TownerFan

New episode of The Legacy Conversations podcast: music theorist Frank Lehman (aka @Falstaft) shares his wonderful academic knowledge about the music of John Williams, illustrating methodology and approach with his usual great observations. He's definitely one of the best examples of how Williams's music ended up influencing not only musicians, but also scholars, academics and historians.
 
https://thelegacyofjohnwilliams.com/2019/11/14/frank-lehman-podcast/

One thing I learned being a soundtrack fan is: never believe anyone who says the session masters are forever lost, destroyed or damaged.

I don't know about the French guy, but Pedroni's transcriptions and arrangements were absolutely submitted to JW's team before the recording he did for Varèse and got their greenlight.
 
As far as I know, JW and his team are more than happy with musicians (especially talented ones like Pedroni and @jimnova ) doing their own reductions and playing them in recitals, but the only thing they ask is to not publish and sell these arrangements. It's not news or a change of policy at all, it's always been this way. The issue here is people collecting money out of copyrighted material they do not own. Entities like MusicNotes.com, which allow virtually anyone to submit their reductions of copyrighted material and sell them through their website, are doing it against the current laws of virtually every country in the Western world. It doesn't matter one iota if they are good reductions. This might be disappointing for people wanting to pay for more elaborated transcriptions than what is officially available, but that's how things are. There is simply too much stuff circulating around and it would be impossible to submit everything to JW and have him looking at it to give green or red light for a commercial release, therefore the choice is to have out only stuff that is already being sanctioned.
 
So, yes, the title of this thread is plain wrong and the moderators should edit it.

Curiously I caught the film just yesterday night on the telly and watched it until the end after many many years since I last watched it.
 
I wonder how an expanded archival presentation should be done since you definitely cannot present it as it's heard in the film given all the tracking, editing and dialing going on. I would likely present first the six sequences JW wrote and recorded as is, and then follow with a sort of C&C presentation of the film cues he wrote afterwards to picture, possibly combining some of the very short ones into single tracks and perhaps also recreating a couple of the film versions (like Arlington, for which JW wrote some specific inserts for the Mr. X scene). A couple of the OST album edits could also be retained for completion sake ("Garrison Family Theme" and "The Witnesses")

Speaking of Presumed Innocent, I found this on YouTube:

Very nice.

In my very humble opinion, this is a masterful score. I'm loving it more and more after each listen.

I confirm that most if not all of Lex Luthor's Lair cue has been reinstated for the LTP presentation.

"The Death of Tybalt" from Romeo & Juliet, by Sergej Prokofiev:

(at 1:30 mark)

It's a known fact that Spielberg and editor Carol Littleton used excerpts of Hanson's Romantic Symphony as part of the temp track (it was even used in the teaser trailer of the film) so it's safe to assume that JW agreed with them that it was with the right choice tonally (I guess especially for its sentimental quality) and he certainly decided to stay close to it in a few bits of the last reel. However, if we look and listen close enough, we can firmly say that it's 5% inspiration from Hanson and 95% JW's own creation. He frequently spoke about the challenge that the cue posed to him in terms of sync points, tempo and overall shape, so it's more than likely that he spent several weeks honing and crafting those final 10 minutes until the cue was perfect to his own inner ear. In the end, he settled to accept the suggestion from the temp, but it's all filtered through his own voice and personality to the point that when we listen to that piece we hear John Williams, not somebody just lifting pages from Howard Hanson and plastering them onto the film. And that's how a good film composer has to navigate through what's requested to him/her to do and what is musically congruous while not looking like he/she is cheating. Of course there are many degrees of how composers do these things and it's true that sometimes the lifts are very clear, but as someone else said above, film composers have to comply to what the filmmakers are asking and sometimes aping the temp is the only way to get out alive.
 
Also, on a broader point, it's always kind of sad to see people in academia still banging on the same subject over and over. I realize it's a very small minority nowadays as film music is not that Cinderella of the musical arts anymore, so it's not even worth to spend time defending Williams or anyone else to the eyes of who is still carrying a prejudice against them. As someone else said, Williams looks like an easy target to these people as he's famous and successful so that he really is the perfect example of a composer carrying that stygma. However, one wonders if these people actually spend time listening to the full score of E.T. or Star Wars before launching into the tirade "Williams is a thief" etc. E.T. for example is really a lot more than those few bars that are modeled after Howard Hanson.

