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tony69

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Everything posted by tony69

  1. I don't know why everyone seems to like his older stuff. I really like his new stuff. It's more gritty and dramatic than the old stuff like star wars or indiana jones. Sure, they were fun scores. But his newer stuff like Episode 3 or Munich shows a much more serious JW. And i really like this trend.
  2. i agree 100%. many composers i know criticise shore's orchestration skills. it's very static , which is just terrible skill.
  3. haha i guess you hate psycho then.
  4. this is an interesting point. in opera, sometimes the composer did not orchestrate the piece. musicals this is almost 80% of the cases. but some operas by the lesser composers had orchestrators.
  5. haha do u mean the original release with like 30 minutes of music and the rest songs?
  6. doubling is putting multiple instruments on the same line. i guess the best way to describe this procedure is with painting. you have ur standard colors, Red, blue, yellow, etc. then you can mix these colors to get other more subtler shades. in terms of music, you have ur standard orchestral instruments, oboe, clarinet, flutes, etc. when you double them, you get a different and more expressive timbre, though often, the expressiveness of the melody goes down (the general idiom is a solo instrument can be the most expressive since he is able to do rubato). one famous timbre is often used by elgar, Violincellos, Horns and Clarinet, giving you the "nobilimente" sound. Wiliams uses it ALLLLLL the time. Sometimes without clarinets though. Anyways, when i was mentioning excessive doubling, almost all classical composers detest this technique. why? two reasons. REASON1 let me go back to the painting analogy. imagine now that ur mixing red, yellow, blue, green, purple, black, brown, orange, pink, etc. the result is some horrible colorshade. likewise, when you use too many instruments at once, you lose the uniqueness of the timbral combinations. now you have simple a sound mass. adding an extra trumpet makes no difference to the timbre; it still sounds the same. thus, this sound is very much not encouraged by the classical community. REASON2 by using so many instruments on the melodic line, you are depriving those instruments of other potential roles. in otherwords, suppose you had all the upper instruments play the melody and all the bass instruments play a bass line. in reality, you only have two lines but in octaves. wat about the inner voices? you could have so much more contrapuntal activity by removing some of the melodic doubling. I am not saying william's technique in this regards is bad. it had offered me with some unique sounds i have never thought of. ex. vibes and piano in CMIYC or sull pont gliisses in chamber of secrets. but the fact that he resorts to excessive doubling in some instances (as mentioned earlier, across the stars) is not trend that classical musicians encouarge. this trend however may be due to time constraints. i have NOT seen any classical piece orchestrations, so until i do, i cannot make any comment on those orchestrations.
  7. you should ask him about his favourite movie composer.
  8. wow, another one of these posts. i think i've read at least 4 of these. the answer is YES. why did he win one oscar? the oscars w.r.t. movie scores have no/little merit; think of brokeback mountain. he does have lots of awards. the best way to find out greatness is to hear his colleagues say of him, and i can assure you it is very positive.
  9. bbh is jazz? i thought we said somewhere earlier it was contemporary elevator music, maybe easy listening. i dont hear jazz in that. course when i think jazz, i think dixieland, or cool, or bebop or fusion.
  10. Oh come on! "Not that good"?? You have heard his concertos, haven't you? Take the Cello Concerto for instance--it is absolutely modern, with Williams's most skillful, transfixing uses of atonality and chromaticism--yet, paradoxically, you can still hear that the music is based on the kind of unrequited passion of the Wagnerian operatic idiom (give your ears to the 4th movement, "Song"--hear how the cello just keeps reaching for something which always eludes its grasp--and you'll understand what I'm saying). And not to mention the absolutely impeccable orchestration, with a dialogue between soloist and orchestra which rivals that of Rachmaninov. Williams's orchestration is all that orchestration should be--colorful, unpredictable, organic, lush, and inspiring. I'm not saying he's the greatest orchestrator to ever live, but I would say he's John Adams's worthy competitor. And I'm not sure what you mean when you say that he's not "good...in terms...motifs, development, motivic continuity..." I mean, are you serious? Once again, just listen to the Cello Concerto--something like the horn restatement of the First Movement's theme at the beginning of the Fourth Movement, and how Williams can develop the cello "Song" so satisfyingly and dramatically still boggles my brain. Williams's concert works--his Cello Concerto, two violin concertos, "Five Sacred Trees," etc.--are just as brilliant as his film scores. They're elegant, complex, passionate, genuinely inspired. They're just not as accessible as his film scores. And any professor unsatisfied with the eclectic and impressive repertoire of the Maestro is either crazy or stubbornly ignorant. I think you're having a blind devotion to jw. i do like jw, but he is not a god of music like wagner was. jw is THE best film composer alive, but he still has faults. i know some people on the board will agree with me that william's orchestration isn't THAT good when compared to other composers, in particular Respighi, Berlioz and Ravel. too much redundancy as in overdoublings, but then it may be due to functional reason, since the frequencies of the dialogue voice will interfere with the music. example: Harry potter main title, across the stars the third repeat, basically all woodwinds and violins. that's unnecessary doubling. and wat i mean in terms of development is based on a reti/schenker/schoenberg view, which has dominated much of classical thinking in the 20th century. williams doesn't really exemplify that tendency. there are a few, such as ET; the 3 themes are based on the same idea. but williams is not a very good developer; he hints at themes a la ravel's valse, but does not break it up like beethoven or mozart and invert it, etc. but anyways, i think we've had some 5 threads based on the merits of JW as a composer. maybe we should have a new clause in JWFan saying "thou shalt not repeat threads within 3 months."
