don't want to play Bear's advocate, but I'd like to express in an equally clear way why I believe there is merit in his scores:

     

    9 hours ago, blondheim said:

    -in his blog, Bear talks about constructing each of the themes the same way, ostinato, A section, B sectionc, etc. I don’t think every character should be reduced to the same cookie-cutter structure. I find that cheap.

     

    From what I understood, Bear wrote the themes first in the form of what we use to call "concert arrangements" when talking about JW: I'm thinking of tracks such as "Galadriel" and "Sauron" from the album. Then, he used the themes in the context of the movies' scoring as leitmotives. The device of using some standardized structure for the "concert arrangements" is not strange, as it is exactly what every composer who wrote concert arrangements did, including JW (and if you listen to those tracks, I believe Bear was over-simplifying the discussion in the blog - there is more to the music than what he wrote in words). What might be unusual is the idea of writing the concert version first, and afterwards the applications to the movies (assuming that I understood correctly what he did). However, I don't see how that would have had a bad impact on the film scoring; it was just a way for him to determine a set of musical features that he wanted to associate to each character, and to give them a form. As far as I can see, the scoring is quite differentiated: when you watch the movies, the themes for the various characters emerge clearly in their own identity. The elves, Sauron, Galadriel, the Harfoot, the Stranger, the people of Numenor... they all have their identity which can be traced to some specific devices that the composer used to characterize them. The fact that he used a similar formal structure in the concert arrangements does not impact that.

     

     

    9 hours ago, blondheim said:

     

    -his discussion of intervals bothers me; at first it seems fine when he talks about creating intervals that define his themes so that you can hear by the first interval who or what you are listening to. However, there are only so many intervals and when you write seventeen themes, you are eventually going to reach a point where you are simply asking “which interval haven’t I done yet?” He seems more intent on memorability than musical integrity or intent. Ambiguity also seems beyond him. Shore used many of the same intervals over and over but made sure that there was a subtextual reason for the similarity. Bear seems dedicated to making them all memorable and different at the expense of that, which as a composer and consumer both, seems like the easy road. Also cheapens the effort for me.

     

    Also in this case, I think Bear was over-simplifying the description of his approach. His themes have many more distinctive features than just the opening interval. For example, the Numenor theme is not just defined by the opening descending minor third, but also by the musical scale of the whole melody, and by several choices in the instrumentation. The theme for the elves in Valinor is not only identified by the harmonic appoggiatura at its beginning (a descending major second), but also by the use of the choir and the harmony: I don't think it is a coincidence that he used, for the first harmonic movement, the same one that was used by Shore in his Rivendell theme (G - Eb chords in McCreary's theme, A - F chords in Shore's); whether intentional or not, this (and the use of choir) is a callback to the way elves were iconically portrayed in the LOTR movies. And so on. The opening interval of the melody is actually the last thing that I noticed when I heard those themes; I find them very distinguishable because of their other features. 

     

    The fact that he was focused on achieving memorability does not seem to be bad, or cheap, to me: it's exactly what leitmotives should do, and also what Shore's (or JW's) leitmotives were very good at doing. And in the way the ROP movies are scored - besides the leitmotives - I found many well-done musical effects, not less advanced (and sometimes, more advanced) and interesting than Shore's both from the technical point of view, and from the point of view of application to the images. I'm not exactly "foaming at the mouth" :lol: , but I think McCreary is using a way of scoring that has significant merits that are not so commonly found in film music nowadays, and that is definitely worth of praise. 

     

  13. 21 hours ago, blondheim said:

    The blogs have not increased my appreciation for Bear, this score, or his methods. Quite the opposite actually. I understand now why I don’t like his work: I just don’t like the way he goes about composing.

     

     

    Well, his methods seem to consist in writing everything by himself in detailed sketches with all the indications needed by the orchestrators, and writing the whole day for an insane amount of hours. It doesn't sound too different from JW's work ethics. And 9 hours of music of that complexity to be written in a single go during 9 consecutive months is a huge task. I'm not familiar with McCreary's previous work, but I still don't see what is so wrong with his ROP scores, and even less with the methods he has used to compose them.

     

    Just now, Monoverantus said:

    Now it's my turn to sort of agree, because, yes of course there's a difference between objective and subjective statements. However, whether "intellect" in music is worth more appreciation is still subjective. 

     

    I think one of the sources of disagreement is that not everyone here seems to agree on what is "intellect" in music. 

  14. 11 hours ago, KK said:

     

    Well, sure. I'm not trying to make this a debate about the subjective musical integrity of Shore's music...there are plenty of other threads that have waded through this and I've said more than my piece on it. Though I'll add that I think you're carrying a pretty reductionist view of what you consider "advanced" and not. And that even in its simplicity, there is actually another kind of complexity Shore builds, especially as film music.

     

     

    Well, discussing musical aesthetics in a forum post is always difficult; due to reasons of brevity and time, one is forced to select certain aspects and not mention others that might be equally important, and inevitably this can be incorrectly interpreted as superficiality. Rest assured that I have a much more articulated view of what I consider advanced, and I am well aware that the quality of music is not just determined by its harmonic language (although for me, it is an important factor). I was just pointing to one particular aspect that I think McCreary dealed with in a more advanced way than Shore. Since earlier in this thread some people were trashing McCreary's score because they felt it inadequate in comparison with Shore's, I was just trying to propose that, depending on what you look for in a piece of music, McCreary's score can be seen as equally interesting and well done as Shore's. McCreary is just using a different aesthetic system, which I feel is more suited to the series he had to score. In that perspective, he did a very good job; contrarily to what others may think, it takes skill to write in that way.    

     

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