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Posts posted by Score
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14 hours ago, publicist said:
Why Williams bothers with this is beyond me. It’s a rather undistinguished piece of work and this time he can’t even make it work in a larger context because he’s obviously not scoring the series. Just let it go, man!
My same thoughts. I wish he was employing his time doing something more interesting. Writing a single piece for a movie or a series does not give him the possibility to immerse himself in the story and develop well-crafted theme(s) of some musical relevance. I felt similarly about the Solo theme (Powell could have written the whole score by himself, he surely did not need a "guiding hand" for the main theme).
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On 19/03/2022 at 5:52 PM, MaxTheHouseelf said:
The guy from Schott just mentioned 'Tangled' and 'HTTYD 1' are coming in early May and that they want to add more titles step by step.
I really want HTTYD 2...
HTTYD 1 is finally available from the Schott website (not exactly "early" May, but here we are!). And HTTYD 2 is marked as "in preparation"!
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On 14/04/2022 at 10:44 AM, Tom Guernsey said:
Listening to Vaughan Williams’ Antarctic Symphony (based on his score to Scott of the Antarctic) and it struck me that the use of wordless soprano in the first movement is very similar to the finale to Attack of the Clones, I think it’s the bit where Count Dooku flies to meet with Palpatine. The overall textures are strikingly similar and supremely eerie. Indeed there’s quite a few passages in the Vaughan Williams that are reminiscent of JW, albeit more the overall orchestral texture than specific melodic lines or ideas.
An even more literal quote is the passage immediately before the soprano entrance, see at 2:15 here:
The very distinctive chord is exactly the same as the "twinkling stars" chord from the Star Wars Main Title, see 1:47 here:
The instrumentation and the general mood are also very similar.
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Caroline Shaw's Partita for 8 voices:
Beautiful and original piece, greatly written for the voices. The third woman from the left is the composer herself.
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On 18/03/2022 at 1:34 PM, MaxTheHouseelf said:
For the europeans: Schott Music will have HTTYD 1 from Omni Music Publishing in stock beginning of May, so no need to pay these ridiculous shipping costs and taxes (shipping to Germany is free from 25€ and just 7,50€ to other european countries). More titles from Omni will be available in the future as well.
For now they only have Elfmans "Batman" https://en.schott-music.com/shop/batman-no557163.html
Shipping costs: https://en.schott-music.com/shop/customer-service
That's great news! I wanted to order HTTYD 1 + 2 a few days ago (from Italy) but the shipping cost for DHL was 85 USD, absolutely ridicolous, and the other options were even more expensive. I decided to wait, hoping for this to happen. So, I will just have to wait until May... I hope they will put in their store also all the scores by Goldsmith.
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17 hours ago, Bespin said:
Well the first movements surely starts in somewhat key???
11 hours ago, Bayesian said:My understanding is that contemporary composers of classical music, going back decades, moved away from the notion of being beholden to a home key, or even in a key from a 12-tone scale (e.g., modes or atonality or your second Viennese school whatnot). Instead of writing in a key signature, JW just writes in all the accidentals as needed. Someone help me out; am I even remotely right about that?
The Violin concertos, like most of JW's concertos, are not strictly tonal (although there are some tonal centers, but not in the classical sense), so they have no key signatures. Key signatures almost never occur even in his most tonal film cues. One of the reasons is that he often modulates and uses chromatic harmonies that require many accidentals outside the main key, so he just writes all accidentals close to the notes as needed. Another reason, I guess, is that it might be easier for the session musicians to read accidentals close to the notes, rather than in key signatures. Even in the most diatonic passages - e.g., some parts of Schindler's List in D minor, G minor, C minor, G sharp minor - there are no key signatures. He used key signatures, however, in some pieces such as the Superman March, the Raiders' March, the first part of Princess Leia's Theme, the second part of The Throne Room and Finale, the End Credits from A.I., Exsultate Justi from Empire of the Sun, and a few others (really not many).
