karelm

I just love Prokofiev but this is probably his weakest ballet. Romeo & Juliette is a freaking masterpiece. Cinderella is nice and concise. I generally favor the earlier works, finding them fierier but this ballet just seems to drag. What do you think of the Shostakovich ballets? I heard The Golden Age is excellent.

This is a pretty stupid question but what is a substack? How does it differ from a forum, discord, quora, etc?

Finally some good news! How was the concert?

Well, when you get hired, there is part of the contract about how you'll be credited. a) Composer shall be entitled to receive credit on screen in way that is consistent with other credited (text style) in the form: MUSIC COMPOSED AND CONDUCTED BY XYZ on a separate card of equal size to the Director credit, in the main titles of the Picture, or in the end titles if no main titles are used or if only cast credits or production/presentation/film by credits appear in the main titles. Composer shall also be entitled best effort to receive credit in the billing block portion of paid advertising. b. Producer shall make best effort to also provide credit in the end crawl for the orchestrator, music recording engineer, music editor and featured soloists, if any, provided that Composer furnishes Producer with such credit information in advance of the filming of the credits for the Picture. The point is they don't have to credit you or your team at all, just that they won't forget to try. There's no teeth to this - no one will sue if this doesn't happen, it just lets you yell at them if they aren't at least trying. So, in some films they have a deadline for post production of the edit and end credits so it's possible the composer is only working with one or two orchestrators/arrangers by that credit deadline and then bring in three more after who are too late to be added in the credits. This becomes more common if the film had a screening and tweaks happened late in the process that suddenly previously approved cues might need to be redone. Then you get ghost composers, etc., who might have their own orchestrators as well. It becomes a real pressure cooker in the final days before the scoring session where it's not uncommon to go several days without sleep. Sometimes you hear no feedback on submitted cues so you think all is good just to get all feedback very late in the process (a dick move that screws over a chain of teams) while writing some of the big cues still. It happens quite often. It is also possible the composer might not know everyone they have on their team. I really doubt the big budget franchise projects know who all is on their team because they probably have an office manager handling some of that. So will ask the manager to write up the requested credits. Of course, they'll know the primary team quite well, but if things are running late, you start asking for help from former colleagues and such. This is not ideal (no one thinks this will happen when the contracts are signed a year earlier) but it is part of the reality of the business.

You might be right...I remember that triangle roll was discussed as being removed but maybe I'm thinking of something else. I'll check. Don mentioned that the LSO original timpanist had four drums (maybe 5 for some cues) but was a monster at tuning fast but this passage was always problematic. In an LA scoring session, they wouldn't have this problem because they'll have a chromatic set but he pointed out it was impractical.

Here are some examples of the very minor orchestration changes. During the opening blast of the first fanfare, there was a triangle roll (part of that high shimmer) before the theme starts: No longer done in empire and after: The walking timpani line I mentioned is at 1:02 of Star Wars. It's not in empire and after. Star Wars timpani in yellow was doubling the tuba and low strings in red. It was simplified after as you see here in Hal Leonard. Don Williams (composer's brother and pro timpanist) considered the original bar not great orchestration finding it "too notey" and not easy to stabilize the intonation because they'd have to tune several of those notes. If the music is loud like it is here, it probably won't be noticed but it's considered awkward/temperamental with the revision being more idiomatic. It also says a lot about the level of perfectionism that goes into these scores that if given another chance to redo it, JW is always looking for how it could be improved even if it's something no one would really notice.

There is probably very minor tidying up but hard to notice. Another oddity that @Jay always sets me clear about this then I forget again is the main Star Wars theme. That is generally re-recorded for each film though I think in several films they simply reused it from an earlier recording. There are also very minor alterations. I know in a new hope there was a timpani walking line that was removed for empire (it became a repeated note), etc. I think to make things more complicated, sometimes the version on the OST is not the one used in the film. OST's are not records of what's in the film, they tend to be produced by the composer so the composer might have a preferred take that differs from what the producers/directors used.

That credit is just a contractual agreement and is not fully true in either of those cases. I know orchestrators who worked on both those trilogies. I recall talking to the late David Cripps about recording Return of the Jedi and I'm going off memory so forgive if I get some of the specifics wrong. They recorded in several studios for various reasons like re-edits to the film or preferred venue was booked and the schedule was slipping. At the smaller studio he said it was considerably difficult; the orchestra couldn't hear each other as they were way too many players for the studio size. This is partially why there is wide range of recorded quality in the Return of the Jedi. Some of that included the re-recorded cues like Here they Come but my understanding is that was planned but would have been a new recorded version. There might be more details because it seems they used it as temp music and just agreed it was fine but I'd be surprised JW wouldn't want to rework it a bit rather than have it straight from Star Wars. For Stanley & Iris, it looks like he did use his then regular orchestrators but also the score was small so it might have been a very minor job like just a few cues needed them.

