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On 15/08/2016 at 9:22 PM, Jay said:
Well, here's the complete cue list for the second half of FOTR
Source: http://www.moviemusic.com/mb/Forum1/HTML/013609-5.html
Interesting to note that apparently there could be a shorter version of "The Departure Of The Fellowship" from when the scene was still in the Theatrical Cut, if the list is accurate. The film AND OST jump directly from "Bilbo's Gifts" to "The Ring Goes South", and it sounds perfectly natural to me, so I assume the list is wrong in that one spot, though.
Also @Faleel reported that cue 23 on this list is "Mithril Vest", not "Mithril!"... but I've seen plenty of times before when the sheet music title doesn't match the recording log title.
Does anyone know if that list of titles is legit and, if so, does anyone have the first half of the list?
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9 hours ago, Nick Parker said:
I immediately wonder if there's something coming down the pipeline as far as some kind of score/sheet music release. Over the last decade, Williams has increasingly entered legacy mode, such as doing a retrospective project like Across the Stars, but more immediately relevant to this conversation, acquiescing to a person he trusts--Mike Mattesino--to handle archival releases of his recorded music...we also know that this happened in part 'cause Mattesino used Williams' disdain for bootlegs/unofficial representations of his work to drive the wedge in for an official, professional curation of his work.
Could the same thing have happened with his written music? ......
If you are referring to something like an "urtext" edition of some of his complete scores... it would be about time, and it would make the joy of many, many music lovers. But I wouldn't hold my breath for that. He has not given signs, in the past, of wanting his full scores published in other formats than the Signature Edition scores, meant for concert use. But who knows if he has changed his mind... the advent of the live-to-projection concerts required a huge amount of score preparation, including the complete typesetting of important scores, such as the SW OT, the HP, ET, CEO3K, Jaws, and others (albeit with slightly reduced orchestrations). It would not be a daunting task to modify those scores into real urtext editions. Who knows if someone among his collaborators has managed to convince him...
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11 hours ago, Falstaft said:
Sure, blatantly wrong pitches do bother me as both a piano player and--like most of us--a walking encyclopedia of JW music. But I don't think errors are nearly as prevalent as some of you are making them out to be, either in official or unsanctioned arrangements. In fact, some of the piano folios are remarkably good: TROS, for example, is phenomenal.
I don't know much about piano folios, but it is a fact that the Signature Editions used to have some evident mistakes. So evident, actually, that it is quite easy to figure out what the right notes should be; still, it's something that they should have put more care to proofread. Even Conrad Pope complained about this, years ago. And I think they did something about that, because the most recent ones that I've seen do not seem to have that problem. However, this was just to say that I understand Drew's frustration with some of the officially published scores; I just don't agree with the solution he proposes.
11 hours ago, Falstaft said:With this particular video, even hearing those chord tones being played in tandem with the main SW theme, you still get the syncopated feeling of the whole w/ the correctly rhythmically offset bass notes. The effect is correct, and it's more pianistically idiomatic this way anyway. Certainly, it has more than "nothing to do the original score."
We may disagree on how we like it or not, but the chord (C Eb Ab Bb) is just wrong, this is a fact. Just look at the Signature Edition score, bar 6. In the high register, the harmony (played by violin tremolos, piano, harp, clarinets, flutes and piccolo) involves the notes Eb, F, Bb. The C appears only in bar 7, so it is wrong to have it appear together with the Bb in the second half of bar 6. The Ab is simply not there, and it clashes badly with the Bb in the melody. An actual Ab appears two octaves below, in the syncopated bass line, and it should stay there; transposing it up two octaves and moving it to the melody beat generates a wrong chord and an unintended clash. It is perfectly possible to realize a piano arrangement that respects the original score (for example, playing the chord Eb - F- Bb in the right hand, which is equally pianistic and, well, right). There are also similar or worse solutions in the rest of the piece that do not agree with the original.
My point in discussing this was just to show that it is not true at all, in general, that the unofficial arrangements are more accurate than the official ones.
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19 minutes ago, Drew said:
Very unfortunate to see some of the most accomplished independent transcribers be reduced to the title of "random people".
