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Falstaft

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Everything posted by Falstaft

  1. @ConorPower: so it's a little more than 5 months -- but are you still thinking about this? Good old Panama Hat's motif is bugging me now too! I feel like maybe it's something Spanish style (or some French or Russian take on a Spanish style... Debussy/Ravel?). This is what's echoing in my head... Is this a relevant soundalike? It's a variant of the Flying Theme... If so, maybe there's a Stravinsky connection (what with all the Firebird/Fireworks/Scherzo Fantastique stuff in Hook). There's also the main theme from Monsignor but that's getting pretty far afield.
  2. Figured it out! DANG this was hard, well done, @Pat_S
  3. Still banging my head against the table trying to figure out your piece, @Pat_S. None of the below clips are what you're showing, but this excerpt is bringing to mind a bunch of other great symphonic plummets and pratfalls and collapses in JW's output!
  4. Wow, this is a tricky one. Can you offer a small hint?
  5. Absolutely, it's a pitch schema he uses and reuses constantly. The fact that after 20 years, Qui Gon and Obi Wan kind of ended up having the same leitmotif is on one level a coincidence--I don't know if JW really though he was giving QGJ a theme even when writing TPM! But on another level it speaks to the extreme continuity in his writing style and melodic imagination.
  6. I really need to update this video one of these days, with recent examples from The Post, TROS, Indy 5, some clear echoes in Nixon and Amistad, and a bunch of Ludlow variants from War Horse and WOTW I somehow missed the first time around. FWIW I don't think any of the music that flagrantly sounds like other JW in Dial (namely the stuff from AOTC, MR, WOTW, and obviously all the other IJ music) is possibly the result of unconscious stylistic consistency on Williams's part. It's either temp-track emulation or Williams farming it out to Ross ala COS. Makes sizable stretches of the score-as-heard-in-film difficult for me to listen to, to be perfectly honest, the Tuk Tuk Chase in particular.
  7. Here's one I transcribed earlier this year for fun. Can't speak to the accuracy 100%, especially toward the end, since AFAIK this has never been leaked, but think the gist is there.
  8. Sure is! The question is, where? It's incredibly hidden. Another hint -- the melodic line is on the harp.
  9. I'll give a hint: it's in Attack of the Clones.
  10. Here's one. The tune is obvious, question is can you place where this specific instance comes from?
  11. I mean the opening of the ESB credits (and all subsequent SW scores), which starts in E-flat major, instead of the Db major unique to ANH. Everything is otherwise the same as the ANH End Title, as reworked into the "Main Theme" as we know it, with, for example, that explicit rather than implicit statement of the Throne Room theme near the end.
  12. Seems like I'll have to be making some updates to the Concert Arrangements section of the SW Thematic Catalogue! Based on initial impressions of the stuff that's genuinely novel in the program: General Grievous: Essentially the same as the ROTS OST track 5 up until the splice that happens at 2:19, where this arrangement just ends. So, 3m7 + 4m4, but not 4m4A. Enter Lord Vader: Essentially the same as ROTS OST track 11. (Entirety of 5m6) Binary Sunset: Nothing more or less than the sunset sequence from ANH, so the middle of "The Princess Appears" (3m1), starting from the the brief arpeggiated intro, through force theme, and with a sustained G-pedal to conclude rather than a transition to the rebel fanfare as in the original cue. Chrome Dome: Essentially identical to TLJ OST track 15 (7m69) Speeder Chase: Presumably taken from the Concert Arrangement from the TROS Signature Edition, or a portion of it. Has a new, tiny (1 measure?) swell to kick things off, followed by a slight reworking of the material 0:00-0:14, then proceeds exactly as the track 5 does. That is, up until the moment that corresponds to ~1:45 on the track 5. Everything following that timestamp is gone, replaced by a short but entirely new and quite sparkly new ending based on the cue's heroic theme. Kind of an odd arrangement -- would work brilliantly if more of the material was preserved from the latter portion of the track. Farewell (Rey and Ben): Just the opening portion of OST track 16, through the complete statement of Rey's theme. No kiss music, no Ben's death, etc. So, almost certainly just a segment of the large-scale concert arrangement we know JW prepared, but not its entirety. Narration on top covers basically the entire plot of TROS after Pasaana. Rise of Skywalker: Essentially the same as TROS OST track 3, up until the end of the tutti statement of Victory (3:30 on the track), segueing immediately to the ESB version of the End Credits (in Eb, so barely justified by the Bb cadence in Rise). Incredibly clumsy transition into credits music, but hey, haven't they all been since AOTC?! The lingering question for me is whether Speeder Chase is verbatim the signature edition arrangement, just part of it, or a new arrangement specifically for this series. edit: Asked and answered by @BSOinsider!
