Hlao-roo

Awesome. Great salute to Korngold's King's Row fanfare.

I wish he'd gotten Williams to do the Choo Choo Arms.

Might be my least favorite tracks. This, on the other hand...
 
 
...is a three minute stunner.

The UK version was produced by Laurent Bouzereau.

The last great theme was by Hildegarde of Bingen, after which film music began rapidly to deteriorate in substance. In particular, I have no truck with this flashy modern "technique" of playing two (or more!) notes simultaneously.

It's my favorite prequel score, and it's not even close. I do have a few issues with it -- not at all sold on the "Clash of Lightsabers" interpolation, and "Battle of the Heroes" is relatively insipid, especially as a centerpiece theme -- but to my ears the action cues largely avoid the scattered quality that hampers the back-portions of "The Chase Through Coruscant" and "Jango's Escape," and the atmospheric writing retains an urgency that eluded Williams for vast swaths of TPM.

Laura was actually a serious answer, although Williams has come pretty close over the years, especially in composing the first few Star Wars scores. Given the thread title ("GREAT"), however, I tried to be more circumspect.

Elliot Goldenthal talks his Symphony in G♯ Minor. NPR's Arun Rath (jokingly) expresses concern on the orchestra's behalf about the abundance of sharps in the key signature, to which Goldenthal responds, "They're not babies!"
And apparently Goldenthal listens to "world music" at home.

Or John End Credits.

Or John End Credits.

Awesome. Great salute to Korngold's King's Row fanfare.

Aren't concerned that Williams's score doesn't go far enough in repudiating Western colonialism?

Aren't concerned that Williams's score doesn't go far enough in repudiating Western colonialism?

It's too bad you guys have such short attention spans!

Aren't concerned that Williams's score doesn't go far enough in repudiating Western colonialism?

Here's a nice report from Charles Noble, assistant principal violist for the Oregon Symphony on working with John Williams: The John Williams Experience

Well, I figured, what the hell?

Fixed.

Jane Eyre by Dario Marianelli.
Unremarkable, perhaps, but still quite lovely. I'm always a sucker for these types of small chamber scores.

A sampler:

Jane Eyre by Dario Marianelli.
Unremarkable, perhaps, but still quite lovely. I'm always a sucker for these types of small chamber scores.

A sampler:

Jane Eyre by Dario Marianelli.
Unremarkable, perhaps, but still quite lovely. I'm always a sucker for these types of small chamber scores.

A sampler:

But wouldn't that be so like John Williams?
I can already imagine Laurent Bouzereau producing it and putting this in liner notes: John Williams, the master dramatist, has finally composed a score for his dedicated fan network, building an architecture of exquisite themes for each major member of the fandom in the process. These magnificent themes and motific identifications performed by the glorious London Symphony Orchestra are now recorded and produced into a massive 10 hour opera of colour, magic and enchantment. But John Williams taught me that you don't have to hear any of the music to enjoy it so we compiled this special "nothing" for all the JWfan.com to enjoy while we store the digital sessions into a vault in Nevada that could withstand a nuclear blast and simply let them date and gather mold in the cold darkness. That is the genius of letting me produce these things.

This discussion is about what is perhaps the most important issue not only with modern music, but probably with a large part of modern art as well. If I understand the main point that Mr. Bortslap is trying to make, I personally agree, and I am also very sad about the state of a great part of current "art music". This does not mean that I do not listen to some avant-garde music (I like many of Ligeti's compositions, to name one), but in general I do not assign it the same value that I assign to Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, or, with the due differences, to some good film music like that of John Williams. I just think they are two different experiences.
What I think Bortslap wants to say is NOT that avant-garde music is "disorder" and "chaos". Actually, anyone who is familiar with this music and has seen any sheet music of it knows that many gestures which sound chaotic are actually the result of an extremely careful planning of durations of rests and sounds and heights of pitches from the composer, which often follows very precise and detailed mathematical sequences. His point is probably that the result does not communicate much more than the "sequence" itself. In other terms, a large part of the avant-garde output (with notable exceptions!) does not give emotions (to most people, not to all!), in the sense that it does not affect the listener's state of mind in any constructive way. If this is his point, I personally agree with this, in the sense that I very often find myself completely indifferent and just annoyed when I listen to things such as "Symphonic poem for 100 metronomes", while I almost always feel enriched and I definitely experience some feelings when I listen to Mozart's or Beethoven's masterpieces.
While everybody has a subjective response to music, I have always had the suspect that there must be something objective beyond the difference that most people perceive when experiencing the two kinds of music (let's call them, for simplicity, "classical" and "avant-garde", although "classical" is here intended in a very broad sense, including, for example, even jazz and the Rite of Spring). Some time ago I read that a study (I will look for a reference if I find it again) seemed to link the "sad" or "happy" feelings that are generally produced in tonal music by using minor and major keys, respectively, to the fact that some typical tones of speech that produce the same feelings fall in the same "tonal" areas (probably it's also a matter of rhythm and pitches). In other words, there would be a link between spoken language and tonal music: a minor-key piece "sounds" in some sense as a sad speech, while major-key "sounds" as a happy speech.
Maybe a similar thing, if confirmed, also applies to other parameters. Perhaps there is an objective similarity between a music piece composed in the "classical" way and certain figures of speech that are familiar to all of us, which help in assimilating their emotional content. It's not just about tonality vs. atonality, but probably about the fact of having (or not):
1) an organization of pitches around some "tonal" center: this is analogous to the modulations of voice from when we start a sentence to when we finish it, which makes the listener understand our intentions;
2) a structure of the musical piece consisting of "themes" and "sections": this is analogous to the structure of a speech or a tale (why was sonata form so successful in the classical period? Because the structure involves a presentation of two distinct ideas, the elaboration of them, and a recapitulation, which is similar to what one would often do in a speech);
3) an organization of durations of sounds and rests which is not dictated "a priori" by mathematics, but by the need of conveying some message in an efficient way (the success depends on the ability of the composer to communicate).
I would not be surprised if it was found that these aspects are what helps "classical" pieces to be more communicative than "avant-garde". Note that this is not related to tonality vs. atonality, but to more general properties of musical pieces, particularly to their structure.
How much of this is my personal impression and how much is it objective?

Typical Spielberg. Can't even be subtle about his ambiguity.

I usually listen to albums in their entirety, regardless -- but I'm weird like that.