Judging just from the first cue (there's no way I'm going through all that), this is definitely *not* a good transcription, for a variety of reasons. For example, when he hits the high B flat in the theme exposition, and he plays the A flat chord along with it (notes in the right hand: C Eb Ab Bb). This has nothing to do with the original score, it sounds awful and it's just wrong. Things like this are exactly among of the reasons why unauthorized arrangements shouldn't be allowed to be published; it actually proves JW's point. There are many other issues with this transcription, but I'm not going into this, as I'm sure that I will not convince you. I give up.
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42 minutes ago, Drew said:
You're saying JW has authorized arrangers get access to the original score just for them to make major transcription mistakes? https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/title/buckbeaks-flight-from-harry-potter-and-the-prisoner-of-azkaban-digital-sheet-music/19747857
I've told you what I think in a previous post, but I see that I did not convince you
I try again. Personally, I don't care for piano arrangements, but I understand your dissatisfaction with them if you care about them; I also go slightly mad when I buy a Signature Edition score and I find blatant mistakes that could be found and corrected after a single glance of a competent proofreader. But this is just the problem of the accuracy of sheet music copying, and it is as old as sheet music itself. The solution is not to let some random people do arbitrary transcriptions and publish them without control, hoping that they will be more accurate than the authorized ones; it is to supervise more accurately what gets officially published, and release corrected editions when mistakes are spotted. But I don't expect JW to check the Signature Editions before they are published, although I think he definitely should. Or at least, he should hire a trusted collaborator to do it.
(Note that there are also several examples of formidable composers who are not as good as one would expect at the task of proofreading, e.g., Beethoven. For what we know, it's even possible that JW did check those scores, and just didn't notice the mistakes).
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20 hours ago, Drew said:Advanced arrangements typically cannot be made without the starting point of accurate transcriptions. Such accurate transcriptions are now not allowed to be published.
Define "accurate transcriptions". I only see two possibilities:
1) The arranger transcribes the piece "by ear" from the recording. In this case, I'm sorry, but whatever the skill of the transcriber, JW cannot allow this stuff to go around. Even if the transcription sounds good (and by the way, who decides what sounds good?), it is not going to be a faithful representation of a full score carefully written in all its details by a major composer. Markings, dynamics and many aspects of notation are essential elements of the composer's thought, and JW is right in prohibiting the diffusion of written music that does not convey those elements as he has intended them.
2) The arranger transcribes the piece from a copy of the original score. In this case, it is obvious that the arranger must be officially authorized to have a copy of the score, and authorized to do something with it that can be sold for money.
I agree with those above who have said that the title of this thread is completely misleading. JW is not declaring war to sheet music, only to unauthorized arrangements.
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10 minutes ago, Drew said:
That's not the arrangement intended for beginners. It's the official piano arrangement for intermediate and professional players. And it has at least two wrong notes in the melody.
It depends on what is meant for beginners. What I mean is that this kind of piano writing can be mastered by a 2nd-3rd year student, provided he/she has a big enough left hand to reach the interval of a tenth which occurs in a few chords. There is nothing, in the writing, that can be considered "pianistic" enough for an advanced or professional concert performance. That piece could be arranged more effectively for piano, with the use of more advanced piano techniques. The fact that they are not doing it, makes me think that they don't see a market for it, independently of what they write on the book. If they wrote "advanced", I can only imagine that they wanted to stress that it cannot be played by a 1st-year student.
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20 minutes ago, Drew said:
Here are 7 YouTube pianists making the exact same mistake on "Anakin's Betrayal" because the mistake is part of the official sheet music.
(Short rant begins) If I can be a bit brutal... I do not see the point, for a piano beginner, of uploading a video on youtube where they play an arrangement - clearly intended for beginners - of a well-known orchestral piece that can be easily heard in its original form. What is any listener supposed to gain? Surely I am from another generation, but I have the impression that, nowadays, anyone who can play two notes in a row immediately rushes to show it on youtube. (End of the old-school, old-generation rant)
Anyway, the point is that those arrangements are intended for beginners (therefore, very easy and not very "pianistic", mistakes aside), because (I suppose) JW and his team do not see anyone else than a beginner wanting to play those pieces on a piano. This is where JW is wrong; it is the same wrong reasoning for which he doesn't want to publish printed editions of some of his complete film scores, which would make the joy of many composers and of anyone who enjoys and feels culturally enriched by studying original sheet scores. JW and his team should just consider that also more advanced pianists might want to play those pieces in good arrangements, and take care of providing those. If they don't want to do it on their own, they should let someone do it in an authorized way, with full access to the original scores and the approval of an editor who is trusted by JW; a bit like Liszt's transcriptions of pieces by other composers, who were always based on the original scores. There are three possibilities: 1) either JW does not care, or 2) he doesn't want for artistic reasons (not every composer is forced to believe that his music can be rightly represented on the piano), or 3) they calculated that the demand for advanced piano arrangements of his music would be too low to justify the effort.
