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Fabulin

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Everything posted by Fabulin

  1. In retrospect it's amazing how different are the themes for the master and the apprentice. Qui-Gon sure must have seemed like an oddball to Williams I like the thought that the Kenobi theme describes Obi-wan the way he is once we take away his social roles (warrior, mentor). @Falstaft your catalogue refers to the Force Theme as such, without mentioning it initially also being a Ben Kenobi theme. Could it be that Williams read the catalogue and noticed that Obi-Wan is the only one who doesn't have a theme? I don't know how likely that is, but the mere thought is entertaining
  2. why is this progression so unthinkable for Star Wars? What makes it special?
  3. 1. The new Obi-Wan piece is 4 minutes of pathos with a bit of hope in the ostinato and otherwise no interruption by any other emotions, including (thank god) sentimentality. It might be small, but it sounds very sincere to me. It could well be a track in some great JW war drama. 2. Galaxy's Edge has a very good structure and other old classical virtues, but it also sounds like dispassionate craftsmanship at the service of something purely commercial. A strange combination of charisma and kitch sticking out. 3. The Adventures of Han, much as some of TROS, sounds a bit off to me, especially the theme. On the day of its release I was very confused by it. In hindsight, it seems to belong to a small, recent, unusual category of 'Haabesque Williams music'. There can't have been many cases in history where a composer hired on the basis of his ability to imitate another composer ended up influencing the latter's later work. Overall, it is a fruit of skill, its thematic material is quite good, and it does carry some very refreshing energy, but ultimately I think I am not the target audience of the kind of naive adventurism it is about.
  4. I think they are equivalent, but I am not sure about making a note longer (dotted) only to add an articulation that makes it shorter again. It might depend on what a particular musician is used to reading. I've seen many scores with such pauses within rhythmic groups, but of course incidence per se has no bearing on whether this is the optimal way to notate. Anyway, at least I am GLAD they are not dotted notes within triplets
  5. Touché. But while the ostinato offers variety, it preserves and contributes to the unabashedly serious and dramatic mood. Rebellion is Reborn is a nice contrasting piece where that is not the case.
  6. If it had a B-part, there would be complaints that Williams only ever composes this way. I like that he went for something with a "longer line" for a change. He knew how to make a build-up within a single mood, and as a result 3:19 sounds quite powerful.
  7. Whoever wrote it, wrote it too short. Moar!
  8. There are fans of looking at bridges and then there are fans of the engineering of bridges.
  9. My thought stems from the one about a more general trend how years of being publically compared to the classics by friends and strangers alike might have affected JW. He has already been a chief defender of Herrmann, Korngold, Al Newman, and others as early as the 1970s "neoclassical" revival. And not just covertly so: there is an apocryphal story how Williams allegedly announced "this one is for Korngold" before conducting one of the cues in The Phantom Menace (Panaka and the Queen's Protectors music). I think that the number of old masters that he has felt protective about (at least once literally, with a patronage over a Haydn manuscript), has grown since. Around the time of writing The Force Awakens he mentioned Beethoven's scores laying at his night stand. At AFI 2016 he said that Beethoven would have shunned Hollywood. By 2020 Beethoven had changed his mind and suddenly in Williams's view he probably would have composed for films and only would have disliked hearing his music cut and edited. Around the same time Williams went on to say that he would return to Vienna if they showed him more original manuscripts of Haydn. In 2020 he went on radio with Dudamel with a suggestion of playing Beethoven's pastoral. A year later, when asked about the famous Schindler's List quote, he said his own first thought of who were those "better composers" had been Mozart, and Spielberg's might have been Brahms. Also in 2021 Williams visited the Thomas-Kirche in Leipzig and reacted "now I can die" after Jurassic Park was sounded in his honour on Bach's old organ. He is said to have wanted to write a theme for Obi-Wan, because he had never written one This just seems like a perfect opportunity (now or never) to have that one deliberate homage to Wagner, too. Or not Maybe it is only my mind in which all that has been planted
  10. In theory, any degree of similarity to anything can be plausibly denied like that (and has been, especially on this forum). Analyse a motif, point out why it works, and there you go, it is somehow absolved by its own mechanical description. Thus far he described his connection to Wagner, IIRC, as "If there are similarities, then it is not because I put them there". So the musicologist perspective is "obliged" to take it at face value. But does that extend to works composed after the statements had been made? My comment was exactly about the idea that this time it is different, and why could that be. That's all. Edit: What wouldn't be "on the nose"? A retrograde inversion at a completely different tempo?
  11. Call me crazy, but I am more and more convinced that the Sword / Siegfried connection is deliberate, a result of multiple interviewers planting the idea of being connected to Wagner in Williams's head.
  12. I would never have thought that Star Wars makers would give Williams an opportunity to write a concert piece on a topic of tragedy and focus on the psychology of a traumatized character. This is the kind of unconditional dramatic seriousness that Williams's blockbuster scores has often been accused of lacking in contrast to operas or, say, Herrmann's scores. But even with that being the case in this assignment, the choice of Wagnerian/Brucknerian tonality and rhythm is not something I expected from Williams, certainly not to that extent. Always a step ahead of us he is.
  13. You may include the anecdote how Williams visited J.S. Bach's old church, the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, on October 10th 2021. As he was exiting, the organist begun to play the Jurassic Park hymn and Williams said 'now I can die'. Here is a photo from the church: The source is one of those high profile interviews, was that The New York Times?
  14. JW: Steven said: "I need a better composer than you for this film". ASM: ... JW: and then I said "I know, but they are all dead" – and raised my fee to 2 million dollars.
  15. have you composed any other such Romantic pieces? I would be interested to hear some more
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