  13. There's no hard and fast rules to describing this kind of thing, but I'd characterize the B as an added 2nd. Not as a 9th (there's no 7th implied), nor a sus-2 (there's no feeling that the B needs to resolve by step). So A major (add2). I think you'll find these sorts of major-add2 chords are quite common in JW!
  14. Thanks so much @Jay, that means a lot to me! I do hope this article will, in some small way, make a case for a more respectful treatment of symphonic film scoring. Judging from the comments, I think audiences are eager for a return. The NPR segment I did was with Think! and should be streamable here: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/478859728/think. We cover some of the same ideas from the NYT article but also touch on Williams's career more generally (including Daddy-O!).
  15. You're not alone in that, @Maestro! Happy to be openly celebrating your incredible achievement. 2025 can't come soon enough. Maybe this is a silly question, but: based on your conversations with him, do you think Williams knows about JWfan, or might care to know? Maybe he'd be embarrassed, but I bet part of him would be pleased that there's this incredibly active and long-running internet community dedicated to his legacy. And that it's been a source of sustenance and inspiration for many of us now involved, in one way or another, in the study and performance of his work?
  16. Funny, I've spent the past couple days writing about exactly this magical passage you've brought up, @AGiambra! Williams's harmonic vocabulary is incredibly rich, and progressions like you mention do not always lend themselves to "explanations" in a standard, functionally tonal sense. Which is not to say they're constructed in an arbitrary way at all! The harmonic weirdness doesn't end with the C|Db chord either! Immediately afterwards, you get C|A and finally C|Eaug. And then the section with the iconic piccolo solo, which is a *tiny* bit more explicable -- basically, a prolonged C(b6) chord, with the piccolo suggesting a C-mixolydian(b6) scale. These augmented chord complexes--and the scales that go along with them (wholetone, hexatonic, mix-b6)--have a fair bit of history in suggesting ~~cosmic~~ states. To offer just a little bit more for you to explore, check out Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia Antartica, the eerie textures and harmonic effects of which I imagine were in Williams's ear -- and certainly Jerry Goldsmith's a few years later in the sublime ST:TMP!. I also suspect you'll find the introduction to Schreker's Die Gezeichneten up your alley:
  17. That sounds like a podcast I'd love to listen to! Alas, time is finite, and I'm more of a writer than a talker anyway. It's not exactly what you're talking about, but Chrysanthe Tan and Dominic Sewell's respective channels are both at that extremely high musical level you're interested in. Speaking of stretto, the clip is now accurate in my article. Hooray!
  18. Ha! I was wondering when someone would notice that. It's one of two goofs, the other being the "stretto" music is actually the ~10 seconds that precede the clear stretto in Crystal Skull. The design team picked out and synched all the music clips themselves, and I didn't want to bug them with little corrections, since so few people would notice the issue and they don't make much of a difference to the argument. So both of those slightly suboptimal clips will remain. Oh well! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  19. It was a long and complicated process, though it started very simply with me pitching the idea with a cold-email back in early May. The thrust of what I wrote initially was more academic in tone, and I had a few more examples in mind: the theme from Slalom on Mt. Humol; the key changes from Bug Tunnel/Death Trap; the rhythms of Ants!; that brass canon Belly of the Steel Beast; and even a mention of Falcon Flight from TROS (as proof that JW "still got it" when it comes to action scoring). But during editing, everything was, quite logically, focused down onto more to a few key examples. The biggest editorial note I received was to make it all more autobiographical and assertive in its opinion, which was a tone I was not used to writing in. But I think it worked out -- the personal touch in particular (anyone else have that Kid Stuff album?; it really was formative to me!). Once everything got going -- after Dial came out, primarily -- the editing process was really supportive and pleasant. As far as the multimedia element, I can only point to the incredible design team at the Times. I just specified the timestamps and they worked their magic behind the scenes. I was super lucky that they had access to that high quality, recent video of JW conducting the Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra with Berlin, that was a real coup.
  20. Thanks everyone. I actually wrote this well before Dial came out, but was glad I was able to sneak in a last minute edit about "The Battle of Syracuse." My secret hope is that some Disney exec sees this article and realizes a score-only presentation of Indy 5 would be a good idea!
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