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John Powell kicks ass


Morlock

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A cool interview - gotta love the guy:

You can hear some X-Men:The Last Stand chorus (and origin of lyrics):

Karol

Lol. Comes out with a Coors Light... what a character. Good stuff.

Wives/husbands are the new patrons for composers.

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I liked when he talked about putting lots of short tracks on albums to get around the choir usage rights.

If you didn't watch the whole thing - a 2:30 track with 30 seconds of choir still counts as 2:30 worth of choir on the album. But isolate the choir bit in its own track and it only counts as 30 seconds. That explains why things like the Horton Hears A Who main titles are split into three tracks.

Clever.

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I liked when he talked about putting lots of short tracks on albums to get around the choir usage rights.

If you didn't watch the whole thing - a 2:30 track with 30 seconds of choir still counts as 2:30 worth of choir on the album. But isolate the choir bit in its own track and it only counts as 30 seconds. That explains why things like the Horton Hears A Who main titles are split into three tracks.

Clever.

It's clever, but it's also getting round a completely stupid rule. If the choir only sings for 30 seconds, it doesn't matter if the track they appear in is the length of the CD - the choir has given their services for 30 seconds. Why on earth should they be paid for an hour of singing?

And yes, I love that he acknowledged that we hate that. The Ice Age 3 CD is a mess, and X-Men 3 seems to change tracks at the most random times.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Very interesting that Antz was tracked with Mousehunt, if he didn't say it I would have never noticed.

Also, that new album he's meaning to produce sounds absolutely wonderful. I truly hope it gets done properly.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Found this great interview yesterday. Some highlights:

JP: Right! I’ve always loved working with voices. Voices give you this instant humanity. You can write them nondescript and they’ll blend into the background like an orchestral color. But if you bring them forward, you can use them a little more aggressively within the orchestration style.

One of the ways to do that is to put words with it. There’s a few places where they are singing words. You were talking about the mother and child reunion as it were in the middle of the movie that has some words in Gaelic which is a Scottish language. I found some poems from the 17th century and I used some lines from those. That whole section is sung in Gaelic and allows the voices to use a little more rhythm once they’ve got words to hang onto.

It’s not unconnected that I’m working on an oratorio, so I probably wrote quite heavily for the choir as an experiment.

WAMG: Your oratorio – if you had to compare it to classical, traditional composers, will it sound like Handel or Bach?

JP: That’s a very good question. Does it sound like me in Hollywood or does it sound like me before? Before I came to Hollywood, I was a little bit more radical sounding so I’m not really sure yet. One of the things that I’m fascinated by at the moment is polyphony, so I’m studying more polyphony and I think I’m trying to make it sound more polyphonic than one would expect these days. I’m trying to see if I can do something interesting with that idea now – maybe refresh it. It hasn’t been used an awful lot.

The piece itself is a story driven by a man who took a moment in history and stood between the chance of peace and the chance of war. His own pride made us go to World War I and basically destroyed the 20th century. Everything bad that is still happening, you can trace to this one moment in history at the end of July in 1914. The Kaiser had the option to negotiate with France and/or Russia so that he wasn’t fighting on all fronts. If he had only fought on one front, the whole first war may have been very different. Maybe it wouldn’t have become a world war with so many Allies being brought in. It may have become a war but not a war that setup the whole of the 20th century’s downfall in a way. It may have not led to the second world war, the rise of Hitler, the rise of Communism, it goes on and on and on. There’s a whole political view I have of the 20th century.

It’s what we’re still dealing with based on the futility of this moment of a man with hubris and pride. He worked on the Schlieffen plan for ten years and he came from a hugely famous Prussian military family, he had a lot to live up to and there was no way he was going to let them negotiate peace at that moment before the war started. He wanted his place in history and he wasn’t going let any of it stop him. At that moment when all the negotiations could happen, he was persuaded that it was never going to work.

The final name of the oratorio is called “The Prussian Requiem” because Prussia, where he came from and was part of Germany, was basically wiped off the map at the end of the first world war. It had such a political hold over Germany the Allies decided this is where all the problems were coming from, so they got rid of it as a place and it became just Germany. Prussia was a country until 1918, so we call it “The Prussian Requiem”. It’s a requiem for the 20th century, for the people that died and I’ve wanted to write about it for a long time.