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The first time I realized film music was a thing was when I saw Star Wars in VHS as a kid. Then, the scores that cemented my interest in film music afterwards were Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Titanic (all seen at the movie theatre), and The Mission (seen at home). I still remember the impression that all these scores made on me. When the SW prequels, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter appeared, I already was a film music fan.
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I don't feel particularly attached to the Harry Potter movies, but I think they would have given him the opportunity to build a musical universe similar to the Star Wars one, because they show many characters, many dramatic situations... and what he did with the first three movies is extraordinary. So, I voted HP.
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10 hours ago, Will said:
I had assumed all JW's concert works were written out by himself in full score. But regardless, as is true with his film scores, the use of an orchestrator doesn't mean JW didn't write every single note.
7 hours ago, WilliamsStarShip2282 said:There were other pieces on the program, I 100% doubt he touched anything on a concert work. He probably arranged some of the tunes that Josh Groban sang.
7 minutes ago, TownerFan said:And he didn't imply orchestrating Soundings, but rather doing more film orchestration/arranging work around that time because JW was committed writing that concert piece.
I don't know about Soundings, but I know that, for example, the Trumpet Concerto was orchestrated by John Neufeld. So, in some cases he uses orchestrators also for his concert pieces - surely, in the same way as he uses them with his film works. In other cases, he writes everything in full score by himself (he did in the Horn, Tuba and Violin concertos).
2 minutes ago, Luke Skywalker said:I think she said E.T.'s flying theme was hers.
Of course the composer is Williams, but Morley orchestrated the beginning of the End Credits. So, maybe she was just saying that it was her orchestration (as in the case of the final Yavin cue from Star Wars)?
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"That's no moon!"
- Jurassic Shark and BB-8
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War Horse and Temple of Doom for me. I think they are the best left in the two polls, considering that we already have almost everything from Hook, so I wouldn't give it the priority. I would be happy also with The BFG or Tintin, anyway.
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5 hours ago, GerateWohl said:
The amount of chamber music written by John Williams is quite... managable. His duo for violin an viola comes to mind. And the pieces for solo cello. And his conversations for solo piano.Anyway, how ever much I like these pieces. When I like to listen to Williams music and I am in a chamber music mood, I mostly switch on some piano arrangements of his film themes, like the beautiful album of Simone Pedroni or one of the 4-hand piano albums of Paul Dukas.
But is there anyone else who would like to hear more chamber music by the master? A piano trio for example or a piece for string quartet?
I would even love to get the remaining violin arrangments for ASM just recorded by violin and piano instead of vionin and orchestra.
So, my desire would be: more chamber music written and arranged by Willliams for any kind chamber ensembles and that as accessible as his film work.
Perfect compromise is here probably the album "Schindler's List - The Music of John Williams" of Dan Redfeld. But I wished it contained more original arrangements by Williams.
Would also love to see there compositions of that kind that pay tribute to his jazz roots.
Anyone else has thoughts about that?
Apart from pieces like "Air and Simple Gifts" and "Duo Concertante", there are a number of chamber pieces which are original arrangements of music from his films; they are published by Hal Leonard in the "John Williams Signature Edition" series, so they should have been done by him. They are mostly pieces for piano and one solo instrument (violin, cello, trumpet...). For example, this one is part of a suite of three pieces from Schindler's List arranged by him for violin and piano:
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The best film music composers are John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Jerry Goldsmith and Bernard Herrmann, in no particular order. Each of them wrote a lot of great music, and each of them outdid the others in some particular styles. Many other composers wrote beautiful scores, but those 4 stand out for the quality and quantity of their output.
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I'm afraid the question is self-contradictory
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On 21/10/2021 at 6:18 PM, TownerFan said:
I completely get your point and I even agree for the most part, but that's the inherent problem of presenting film music out of its original context. If you take out the visuals, most of film music loses its power and even its significance, so it's essential to rework it (sometimes even extensively) to present it as pure music in a concert hall. It's true that one of Williams' ultimate talents is his ability to create a coherent musical discourse while accompanying the film narrative, and that goes beyond the usual 3-4 minutes miniatures he prepares for concert performances (the live-to-picture performances are perhaps a good compromise in this regard). I guess it's his own modesty at play here too, as he would probably feel too pretentious to present a 25-minute suite from just one score, so I suppose he feels that those 3-4-5 minutes are enough to satisfy both himself and his audience. But again, it's also a matter of how staggering his output is. Even cutting out completely everything before 1975, it's still 45+ years of music.