I was an orchestrator for Chris Young on several films. Ask away!

I just saw Cloud Atlas. A bit of a mess. I like the premise but feel it would have worked better as a manga but as a film, it's overly long and jarring story telling. Jarring could be fine if concise like Sin City and Pulp Fiction but they also give episodes time to themselves. This film literally flips epoch's mid thought for much of the run time. It might have been better if they gave each epoch 20 minutes straight then jumped and tide it all up just at the end where they could have done a flip through of the various timelines in a few minutes.

Very interesting...will check it out as well!

Michael Tippet's "New Year". A rather strange opera from the 1980's.

I wish but they're all sold out....I waited too long.

Alot of Horner such as Field of Dreams, Cocoon, New World.

Finally, a good thread. There are too many to count. Here are a few: The first forceful use of the force theme at 0:59 This is a masterclass in brass writing, the whole cue but especially from here to the end, that fanfare at 2:35 ugh!: I'm so happy someone managed to arrange this cue for trombone octet!

That's what I was told by someone who performed it publicly. They had to get her permission because she owned it and ASM gave permission.

It's from the poetry of Walt Whitman which is excellent and multi-layered. For example, Whitman's "A Passage to India" is about a new train route that connected Europe with India, at the time that was opening up a distant, exotic land. The poem isn't really about the train, it is about the march of progress of science and technology through time and how it connects unknown people. That means the poem applies today to new technology every bit as much as it did back in 1871 - like the internet allowing people to connect who might never had the opportunity or a bunch of JW fans connecting from around the world. The train becomes a metaphor. Similarly, the Sea Symphony starts off about ships sailing the sea, but by the end, becomes about the journey of the human soul depicted with the ship of life slowly and calmly disappearing over the horizon into the afterlife, that which is unknowable and can't return from.

That's the best recording of the work I think. It is a very, very good work and much deeper than most think. It is not about the sea.

What is this project you are doing? Are those new mockups?

I quite like him. I'm beginning to think we have similar tastes.

I haven't found time to play it either and I'm in the freaking credits!

Remind me, what was the Geisha question? Was it when was the last time Williams scored a non-Spielberg film?

So how well did you do? Anyone who scores below 70% is not a true fan and will be banned from jwfan.com. Good luck! Quiz: How much do you know about John Williams?

It's not bad, just not the greatest. No single cycle can be, he's such a rich, dynamic, and complex composer. I loved his son's Maxim's recordings with the LSO on the now defunct Collins label, but he also recorded some of the symphonies with the USSR symphony in the early 1970's which I find more authentic (his dad personally involved) and more recently Prague and each version is very different but there is an air of authenticity in those recordings though they are still flawed in other ways. I'm currently listening to two very good series of Sibelius symphonies (Santtu-Matias Rouvali and Klaus Makaela are modern and highly accomplished cycles) but don't quite feel authentic. As if they are only referencing the music notes but not the feel. For reference, we see this in interpreters of John Williams. Zubin Mehta and Charles Gerhardt (and perhaps Dudamel) were excellent at making his music sound like a symphonic poem but didn't have the right feel for the score. It worked great for what it was, such as someone who had never seen the films and only had the music to rely on. The same could be said for Mahler and Shostakovich. Bernstein lived through what Mahler lived through. Cosmopolitan Jew who was primarily known as a conductor in his life but was also a uniquely inspired composer. You have to understand what the composer means, not just what they say. This points towards dissidents of an oppressive regime who are also pragmatic and patriotic ergo but with careful ears and personal interpretations: Bernstein, Barshai, Sanderling, Haitink.

I heard him conduct Mahler 10 and Shostakovich 7 live. These are a mixed bag. Some of them have a dynamic range way too low (I think it was No. 5 or 7, can't remember), some tend to be quite slow but all have good recording quality, just rare that one set will have the best of everything. I still think Haitink and Barshai are superior performances, interpretations, and sonics. Petrenko is a quite good modern set. The thing about Shostakovich recordings is no one set is the best because there are many different ways to judge it. This set is not authentic. For that, seek Kondrashin or Rozhdestvensky. They'll be more intense and manic, less polished. If you are looking for interpretation, my favorites are the 1980's cycles like Haitink, Sanderling, Barshai. If you are looking for innovative, seek the new sets like Michael Sanderling (son of Kurt Sanderling). Ultimately the finest are a mix of all of these so might not be the greatest in any one category. Yeah, sort of sounds like a character in Harry Potter. Like Professor Wigglesworth.