  11. ya i think they double miked the bass drum.
  12. well BoTH isnt a hard piece. its actually very easy; look at the score. the only hard part is the hard rhythm parts in the middle, and the high trumpet parts. the star wars main title on the other hand is MUCHHHHH harder. much more technically demanding.
  13. i agree. it does not sound at all like williams. however, williams did do banning back batam or whatever that track was in Hook. so it IS possible. but i doubt he did air bud.
  14. I 100% agree with JMan's statement. Movie music is THE new genre of the 20th century. However, it is not yet very artsy. Take zimmer for instance. I think that is the reason of the hesitation of composers to accept this medium. However, the lack of creative control for the film composer may make wagner hesitant to do film scores. He's used to TOTAL control.
  15. Well, why does the classical community have a snobbery against williams? i think this can be because of 2 major reasons. Of course some of you will disagree with me in terms of some of my statements and cite bar numbers of different pieces as contradictions, but the classical community doesn't know every single williams opus. They can only judge based on what they've heard/seen. 1) He mainly writes in a neoromantic style for movies, which has already been 90 years too old. Classical music is about progress, not anachronicisms. Remember the famous story of Korngold. When he was a kid, strauss proclaimed him a musical genius. When he died, he was considered an old fashioned dud cuz he did not progress. I think this is one of the reasons, williams is an old fashioned dud in that respect. 2) His classical pieces are not that good either. When i mean good, i mean in terms of classical ideals such as motifs, development, motivic continuity through all the movements (the "Ursatz"). Do you see melodic inversions, inversions, etc? He is a tuneful composer, but tuneful doesnt cut it for the classical community. They want to see semblances of the serial row (which by now is also an anachronicism. it's 60 years too late). The anachronicism thing is VERY important. It explains the lack of bach's popularity in his time by other composers, especially at the end of his life. He was writing in a style that was already superceded by the galant stile. Another example (but a success story) is beethoven. after his heroic period, he had a crisis in which the styles around him were changing away from the classical ideals. Some people were beginning to consider him old fashioned (from a biography). He changed his style accordingly and ended up creating the masterpiece Symphony 9, well recieved by everyone.
  16. omg transformers. nostalgia. ya we shoudl get williams to do it. then there would be this sick autobots theme.
  17. well, among the best working composers, you have the minimalists (esp reich, though also adams and glass), part, ligeti, gorecki. film music is generally looked down upon, except for williams and goldsmith. i think it is because many of the other composers have a very standard style that we can sum up as the 'hollywood style' plus they did not go through the classical training that williams and goldsmith did. elfman for instance was a member of oingo boingo.
  18. actually older recordings do sound better. many sound engineers would agree with me on this. there is a reason why people used analog. some engineers were telling me how in the old days, they used like vacuum tubes or something. with that equipment, it would create some sort of a warm sound reverberations, like a humming or something which is why for a long tiem they used that sort of equipment to record. but the problem with that is it is hard to edit the sound. with digital, you dissect the sound into 1 and 0s so that alters the quality. but you get the option of increasing the decibels of frequeuncys at 1 kHz or whatever. the tape medium may not be the best, but the recording sounds quite good i am told. thats why we can reuse old recordings and re-release it, ex. solti, bernstein, furtwanglar, even strauss's conducting back in the day
  19. cumparsita? wow, thats a VERY famous tune. everyone knows it.
  20. THE soviet anthem. the one that was used during the soviets, got taken out, and was reinstated by putin in 2003? (i think it was 03)
  21. i hate the victor's tale arrangement. it sucks. jw just does the theme like 4 times in a row, each time with a bit more instruments and no variation. I would have much preferred the long final track on the CD instead, with the piano solo, and that pretty melody that reminds me of canada's national anthem.
  22. omfg. it actually is the russian anthem. blasphemous. they should take non-country-affiliated music.
  23. sorry, beethoven wins actually. dumdumdum daaaaa. tho its not an ostinato, it is far more recognized than dummmmmmmmmmda.
  24. does anyone know who wrote the world cup music? its the one that always plays right before and after commercials and during halftime shows. etc.
  25. no, bigband is not considered a jazz fanfare i think. i thought of that but then i realized fanfares usually employ ONLY the brass, so u cant have drums and all the acessories (saxes, etc). And ya, it doesn't some too jazzy but meh. I cheated for the swing, but putting it at 12/8. I couldn't figure out how to make finale play reverse swing (as in short long). it only did normal swing, so i put it at 12/8. plus you are listening to a very crappy finale'd mp3. real life it sounds jazzy. half of jazz is articulations, and trust me, there are lots of jazz articulations, wails, etc. but you can't do authentic ones with samples.
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