igger6

Holy cow, that Legacy of John Williams LJW piano watermark just broke my brain. Well played, @TownerFan! Is that new?

Not exactly concert-related, but I just found this and it's fantastic:

If I’m not mistaken, Mariah Carey cowrote the the end credits version, and her apparently recorded version didn’t see release because of a possibly divorce-related rights spat with a record executive she had been married to. I don’t have the source in front of me, but I just read that recently in a legit-seeming place. That probably would have made its inclusion here even more impossible.

Wow, after 23 years, Williams finally gets to conduct inside the Galactic Senate!

This is great! Fawkes is so criminally under-programmed that any release is a good one. And the tempo change (barely perceptible to me) just brings out other elements of the orchestration I hadn't focused on before. So now I just have to decide whether to buy this single or wait and see on an album (especially with the potential for an album with the new fanfare on it!).

I had forgotten this was happening! What a spry-looking Maestro! And what a program! That's a spectacular distillation of what's great about John WIlliams from the Seventies to the present and beyond. I can't believe he did both Helena and Obi-Wan! Has he ever conducted a theme for a not-yet-released movie at more than one concert? And honestly, I was half-expecting the Obi theme to fade into history once the show hype subsided. This also makes me wonder what, if anything, from The Fabelmans will make it into his orchestral concert repertoire. Maybe a trimmed version of the end credits? Strange, though, that a clean version of it wasn't on the OST. That also could be a first. I also find myself contemplating the fact this weekend that the latest Williams scoring projects we know of are now complete. I wonder what he's doing now! OK, bring on the videos, somebody!

I love the "Fabelmans" melody. That struck me and stuck with me instantly. Lovely and long-lined, with a promising B theme at the end of the sample. By the way, kudos to whoever plucked these samples for starting in melodically appropriate places. It doesn't feel random as samples often do.

I couldn't find anything on YouTube. The world is conspiring to hide this music!

Maybe it's just a function of how busy he is with how much else at the time.

Apparently the New York Pops played the TROS suite in its entirety just a couple of weeks ago?! Who knew? I found this by accident today! https://www.broadwayworld.com/cabaret/article/Review-The-New-York-Pops-Soar-With-THE-MUSIC-OF-STAR-WARS-at-Carnegie-Hall-20221027

Goldang it, Spielberg, edit and release your recording session footage already! How many more moments like this are sitting on a bearded hard drive somewhere in California right now?

The older John Williams gets, the more obsessed I get with seeing him go back and play the piano. This video that came up in another thread a few months ago was a huge factor in that. Maybe this experience will send him back to re-explore his jazz roots for some upcoming work!

I'm no expert on thematic development, but wouldn't this funereal version of Nori's theme from "We Wait for You" in episode 3 count as a development? (22:53 or so)

Can anyone remind me what the difference is, if any, in performance between the OST disc and the film score? I seem to recall Matessino saying on TLOJW podcast that it's all the same takes, but he wanted to preserve the original mix or something. Since my Styrofoam ears can't usual discern mixing differences, I think that makes the second disc a museum piece for me. With "Journey to the Island" on the new JP set, I was curious enough to actually rip both and compare them in Audacity, but I haven't made time for that yet with this score.

[Hastily deletes half-written justification of why this sounds like Williams music] I trust @Falstaft.

Hey, didn't Williams just write a theme for Hal Leonard and debut it at the Hollywood Bowl? Thought I read a thread about that somewhere.

There was a comic of that? Interesting. I just blundered and tip-booked my way through the re-release of that game a year ago. Now I'm wondering which path the plot followed—Wits, Fists, or Teams?

Interesting! They haven't done Greco-Roman stuff in the series yet. That could be a cool way to go!

Well, of course you're not objective about Zootopia. As a hyena, you've got skin in the game.

Doesn't this start shipping tomorrow? How are people getting them already?

I am 100 percent confident that John Williams played a concert piece from The Accidental Tourist as an encore with the CSO in 2007. I was there as a young JWFan, a mere JWFanblade, if you will. Let me search the forum archives for the evidence. I should be able to find it by next April. UPDATE: Here's @TownerFan corroborating it in 2015: Was the 2007 piece just another concert piece from the film that technically wasn't the End Titles? That seems like a stretch for a score that's practically monothematic.

I just love how three separate, consecutive composer/director pairs for three separate shows (counting the Mandoverse as one) have now spoken about running away from the Williams sound as though it's a bold new direction. I agree with @Tallguy: I want themes. When Mando worked—and it didn't always, maybe not even most of the time—it worked because we got melodic hooks associated with characters and ideas (Mando and Grogu, basically; although I know there were more, that's what I remember a couple of years later). Eventually, in season 2, we even got some musical humility, bringing in Williams and Kiner themes when it made sense to do so. For all my beefs with Ludwig, he had it where it counts in the thematic sense. It sounds like Britell may have written a great theme, but a truly effective Star Wars show/film can't live on a single theme, even when it's a corker. We all just got glaring proof of that earlier this summer. Even Solo wouldn't have been a fraction of the score it was without the vast palette of themes Powell added to what Williams gave him. And to reiterate, music is such an incredible component of the Star Wars universe, by anyone's measure, that I honestly think thematic Easter eggs are a major draw for me now. When Ludwig hinted at the March of the Resistance in that X-Wing scene in Mando season 2? That was a fantastic moment, a reminder that this story is part of a greater story, and a subtle, affectionate wink warmly linking the creators and the fans. I think moments like that keep Star Wars grounded, especially when we're enduring a fire hose of new content, with each piece more determined than the last to expand the universe and redefine the nature of the franchise. That's well and good and even necessary up to a point, but run too far from those little, unobtrusive injections of nostalgia, and you're just making random sci-fi with dirty walls.

That is, at the very least, an inherently awesome logo. Looking forward to the inevitable Behance article about its creation. And, you know, if it turns out to be a harbinger of the realization of previously written-off hopes, so much the better!

Woohoo! Between this and Jurassic Park, I get to jump on two missed boats!

I don't like this idea. If you want orchestral music that sounds like Williams, hire a composer and tell him or her that. If the composer is good, you'll get brilliant new music that keeps the orchestral form alive. Williams himself argued against this approach on Star Wars, and as a result, we got 40 years of a musical idiom thought to be dead in the '70s.