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Chen G.

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Posts posted by Chen G.

  1. Possibly. Isn't all academia just that?

     

    Still, I think the discussion that developed is a valuable one. That's why I "Like" @Falstaft's comments, even if I don't necessarily agree with his thesis on the matter: at least its interesting, and constructive to a meaningful (and potentially mutually insightfull) discussion, which is what an online board is all about.

     

    Its certainly much more engaging than me saying something and people just agreeing, or vice versa.

     

    And, again, whatever you want to call it: its a very nice tune!

  2. Ah, I see. An issue of terminology, then....

     

    I speak of "themes" and "leitmotives" as one and the same. You don't. Alright...

     

    I also don't think Williams is necessarily forgetful, but I do think we need to distinguish his more fleeting, cryptic comments to his more explicit, straightforward statements. And we also need to consider the time between his comments and the actual composition process upon which he is commenting at any given time: An interview with him ten years removed from Return of the Jedi will not be as valuable as an interview that took place as he was writing the Solo theme (or themes, whatever), to be sure. All very much the basics of textual analysis. As such, I continue to hold that explicit autorial intent remains the most important tool in analyzing the composer's work, although I agree its often appearant from the music (as well the way in which the album is arranged), as well.

  3. 3 minutes ago, JoeinAR said:

    Neither has held up worth a damn.

     

    If you care about the story being told, you should be able to get over poor or dated special effects. Production value is secondary to narrative.

     

    I'm not the biggest fan of the Matrix (and the less is said about the sequels the better) but its a better story than The Phantom Menace!

  4. 1 hour ago, Falstaft said:

    It's similar to the "Rebellion is Reborn" in this respect, in which the "Rose" and "Luke in Exile" themes are pretty strongly differentiated.

     

    Yeah, but the thematic material in that abides the "rule" that I stated above: i.e. that the two not only appear in the score proper in isolation but also emerge in separate parts of the score, and develop separately. I don't think the two themes (which have little to do with each other, narrativelly) ever cross paths in the story. Here, they're both for Han Solo. Granted, one could argue they evoke different parts of his personality, but still.

     

    Besides, here we can't draw from the way the theme is used in the score proper because the individual statements might not represent what Williams would have done, and are therefore not representative of his authorial intent, as it were.

     

    Not to namedrop or anything like that, but its what Doug Adams called (in a comparable situation) a "theme and-a-half". ;):P

     

    You can take it, you can leave it, but the point I'm making is a valid one, nonetheless.

  5. That's a fair statement. I guess I'll just have to hear it for myself. Again, its a matter of perspective more than anything else. To each his own (view, that is)

     

    As for the similarity to Poe's material, well that was to be expected. Really, Poe recieves the most old-fashioned, swashbuckling identity of anything Williams scored since maybe the early 90s, very much in-line with the character (well, as least as of now).

     

    It makes sense that young Han - in a movie that is meant to evoke the retro (and, narrativelly, takes place prior to Williams' original Star Wars), and to which the composition was writen within a couple of years from Poe's material was - would merit a piece in the same style.

     

    That aspect, for instance, really doesn't come across in the demo above, so I suppose its really not much to go on.

  6. All this debate whether or not A and B phrases of a long-winded piece are separate themes or not really boils down to perspective. For me, like I said, they are of a piece. Others' milleage may vary, though.

     

    I think what differs this piece (and really, most of Williams longer themes, of which there are many) from, say, Kylo Ren's two themes, is that in that case not only was Williams explicit about it, but the two "phrases" not only appeared in isolation from each other, but also emerged and were developed separately: one emerged at the very beginning of the score, the other - only started to form nearly half-way through the picture, and from that point onward they just occasionally happened to be played one after the other.

     

    Not so much with most of Williams longer themes: usually we get a straightforward statement of the entire thing (either in the score or in the album presentation) and than we get individual parts applied to different scenes, usually without much in the way of thematic logic, which is another reason I'm not an advocate of this organisation method: if the individual parts of theme don't mean anything in and of themselves - than how can they be considered leitmotivic in their own right?

     

    In a way it actually diminishes what Williams accomplishes with these themes, in terms of the length of the melody...

     

     

  7. 6 minutes ago, Stefancos said:

    The Matrix was the more infuential of the two.

     

    Well, it was much more novel. The Phantom Menace was, in many respects, "yet another Star Wars movie." The Matrix was the first of its kind.

     

    But than, I really don't put much stock into judging films by their influence. I could appreciate a film's contribution to the industry or its effect on the public over and over, but what really matters to my eyes is whether I enjoyed watching it. 

  8. I hear it, but it doesn't mean that the resemblence is in any way intentional.

     

    Shore's Middle Earth music is largely written in the idiom of the romantic period; but he rather ingeniously wrote the material around Bilbo in the idiom of the classical period to make it sound out-of-place, just like Bilbo is. This will inevitably create incidental resemblances between this music and classical pieces.