Anyway, let's not miss one very important point: by doing these concert arrangements Williams is not necessarily simplifying his musical discourse, but more likely making an effort to reach a wider audience. My wife didn't know a jack about John Williams and film music in general (nor even classical or symphonic stuff) before we met, but now after attending several concerts she's starting to sincerely enjoy some of John's music. She learned to appreciate not just the tunes, but also how the pieces sound and how they tell a story. She never saw any of the Star Wars films, but she can enjoy the music. It's fascinating for me to see someone completely unfamiliar making a process of discovery even without all the context in which that music was born.
If I think about some other examples (old and recent), the first who comes into my mind is Prokofiev. The cases of "Leutenant Kije suite" and "Alexander Nevsky cantata" are examples of a composer presenting his film works out of their original context. In those cases, indeed, he had to perform extensive revisions; the original film score of Kije is just a set of few-second pieces, totally unpresentable in their original form, while the original film score of Nevsky is orchestrated in a way that is both economic (in a certain sense) and suitable for the recording means of the time, whose requirements were very different from those of a concert performance. In order to present those scores as concert pieces, Prokofiev combined cues, re-orchestrated, and wrote transition passages. The Cantata from Alexander Nevsky is recognized as one of his masterpieces; the film score cues do not have the same power at all, if disjointed from the movie.
In more recent times, probably the most notable re-arrangement of film music for the concert hall is Shore's Symphony from LOTR (although the name "Symphony" is inappropriate). There, he basically combined cues to form 6 large movements which work well as absolute music, and - as far as I know - he did not change the orchestration; he just assembled them together, with minor cuts here and there. In my opinion, JW's film music could be presented in concerts in the same way: there would probably be no need to do extensive revisions as Prokofiev had to do, because most of JW's film scores are able to stand on their own - at least, the best parts of them. JW could easily assemble a "Symphony" from the music of the Star Wars saga alone (the Battle of Yavin, or the Battle of Hoth, would already work as full movements in their own), or large suites from any of many of his best scores. This is what I'd like to see one day!
- Martinland and GerateWohl
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1 hour ago, TownerFan said:
As I tried to express in my own piece, if the Berlin concerts showed something is indeed the fact that Williams' film music can be enjoyed as music per se without necessarily having a bond or a connection with the films themselves--do we really have to remind ourselves of Far and Away, Solo, or Sabrina, with all due respect for fans of these films?
I totally agree with this, but the problem (for me) is that he does not frequently present his film music in concert, but rather concert arrangements whose aim seems to be that of giving a feeling of "remembrance" of some key moments of the respective films, a bit like opera ouvertures. What I love of his film music is the impressive ability with which he can create stories with purely musical means, which live independently of the film. But to grasp those stories, one needs, as I tried to say, to go through the musical journey (or at least, part of it) that the cues, all together, constitute. This kind of journey is what I miss when listening to most of his concert arrangements: the journey cannot be done in 3-5 minutes. That's why I prefer to listen to his film scores in their original form, or to the more elaborated concert suites, like that of Cowboys, as @publicist was suggesting. And I would prefer him to present well-developed suites... maybe a set of 5-6 consecutive cues played "as written" for the film; I can think of many such sets, from different movies, which would provide great musical experiences. I mean, I don't care about the critics' opinions (I didn't even read the one mentioned above, since I don't speak German), but if they are criticizing the structure of the concert arrangements, I think they have a point. It is not equivalent to criticize JW's music as a whole, but only the way in which some of it is presented in concert.
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1 hour ago, publicist said:One argument i totally can understand is that someone who's served this program with only a few breathers in between and too many outré cymbal crash moments and tutti stuff isn't exactly glowering with praise and why should he? It's obviously geared towards film fans.