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2 minutes ago, Drew said:Here is a YouTuber explaining the email they received about it.
Ok, if this is reliable, then I think JW and/or his legal team took an absolutely right decision. It's totally reasonable for a composer to keep control over his published output, and not allow other "non-official" editions to be passed as representations of his pieces, without his control.
Another story is the inaccuracy / inadequacy of some of the "official" editions (I think this is what is bothering you, right?), such as the piano folios, which are (or were - I've stopped buying those long ago, and only go for the Signature Editions) in most cases done by people who are either bad pianists, or bad transcribers. This is an issue, but I consider it a separate one. The solution is not to allow random people to publish their own arrangements, but to supervise more closely the official editions. It is possible that, if they care so much about what is published, they will also start putting more effort into those piano reductions.
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1 hour ago, Drew said:
John Williams and/or his legal team have made the decision to forbid music publishers from selling arrangements of his music made by third party arrangers. For now, the only Williams arrangements allowed to be sold are the official ones.
Do you have a source for this? I'd be interested to know the exact way they phrased it.
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22 minutes ago, Richard Penna said:
Interesting indication of how much he wrote, and if taken completely at face value, no additional composers....
I had realized that the average must have been like that, and it's one of the reasons why I am impressed with the result. I mean, many film composers had to write 2 minutes of music a day to meet the deadline for a project, but doing that sistematically until 9 hours were written, that's quite amazing. And up to now, the quality is very good.
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I've seen the two episodes. I think it's a bit too early to judge the story (it could continue either very well or very badly in the next episodes), but I was very favourably impressed by the music so far. I didn't notice any dull moment in two almost-hour-long episodic scores, while I noticed several highlights, like the cue for the boat scene in the first episode (which I found to be very well written and perfect for the scene - I cannot say more without spoilering). If the scores for the whole series will stay on this level, it will be a great achievement, in my opinion.
Also, if I have to be completely honest... I don't think what I've heard up to now from McCreary is significantly inferior to Shore's scores for the LOTR trilogy. There is no comparable leitmotivic system, but I don't think this should be the only parameter to judge a film score. In terms of harmony and orchestral writing, in McCreary's scores I've heard many interesting and effective solutions, and there were no moments where I thought "ok, here he is just being lazy or didn't have enough time to do it properly" (I have to say that there are some moments in the LOTR trilogy where I had this feeling, instead). Considering the amount of music that McCreary had to write, the time he was given to do it, and the result in the context of the movies, I think he did great, so far.
There, I've said it - now shoot me!
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Wow, that's a beautiful piece! Nice harmonies all around.
It might be interesting to those who have seen that music excerpt (posted few days ago by JoAnn Kane) with the instruction "De Rosa legato" in the horns' parts, to know that it perfectly matches the horn phrase starting around 2:17, so I bet that the excerpt was exactly that passage.
2 hours ago, TownerFan said:
I don’t have memory of anything by JW being premiered in concert with such advance. The closest thing is when he performed an earlier version of “Hedwig’s Theme” at Tanglewood in July 2001.I seem to remember that he premiered Yoda's Theme and the Imperial March some time before the movie premiere, but I don't remember how long before...
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1 minute ago, bollemanneke said:So... are you saying that Mozart and co found Don Giovanni's behaviour not disconcerting at all? I read the summary before listening and was genuinely uneasy.
No, I'm not saying this. Mozart and Da Ponte's judgement on Don Giovanni is very clear from the fact that the character is carried to hell at the end, and from the final ensemble piece "Questo è il fin di chi fa mal..." (= "This is the end of the wrongdoers..."). The point is about the way the authors chose to tell the story, by means of a "dramma giocoso" rather than just a "dramma". And the idea that you could treat such a topic in a (mostly) cheerful way is typical of the century when Don Giovanni was composed.
