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RIP John Barry


Charlie Brigden

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The first orchestral film score I owned was a dubbed tape of Moonraker. John Barry cemented by budding love for film music.

He has given me so much.

He's the most breathtaking track from a breathtaking score.

Cool music. I didn't know he could do s-f so well (even if it was in Bond). I need to check this one out. Along with King Kong that I that we talked about about not so long time ago. What I heard was really good.

The other one I'm curious about is Body Heat. I never got to expand my John Barry collection. I know much some of his scores very well, but there are only two or three on my shelf. Anyway, his style is very distinctive.

Karol

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I bought 'Dances with Wolves' on blu-ray just yesterday, being amazed again afterwards by how utterly beautiful the music for that movies is. I also watched the making of part on John Barry... and now I find out that he died. Sad.

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God, I listened to The Living Daylights on the way to work today. This also my first music since 20 days ago when I stopped listening to music. So...

Once ''Mujahadin And Opium'' and started playing....DH1ix.gif

If you are a resident of the Triangle, and saw a man in his early thirties getting teary eyed, it was me.

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I'll miss those long, languid melodies that for a period in his career he wrote better than anyone else.

I was listening to Moonraker this morning, those long lined melodies, that deep, resounding brass, those urgent, yet sumptuous strings....

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Way back when I was in high school my grandmother lived with us and she mentioned how much she enjoyed the music to Somewhere in Time and Out of Africa. This was a woman who didn't know the difference between Beethoven and the Beatles. I picked both up on CD and copied them onto a cassette tape for her. She played that tape so many times, I had to redo it due to the loss of integrity on the tape.

She's been gone for five years. And, now, so is Barry.

Which one do I dust off and listen to tonight? I'm thinking Moviola...

I loved his argument about his contribution to the James Bond theme. Something along the lines of, "If you want to know who made that piece-- which one of us was hired to compose the score to the subsequent films?" (I think it was an interview in FSM.) It does have a certain logic to it.

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Way back when I was in high school my grandmother lived with us and she mentioned how much she enjoyed the music to Somewhere in Time and Out of Africa. This was a woman who didn't know the difference between Beethoven and the Beatles. I picked both up on CD and copied them onto a cassette tape for her. She played that tape so many times, I had to redo it due to the loss of integrity on the tape.

Yeah, it seems single every person on the planet has got Dances with the Wolves CD. Even the Pope did. I kid you not.

Karol

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I loved his argument about his contribution to the James Bond theme. Something along the lines of, "If you want to know who made that piece-- which one of us was hired to compose the score to the subsequent films?" (I think it was an interview in FSM.) It does have a certain logic to it.

I've always sided with Barry on that one, always will.

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God, I listened to The Living Daylights on the way to work today. This also my first music since 20 days ago when I stopped listening to music. So...

Once ''Mujahadin And Opium'' and started playing....DH1ix.gif

If you are a resident of the Triangle, and saw a man in his early thirties getting teary eyed, it was me.

(Y)

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It's weird. People like Jerry and John Barry were people I never met in my life. I couldn't tell you their favorite color, their favorite food, or even if they would acknowledge my existence if I randomly saw them somewhere. So the wife asks why get so emotional over them?

"Because, before our first date, I was playing John Barry's 007 to work up some swagger and courage before I picked you up." I replied.

These guys were there at some of the most important and personal moments in my life, all through their music.

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I heard this heartbreaking news on the radio this morning, and it was a horrible start to the day. I actually winced when I heard it.

His Bond scores were some of the first soundtrack I ever bought. I remember when I was 16 travelling to a nearby city with my parents to buy Goldfinger, Thunderball and OHMSS. After listening to those OSTs over many times I made it a mission to acquire all his Bond scores. This was before I even heard of Goldsmith or Horner (I had two or three Williams scores).

Now 10 years later, I own over 400 scores, but I still listen to those three Bond scores regularly. And The Living Daylights should have won an oscar, period!

I owe a great deal to John's music for cultivating my interest in film music. Whatever Monty Norman's contribution to the Bond theme was, John made it what it is today. Bond without John Barry's theme would be like Star Wars without John Williams.

A presenter from an Irish classical music station interviewed John about 2 years ago. I highly recommend taking a few hours to listen to him and his music. The link is http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/movies/1245349.html

R.I.P. John.

Damien.

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I owe a great deal to John's music for cultivating my interest in film music. Whatever Monty Norman's contribution to the Bond theme was, John made it what it is today.

I don't know who really wrote what, but I do know that the arrangement of the theme that was cut and pasted all over Dr. No was by Barry, and that's what was in my head weeks later, months later, years later.

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Out of Africa is one of my alltime favorite scores of any composer. Few film cues are as stirring as I Had a Farm in Africa IMO. Thank you, Mr. Barry.

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Here's a real treat for you all, the BBC special on Barry which I was pleased to find on YouTube just now. I watched this when it aired back in 2000, I think. Highly recommended, fascinating stuff, 'License to Thrill':

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He's the most breathtaking track from a breathtaking score.

Bravo, Stefan, this is so worth posting again. Probably my favourite Barry track of all time. Listening to it as I type.

I still don't get it. I feel so sad and empty today as I'm beginning to realise I apparently loved Barry more than I thought ... :shakehead:

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Barry at his absolute best. His strings are goose-bump inducing magic, but never overdone, never overly manipulative. No, Barry had class.