That's precisely the point, and it is something that has always bothered me as well. I am a classically trained musician, so my music world is dominated by people like Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and so on. Williams fits very well into that category for the outstanding quality of his film music, which is sometimes even more advanced than the works of many composers in the standard classical repertoire. However, I totally understand the criticisms about the "lack of structure", when they are directed towards his concert arrangements. A piece that lasts 3 or 5 minutes, and ends with a huge applause-calling crash as if it was the ending of a long journey represented by a symphony (or a film score), feels like an excess that aims more at getting an applause than at delivering musical content. When many such pieces are played in succession, I can understand why a reviewer with a classical musical background might get impatient.
An example of this tendency (for me, at least) is the concert arrangement of the Jurassic Park theme. The film score is gorgeous; the dinosaurs' theme plays beautifully in the scene where we see the beasts for the first time, the "journey to the island" theme is also perfect for its scene, and the thunderous finale is a satisfactory conclusion for the scene where the T-Rex establishes its supremacy at the end of the movie. But condensing all these elements into a few-minute piece somehow cheapens their effect, and it can only work because people remember the movie scenes (that's probably why the reviewer was not comfortable in judging them as pure music). The individual moments are beautiful, but the journey between them is even more important, at least for a classical music listener. That's why I wish JW played extended chunks of his film scores in concerts, rather than those concert arrangements (although several of them work very well anyways, for example the slow pieces from Star Wars - Princess Leia, Luke and Leia, the original version of Han Solo and the Princess...).
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3 hours ago, Josh500 said:I believe these editions should be limited, because it makes them feel more special,
You mean that, if they were not limited, you would consider them "less special"? So, for you the value of a work of art does not reside in the product itself, but in its rarity?
3 hours ago, Josh500 said:it allows LLL to actually release and sell them at a profit,
This is a consideration that, although realistic, has nothing to do with what we "prefer".
3 hours ago, Josh500 said:it raises their value for us, as customers, etc.
I cannot see how it can raise their value, unless you mean their economic value once they are sold out. I would never think that the HP scores are more special, nor would I enjoy them more, just because I am one of the 5000 (or whatever) people in the world who could buy the box. They are great because the music is great.
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10 hours ago, Josh500 said:
I hate to admit it, but I haven't even seen the movie yet.
Good for you!
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1 hour ago, Josh500 said:
I know that many people think like that, and that's their right by all means, but I don't agree at all. A work of art should be judged for what it is, regardless of who created it. That's what I strongly believe in.
Otherwise... Let me give you an example. Let's take the score of Home Alone. This probably isn't in your Top 10 John Williams scores, so you don't consider it a masterpiece. But if a lesser composer, say, Patrick Williams had written Home Alone, the exact same score, you'd all of a sudden consider it a masterpiece? Because all of Patrick Williams's other scores are just forgettable trash? That doesn't make sense at all. Either a work of art is a masterpiece or not, regardless of the name of the composer.
Consequently, I submit that John Williams has written dozens and dozens (perhaps as many as 50!) masterpieces during his long, long career.... Not just what somebody considers his Top 10.
Well, it's a matter of definitions. The word "masterpieces" is sometimes used to denote an author's best works within his oeuvre, or in other cases to denote the best works in a certain medium, independently of the author. In this second case, I would maybe say that his most recent masterpieces are "War Horse" and "The BFG".
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I share the opinion that most of JW's scores are masterful. To answer the thread question, I choose to define his "masterpieces" as those scores which belong to my top 10 of his works, then I select those which were composed last. According to this criterion, my answers are HP3 (2004), and whatever was composed last between A.I. and HP1 (both released in 2001). If I had chosen to look at his top 20, my answers would have been different, as the scores written after 2004 definitely include some top 20 material.
What are your thoughts on John Williams' new theme for Obi-Wan?
in JOHN WILLIAMS
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Based on the result, yes. I would not say so if he had provided a new theme at the same level of musical importance as the themes that he wrote for the film scores.