Think of another opera of the 19th century featuring another vile predator: Rigoletto, by Verdi (composed 1851). The character of the Duke of Mantua has many traits in common with Don Giovanni (it is also said that Verdi had thoroughly studied the score of Don Giovanni before composing Rigoletto). The consequences of his (and not only his) actions on the main character are quite terrible, and the opera ends tragically. And there are no real moments of comical relief during that opera, although the main character is a court jester - the point, in that case, is to show the tragedy in the life of that man. A very different mindset with respect to Don Giovanni: Don Giovanni is a product of the Classical period of music, while Rigoletto fully belongs to Romanticism.
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22 hours ago, bollemanneke said:
I just started Don Giovanni. I'm obviously enjoying the music immensely and will check out Gardiner and Norrington after Karajan. But: Isn't most of the music inappropriately cheerful? Since this is essentially about a vile predator, shouldn't it be more dramatic? Or does opera not allow for that sort of approach?
It's labeled as a "dramma giocoso" (= "playful drama"), see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramma_giocoso . The point of this kind of operas was to treat a dramatic subject in a light and at points cheerful way (see the character of Leporello). To us, it may indeed seem less dramatic than it should be, but that's because we come after Romanticism (19th century) and the full 20th century, which redefined the ways music can express emotions - in large part due to the evolution of the musical language, but also to a general change in sensibility. Even the climax of the opera, the scene where Don Giovanni is carried down to hell by the demons, is not frightening at all by today's standards, although it was almost an avant-garde piece at that time. And it is followed by a major-key finale, which is surely not what a Romantic composer would have done. It was the spirit of the time, and while some aspects of it may seem strange to us, it was a masterpiece which had a huge influence on all the opera composers who came afterwards.
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Surely the Centennial Overture!
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4 minutes ago, Chen G. said:
I think that's a little bit trickier to do given the kind of idiom those scores are written in: Williams wrote something like Rey's theme with the intention that when we should hear it, we should remember Rey and what she's going through over the course of the movies. That's the whole purpose of the leitmotif technique: the make the music and drama inseparable.
I do not agree that a leitmotif-based music and the corresponding drama are inseparable, in general. You can definitely evaluate and enjoy (or not) a piece of music in itself, with respect to its musical qualities (harmony, melody, instrumentation, rhythm, structure...). Another question, which is what you are referring to, is how a piece of music written to accompany a film (or opera) scene relates to the feelings, the scenario and the story portrayed by that scene. This is another point, which is of course important in film music, but has little to do with the intrinsic musical qualities of the piece of music. In other words, the result can be enjoyed independently of the inspiration. In 1999, when I was much younger but already a musician, I listened to the soundtrack of Ep. 1 before seeing the movie and I could definitely say that pieces like Anakin's theme, Duel of the Fates and, for example, the Qui-Gon funeral scene, were very well written and beautiful pieces of music, even if I knew nothing about the story (well, except for the mega-spoiler about Qui-Gon's death in the track titles
). Now that I know that story, and I don't like it / don't care about it, I still say that the score to Ep. 1 is great, because its musical qualities are independent of the story (fortunately).
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8 hours ago, igger6 said:That's an interesting conversation. I think it's totally aesthetically possible and kind of fun to rank themes and motifs that way, but the fact that your ranking happens to coincide with the eras of the movies makes me suspicious (in a playful, sake-of-argument sort of way).
I'll answer, since I also consider JW's work for the first two trilogies superior to his work for the third trilogy. It's not really suspicious if you take into account that the movies for which the scores were written are separated by decades, and in the mean time JW has both grown older and changed his style. It's no coincidence that Superman and E.T. are stylistically much closer to the original SW trilogy than the last SW trilogy is, as they were written in the same years.
It's totally possible to compare JW's works, taken as pieces of music independent of their movies, with other musical works written by other composers and for different media. In this regard, I believe JW absolutely deserves to be included in the list of the great composers (not just "movie composers") of all time, the list that includes people like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and so on. I even consider him superior to several of the great "classical" (in the broad sense) composers. This does not mean that every single 5-minute piece of his output is a masterpiece, or that everything he wrote is at the same level.
By the way, just to play the game, here is my ranking of the SW scores:
V and IV (more or less equivalent, although different), I, VI, III (the last reel is amazing), II, VII, IX, VIII
- MaxTheHouseelf, Rimsky and artguy360
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1 hour ago, GerateWohl said:
If you recept Star Wars music pieces completely independent from their subject, why are you then even comparing them with another and not compare them to completely different unrelated pieces of music?
The only valid answer her is, that you include that relation into your reception and assessment of that music. And that is what I was referring to.
