DomSewell

That's interesting. Am pretty sure I remember Potemkin as a silent film but Ivan must have had sound as well as Nevsky. Good spot! Yep - imagining conducting from a sketch! Glad no one sees mine!!!!

Update: one of fab patrons mentioned that Wannberg was responsible for timing all of JW's cues and hence all of the streamers. During the 2002 E.T. Anniversary performance with the orchestra, Wannberg was sat beside the orchestra with score and video monitor making sure all the streamers were working correctly. Was this the first time a whole NON SILENT film had been performed with live orchestra?

Apologies if this has been covered but I'm interested in the technology that JW had access to in 1980 for The Empire Strikes Back. There are no tempo markings in the orchestrator scores but there are in his sketches (I say sketches but really they are handwritten full scores with all the orchestration in a condensed format). So for example, in Asteroid Field he indicates a span of time from 27sec9fr to 29s4fr with 4 beats between them. All he would have had was Kenneth Wannberg (RIP (didn't realise he died last year)) a moviola machine, a stopwatch (?) and some calculations 60/secs in clip x beats = BPM and presumably a click book. A click book still exists in older editions of Karlin and Wright On the Track and I think I worked out using it that the bpm was 133.95 for 1.79secs (1s and 19fr with 24fps). What i want to know is who put streamers on for the sessions as well as worked out the BPM's and where did they list them? Quite a large chunk of time would have been taken up by that synchronisation stage and if JW only had Wannberg to help him the achievement of writing such a lot of complex music for that film is even more if a Herculean effort. Part observation and interest this post... clip with Wannberg towards the end of the vid...

Thanks so much and such good news. I love the passion surrounding JW's music and the joy that it brings everyone. I'd be first on the list for the new action course!

Thanks so much! I’ll do my best and yes will do some Goldsmith and Horner too after The ESB. Possibly. But I suspect (although don’t know for certain) that a lot of the theory was already ingrained at his age even then (studies with Tedesco and others). Tim Rodier (Omni Music) suggested he did a lot of woodshedding when his first wife sadly passed away in 1974 (would be interesting to compare his work after with before?) Of course that’s not to say that he didn’t get inspired by moving his fingers across the keys. It’s undoubtedly true that he did get get inspired in this way (as did Stravinsky eg Petrushka black keys/white keys). But also using the example of Stravinsky he also must have worked out certain combinations of notes that seem to ‘work’ since they come up again and again. The detail of his score shows someone who painstakingly writes (perhaps after having a play around!) - I really hope someone asks him about his classical studies and what books he was aware of. My feeling (I think others would generally agree) is that the coincidences of using Octatonic, hexatonic and Hungarian minor (and Super Locrian) are far too numerous to ‘intuit’. I’ll be chatting to Frank Lehman soon I’m the next couple of weeks so will ask him about this ! It’s a fascinating topic! And thanks too! Well put!

Absolutely - Mark Richards calls that the 0,8,11 voicing and I often call it the Maj/min dyad. He often uses it as a pivot chord between various minor or octatonic scales types. Great spot. The other one is the Viennese trichord - less common. C Db Gb or C F# G (the 'Maria' melody in harmony) and often voiced as a quartal chord Eb A D - the M7 seems very significant in all his gnarly writing.

Warning - this is probably a rather specialist post! I've been doing a lot of analytical work on The Empire Strikes Back this season (2022-2023) and am about half way through now. There's tons of information on themes and advanced harmony (octatonic, hexatonic, Hungarian minor and Super Locrian etc) (see Frank Lehman's thematic catalogue or Mark Richards' fabulous course on Action Music Cues ) but there's not as much information on JW's atonalism: pc set theory doesn't always tell the whole story with Williams who often combines atonalism with advanced harmony. It's a similar situation to that which has occupied musicologists about let's say the Augers Chord from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. (for a wide discussion see Daniel Chua here (music analysis Volume26, Issue1-2 March‐July 2007 Pages 59-109 What struck me about the Chua article was the interesting take that Stravinsky himself had on the augers chord. When he plays it for a CBS interview - he voices the chord in three ways - firstly the Fb chord but then the G then Db, Bb Eb which is the seed motif for the rest of the accompaniment in that segment. It exemplified the problems of calling it an Eb 13 (because you have to literally rearrange all the notes!), or 7-32 (for the same reason, it ceases to become that chord and becomes something else) along with amy modal or octatonic analysis (there is an anomalous note which doesn't 'fit' and modally bears no relation in that voicing to a harmonic minor mode), or, bitonal (Stravinsky doesn't play the chord as a bitonal chord when he individualises the notes in the CBS interview ). JW. Chua also cites others who say 'it's just hand position...nothing more' which he says is a cop out! Chua eventually considers the Augers chord as a 'sonority' and a sign in a semiotic sense and one which defies most analysis. Perhaps by taking Chua's conclusions and applying them to JW we could consider sonority as a useful way of defining separate standalone chords within JW's atonalism. Intervallic content can be defined better if we consider the melodic order - in a particular voicing. It's an interesting problem and am keen to hear viewpoints. I've enclosed this cue as the emperor appears towards the end and there's quite a bit of atonalism in there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxe_rd2GVPY