:thumbup:

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Not since Goldsmith has the death of a film composer affected me this much. John Barry, you will be sorely missed. I've had the theme from Midnight Cowboy floating mournfully around my head all day. The Space Capsule from You Only Live Twice is a work of genius.

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I admit I've never been the biggest Barry fan. Perhaps it's because I didn't see a single Bond movie before I was about 20, so I was later to the Barry game than the average film score fan of my age. And while I love many of his themes, the whole scores often fail to hold my interest.

But there still are the themes, and they're magnificent. Barry not only had a great gift for writing melodies, but he used it to write scores that supported their films AND stood out, entirely positively, to the average movie audience. He personally managed to excite more people for at least a little bit of film music than most other composers could even dream of.

RIP.

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Heard about this from someone this morning. "I know Justin will appreciate this. The guy who wrote the James Bond theme died." Ugh, so sad.

My favorite scores by him are King Kong and Out of Africa. The Petrox Explorer opening title sequence, arrival at the island, Kong emerging from the jungle, the opening title train sequence, flying over Africa. Man, oh, man. The guy came quite close to JW for me with these scores. Because it's one of the few Barry tracks on my iPod, I did the Out of Africa theme from John Williams/LSO Hollywood Sound album this morning. It was enough to really get me depressed.

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He's always been one of the great "J's" of film composing. I remember, early in my collecting years, my novice ears thought his sound bordered on maudlin. Everything seemed the same. Then I found a Limited Edition CD hiding in the bin of a store one day--one of only 2,000 made--to a score that still ranks among his best (I've been surprised no one's mentioned it yet): High Road to China. For the first time, I really heard how well he textured his music, how versatile were his melodies, how triumphant his fanfares. I began to listen more closely to the scores of his I already owned (King Kong, Moonraker, and Somewhere in Time). I was forced to reevaluate my perceptions of the man's talents.

Then in 1990 he blew the lid off the whole thing with the release of Dances with Wolves. It remains one of the best scores composed over the last thirty years (and that includes the masterpieces of JW himself). While I adore the "Two Socks" theme as much as anyone else, this is the theme that came to mind when I first heard of his passing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIujnIsQz0M

Picture the scene in your mind for a second: after Dunbar receives the robe from Kicking Bird, he looks to the hilltop in the distance where a group of Sioux await on horseback. One of them waves in a sign of hesitant friendship. I ask you to remember it because I wish I could wave to Mr. Barry in much the same manner as he goes on his way now.

Fare thee well, John. You will be sorely missed. . . .

- Uni

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Heard about this from someone this morning. "I know Justin will appreciate this. The guy who wrote the James Bond theme died." Ugh, so sad.

Well, the guy who wrote the James Bond theme is actually still alive ...

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Listening to Dances with Wolves right now... beautiful and moving as ever. Sometimes I tend to forget how much of Howard Shore's lyrical writing in the LOTR films is in debt with John Barry's style (Shore is a professed Barry admirer).

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The last thing I remember him doing was Enigma. But I don't remember what year was that.

Yes, Barry's sound can often be heard in a deal of Shore's music.

In the recent years I heard of lot of him in the Giacchino's Lost (Oceanic 6 theme and the sideways theme) and in Powell's X-Men: The Last Stand score (the funeral cue). These nods are obvious, I think.

Karol

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RIP John Barry Barry.

Even though I've never met the met the man, I feel like a lost a friend. His scores so directly to do your soul, free of unnecessary ornamentation and layering, cutting to the heart of the drama. Even John Williams himself said that simplifying and refining a melody is what he finds the most difficult, whereas it's relatively easy to obfuscate. Peeling back a score for the most clarity, precision and affect is something that John had a knack for, arguably more so than any other film composer to date.

Whereas John Williams and Goldsmith had have frequent lulls, John Barry's scores (while never the most versatile or innovative), have have always been of a consistent high quality. More akin to the master Bernard Herrmann, who produced masterpieces spanned evenly throughout his career, until his dying day.

From a musicological angle, there's a lot of similarities too. Both used a mosaic-like, cell structure to construct their pieces, were somewhat circumscribed in their style, relied a lot on repetition, preferred vertical chord-conscious composition over linear, were fine orchestrators, understood the jazz idiom well, and had a natural affinity for romanticism. And both produced soul-opening masterpieces in their last few works, Taxi Driver and The Beyondness of Things.

One of the absolute greats, gone forever.

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Yes, Barry's sound can often be heard in a great deal of Shore's music.

I always considered Shore the dark doppelgänger to Barry.

I think doppelgänger is a bit of an overstatement. More like a successor to Barry's legacy (a great deal more so than David Arnold).

Shore pays to tribute to Barry in this interview here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00dt0zf

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Even John Williams himself said that simplifying and refining a melody is what he finds the most difficult, whereas it's relatively easy to obfuscate. Peeling back a score for the most clarity, precision and affect is something that John had a knack for, arguably more so than any other film composer to date.

Absolutely yes. If ever a composer suffered from 'too many notes syndrome', they only ever needed to look to Barry for inspiration.

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Heard about this from someone this morning. "I know Justin will appreciate this. The guy who wrote the James Bond theme died." Ugh, so sad.

Well, the guy who wrote the James Bond theme is actually still alive ...

...yes, if you believe what you read. ;)

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