I meant that my assessment of the *quality* of a piece of music is independent of the movie. If a music piece has great harmony and melody and the movie is unwatchable, I will still say that the piece of music is great. Of course the SW themes belong to the same body of work, and thus they can be compared. However, that "their emotional impact highly depends on the movies they are written for" does not hold in my case, at all.
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2 hours ago, GerateWohl said:
These themes are impacted by our positive Star Wars experiences. They are good. But their emotional impact highly depends on the movies, they were written for.
This does not apply to every listener. Personally, I judge a piece of film music on its own merits independently of the movie. That's why, for example, I like very much pieces like Anakin's theme, Duel of the Fates and Across the Stars (they have a positive "emotional impact" on me), while I dislike the movies they were written for. In the same spirit, I see a significant difference between the Obi-Wan theme and those written for SW 1-6. It has nothing to do with me seeing and/or liking or not the movies themselves.
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3 hours ago, Gibster said:
I was looking into getting one of the star wars Hal leonard Deluxe sheet music (85$), how accurate are they? Are they from Williams?
The orchestrations are not identical to the original recordings, although very close. Typically, in the original movie recordings he uses 2 harps, 2 pianos, and larger brass ensembles. In the Signature Edition scores, these are reduced to a standard concert orchestra with 1 harp, 1 piano, and usually 4 horns, 3-4 trumpets, 3-4 trombones and 1 tuba. As an example of the modifications induced by this reduction, there is a fast figuration in the accompainment of the flute solo in Leia's theme which is played by 2 alternating harps in the original (1977) recording, while it is played by a celeste in the Signature Edition suite (while the harp plays chords). As another example, there are two versions of Yoda's theme: the first one, recorded during the sessions of ESB, and a second one, written for a suite that was first offered to orchestras for rental, with a slightly altered orchestration in the reprise of the theme. The Hal Leonard score matches this second version.
Keep in mind that the Signature Edition version is what JW plays in concerts, so it can be considered as his "final word" on these pieces. In my opinion, the Star Wars suite is worth the money (although for the same amount, you can get a complete film score published by Omni Music or Chris Siddall... but not of Star Wars, unfortunately).
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18 minutes ago, Remco said:
Your opinion is all fine, it’s the part about JW’s time that I do not understand. Especially considering he’s got 2 new scores coming up, there’s the recent Yo-Yo Ma and upcoming Mutter album, his plans of writing a piano concerto… it’s not like this had any impact on his other activities. We got this theme, the other option would have been a theme by Holt. I’m just surprised to read on a JW forum that people would rather have that option.(Btw, no I do not think it’s as good as Leia’s theme, but I do enjoy it a lot and I don’t think it’s as one-dimensional as some claim here.)
Ok, I just meant that, since I don't like very much the result for the Obi-Wan theme, I would have preferred him to work on something else in that time, nothing more. I know, of course, that we are going to get two scores and I cross my fingers for the piano concerto, and it's true that this 2-week assignment likely did not distract him too much from the rest. But - having seen the results - I don't like this operation of letting JW sign the main theme of a SW spinoff and then let another composer write the rest of the score, as if anyone else were unable of writing a main theme for a SW show. I don't know anything about Holt, so I cannot say for sure in her case, but in the case of Solo, I am sure that Powell could have written a comparable or, possibly, a better theme. The musical writing in both themes (Solo and Obi-Wan) is not out of reach of any other competent film composer. My opinion is based purely on musical aspects of the two compositions (melody, harmony, and so on). The originality and mastery displayed in the themes of the 9 main movies, especially those for the original trilogy and the prequels, is of a totally different level.
However, I see that many people genuinely enjoy this piece, and I'm happy for them. I have no reason nor desire to attempt to change that.
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9 minutes ago, Remco said:
I think JW should do whatever he wants and the idea of fans deciding on how he should spent his time quite preposterous.
In fact, I did not decide anything. Since this thread is about our opinion on the Obi-Wan theme, my opinion is that it is rather unimportant (as a piece of music) and, since I thought the same of the Solo theme, I'd rather see him composing something else than single themes for Star Wars spin-offs, because I believe these don't give him the possibility to shine. If you think the Obi-Wan theme is as good as, say, Princess Leia's theme, enjoy!
Alan Rickman Thought Williams’ Potter Score Was “Hideous”
in JOHN WILLIAMS
Posted
Maybe he was disappointed that there was no Snape's theme...