     

    Written in this vein are not just Bilbo's fussy theme, but really all the Shire material used in the Bag End scenes that occur in The Hobbit's timeline.

     

    Oh, and "The Valley of Imladris" needs be added to the catalog of themes at the top of the thread. Its appears twice: In "The Hidden Valley", 3:14 going forward; and again in the diegesis - sadly unreleased.

  9. He does do a lot of digital grading. I actually think the biggest offenders are The Fellowship of the Ring and The Battle of the Five Armies: The former, for going for excessively soft picture quality for the scenes that are supposed to take place in the second age to denote its antiquity; the latter, for trying to bring the picture quality to that of the former.

     

    Otherwise, I think the films look fine.

     

    But than, stylized grading is probably another thing that you won't be seeing on the small-screen.

  10. 11 hours ago, Pellaeon said:

    Doesn’t mean I have to like it when things make poor sense in the logic of the imaginary universe, or when discontinuity is created. It jerks you out of the story; it distracts from the story.

     

    Its merely the stage for the story.

     

    Of course, staging is important and the world of the films needs to be consistent. But if you think about it too much (especially in terms of what transpires off of the screen and between films), some inconsistencies are bound to reveal themselves. If its nothing too major, one should be able to look past it.

     

    By not delving into what brought The First Order to such a position of power, both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi can flow much better as films. I guess some of it could have been told in the crawl, but there's a reason the crawl is as short as it is. Otherwise, you'll end up with tidious crawl like The Phantom Menace's, or with a languid one like the first drafts of the opening crawl to the original Star Wars, which were twice as long. Not a good way to start your film.

  11. Well, from a photographic standpoint, this series (and really, almost any concievable Tolkien story left to tell) isn't going to require a lot of scaling down and up of characters: its almost all Men and Elves. So you got that out of the way.

     

    Beyond that, its impossible to expect this series to cinematographically resemble the films too much, for any number of reasons: First, Jackson has a very specific style (namely, a love for the extreme close-up) which other directors are unlikely to mimic too closely. Furthermore, TV shows go through multiple directors through the different episodes, so the style in which the coverage is achieved is different even within different episodes of the same series.

     

    And lastly, It'd be hard, with so much of the budget presumably already routed to effects, to use cranes, helicopters and virtual photography as freely as the films do; nor will it be easy to construct takes as long as Jackson concieved for The Hobbit in particular.

  12. 5 hours ago, crumbs said:

     it sounds like you're just trying to talk down Williams' writings on TLJ (as usual) by flagrantly disregarding these separate ideas as "duplications."

     

    Not at all.

     

    I just prefer a more exclusive approach to tracking down leitmotives (or themes). I think its more consistent with the way Williams writes: He (intentionally) doesn't go the Wagner/Shore route of writing a large amount of them: instead, he writes 5-6 of them (or, in this case, half of that), which he can feature more extensivelly and make more distinct. I really don't think he would want us debating whether each three-note snippet from his scores is a leitmotif.

     

    I think that leitmotives need to have a clear association, and a specific one: if its something too general and abstract (e.g. action motif) than it probably isn't a leitmotif. Likewise, the motif in question has to be substantial, not just be a generic musical gesture or something that's so brief and inconsequential that it might have re-occured by sheer accident - it needs to be intentional. On the flipside, it has to be something intentional to the score at hand - if its something you find across multiple scores by the composer, its usually more of a stylistic device than a proper leitmotif.

     

    A good example from another score is the two-note brass figure that James Horner in Braveheart. Its all over the score. Is it a leitmotif, than? hell, no. First, its too generic: at a mere two notes, the figure is defined more by its timbre (growling low brass) than by the actual music. Second, if you try to pin down its role in the story, its really nothing more than "danger" or "ominous" which is far too abstract (effectivelly a replacement of Horner's prexisting three-note figure used for the same purpose in his earlier scores), and third - having recurred in Titanic - its really more of an expression of Horner's style than it is a specific leitmotif written for this score.

     

    I think a great parallel is between leitmotives in a score and callbacks in the dialouge of a script. Not every line that happens twice (or more) in a script is a callback. It maybe too generic to be intentional: think about a character exclaiming "oh my god" when facing danger. A lot of the supposed leitmotif being labeled around JWFan are the musical equivalent of that.

  13. 15 minutes ago, rough cut said:

    Am I the only one who didn’t care much for The Rebellion is Reborn?

     

    You're not.

     

    I mean, I do like it, but I am certainly in the minority, and I totally understand what issue others have with it.

     

    And I'm not too crazy about the score as a whole, either. Although, like you, I'm not saying its bad by any stretch of the imagination. I probably like it more than The Force Awakens.

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