The main thing is that I wanted to make sure I had the time to make it right and that we had the right choir and the right orchestra playing it, which is the Philharmonia Orchestra - one of the most exquisite in the world. We’re doing it at the Royal Festival Hall as part of their season and I’m very pleased when it’s going to happen. We’re recording it next year.

I’m also hoping with the orchestra to try and record an album of suites of film music. I’m going to reinterpret some of the music I’ve done from films – some quite radically. There are moments in some of the pieces that are like suites and you just want to end them differently to finish the musical idea, tie them all up as well as add a few fun things that people haven’t heard before. Probably eight movies, eight suites that we can perform live with orchestras around the world and make an album of it. It will come out at Christmas next year.

http://www.wearemoviegeeks.com/2014/12/composer-john-powell-talks-train-dragon-2-oratorio-wamg/

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  • 4 months later...

Great news on the Prussian Requiem! I also hope the recording of the film music suites for an album Powell mentions in that interview goes through as well. :)

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  • 3 months later...

John Powell is an English-born composer now based in Hollywood, who has written the music for films including Shrek, Chicken Run, the Bourne trilogy, Rio, How to Train your Dragon, the Ice Age sequels and many other major motion pictures.

The Philharmonia Voices will be recording his new work, the Prussian Requiem, an oratorio written to commemorate the outbreak of World War I, and described by the composer as ‘a requiem for the twentieth century’. We will also be singing in a handful movements of suites from his film music.

Source

So apparently the Prussian Requiem was recorded last week, but it seems like we will be getting some film suites as well. Can't wait!

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  • 1 month later...

I've only just now noticed Powell's mission theme from Chicken Run is quite similar to a theme from Zimmer's Cool Runnings:

1:17

Now that's anything wrong with it, just was listening to Cool Runnings and got to that particular section and I was like "Waaait a minute! I know this!" and then it hit me.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...

He's great. Though with his recent disillusionment with the industry, I'm not sure if there are any projects that currently really inspire him.

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I may have mentioned this before but my relative unfamiliarity with the Dragon scores means that when a cue comes on shuffle, I listen to it with rapt wonder before realizing what it is. Genuine amazement at how good it is. It happens so frequently, I'll be disappointed when I start recognizing them and can't be so satisfyingly surprised anymore.

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I may have mentioned this before but my relative unfamiliarity with the Dragon scores means that when a cue comes on shuffle, I listen to it with rapt wonder before realizing what it is. Genuine amazement at how good it is. It happens so frequently, I'll be disappointed when I start recognizing them and can't be so satisfyingly surprised anymore.

Try PAN again, then. Not so much the second half but everything up to 'Tramp Stamp' is on the same level.

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Can't wait for the premiere on 6th March!

Btw, out of interest, this article says:

The oratorio has already been recorded at Watford Colosseum, along with another of Powell’s concert works for gospel choir and orchestra, written in collaboration with Gavin Greenaway. Together, these will form an album due to be released early in 2016.

I seem to remember hearing about a gospel choir in an interview once...but I can't remember if it was related to this! In fact, I heard from another source that they also managed to record some suites from Powell's films (Powell definitely mentioned this before). Either way, I can't wait to get my hands on that CD. The more music the better, I say!

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I may have mentioned this before but my relative unfamiliarity with the Dragon scores means that when a cue comes on shuffle, I listen to it with rapt wonder before realizing what it is. Genuine amazement at how good it is. It happens so frequently, I'll be disappointed when I start recognizing them and can't be so satisfyingly surprised anymore.

Try PAN again, then. Not so much the second half but everything up to 'Tramp Stamp' is on the same level.

I love the theme as introduced through the first track.

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I seem to remember hearing about a gospel choir in an interview once...but I can't remember if it was related to this! In fact, I heard from another source that they also managed to record some suites from Powell's films (Powell definitely mentioned this before). Either way, I can't wait to get my hands on that CD. The more music the better, I say!

My curiousity is piqued.

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I may have mentioned this before but my relative unfamiliarity with the Dragon scores means that when a cue comes on shuffle, I listen to it with rapt wonder before realizing what it is. Genuine amazement at how good it is. It happens so frequently, I'll be disappointed when I start recognizing them and can't be so satisfyingly surprised anymore.

Try PAN again, then. Not so much the second half but everything up to 'Tramp Stamp' is on the same level.

I wasn't that impressed. But the theme introduced in the second half of overture track is really lovely indeed.

Karol

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