If music is not enough and want to hear some first reactions blabber, there you go
 
https://thelegacyofjohnwilliams.com/2022/11/11/the-fabelmans-first-listen

YouTube Link>
 
 

I saw the film last Saturday and I liked it a lot. Is it a masterpiece? No. But it's perhaps Spielberg's most sincere and heartfelt film so far, possibly unlike anything he ever did before. The closest in tone and style is perhaps Catch Me If You Can, but the level of poignancy in The Fabelmans is imho on a different league.
 
Imho, it's a profound film that touches deeply anyone who decided to follow the muse and tried to create something with it, and how all of this inevitably ties with your own story and your own roots. It's a film that speaks truthfully about many things. I was touched about the feeling of nostalgia for things that now belong to the past and that we miss dearly. Plus, I loved how the references to virtually each of his own films throughout all of it (some of them very clear, others very subtle). In this way, it almost felt like his own swan song, even though Spielberg stated clearly that it's not.
 
John Williams scores the film in the only way he could have possibly done, i.e. with the utmost respect toward the personal story of Spielberg, who is first a friend for him and then a colleague. It's his most restrained score in decades and yet it's touching and very poignant. He let source music, classical pieces and also classic film music bits have the more prominent role, and reserved for the original score a minimum role mostly to offer a comment on the emotions of the characters. I found this choice very moving and also very humble in how Williams decided to stay out of the way most of the time.
 
I only detected one cue that isn't on the album, but I'm trying to figure out if it's actually JW because it didn't sound like him at first glance. I'm referring to the cue that accompanies the moment where Sammy is filming the "long walk" of the final scene of Escape to Nowhere. It features a Morricone-esque solo electric guitar, and later strings and horns join in. It's almost a source music-like moment and initially I thought it was a selection from a classic score, but the recording was too clean and crisp as all the classic film score selections that appear in the film are used when Sammy is actually showing the films to the audience and they're clearly sourced from the original recordings.

I reflected on this a lot over the years and even more since I began the Legacy project. Several things mentioned above here are true and I agree with such statements. It’s possible to do a critical evaluation of JW and put him into a definite historical context. In this regard, Williams is very much a fixture of the 20th century, as he grew up, matured and found his success throughout the second half of the 1900s, so he belong to this specific timeframe and absorbed its wide variety of influences, as many of the greats who lived in the same era did. 
 
Anyway, what I understood is that JW is pretty much a unique and irreplaceable figure in the history of film music, but also music in general. The fact he found fortune and glory in the glitzy commercial world of Hollywood (to which he will always be inextricably tied) doesn’t diminish his formidable skills as a composer who has been able to synthesize and revive a musical tradition (i.e. the classical Hollywood scoring style) and let his own voice be also heard loud and clear nonetheless. He has always been popular and sophisticated at the same time, a quality that is really rare to find. I think he’s the musical equivalent of a Charles Dickens or a Mark Twain in this regard. He fuses unbridled Mozartian genius with a Haydn-like balanced sense of sophistication. Hollywood offered him an ideal platform, in which he was able to express his own talent. He was the right person in the right place at the right moment of history, surrounded by talent and creativity since his early days there and part of a generation who also loved jazz and modern music. 
 
There won’t be another John Williams as there never was another Twain, Dickens or Haydn. He will always be a benchmark, a fixture and a role model for many many composers and artists for centuries to come.

.

.

Grazie!

YouTube Link>
 
 

YouTube Link>
 
 

YouTube Link>
 
 

YouTube Link>
 
 

Should also be noted that the reviewer is the esteemed Christopher Palmer, i.e. a distinguished film music historian and also a fabulous composer, arranger and orchestrator--he collaborated with Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein among others.
 
His book The Composer in Hollywood is an essential reading for any true film music aficionado. I also love the notes he wrote for the TESB re-recording by Charles Gerhardt as printed on the Varèse Sarabande release, it's a sort of mini-essay on JW:

 
 
 

YouTube Link>
 
 

YouTube Link>
 
 

.

I just love the work Christopher Palmer did for Prokofiev!
 
And what came out on record!