Which Score Do You Realize You Play The Most?

[scallenger 483]

I've seen a lot of "favorites" threads or "least favorites", but I wonder: do we all actually play our absolute favorites as often as some other scores? It's kind of an interesting question. My favorite score of all time, for technical and personal reasons, will ALWAYS be Jurassic Park (big surprise, right?). I rank the Star Wars scores, various Star Trek scores, and others up right with it, too. While I do play them a lot... it is ODD to say there is one score I seem to play more than these and many others. In my case it is Bill Brown's score to the PC game of Michael Crichton's Timeline. Now I don't mean I play it consecutively over and over again. I mean that whenever I want to do some work and want music in the background... I put on Bill's Timeline. Whenever I drive and just want something to play that sounds great but isn't too obtrusive, Timeline gets put on. Bored? Timeline. Not feeling well? Timeline. You get the picture.

Now, I do rank this in my favorites, but not as high as something like Jurassic Park or others I mentioned. So what is it about this one score that makes me play it for just about ANY occasion? Perhaps it is because it is, in the best of ways, "generic" in it's sound technically, but there is something about it that always seems to set the mood well with me in a really fun way. I think it helps that it is not set to any kind of "action" (except for it's brief cutscene music tracks), but just has a life of it's own. You could call it "mood music", but that's not entirely what I mean (since this score does have louder and more frantic moments, too). I also did kind of grow up on this score and actually liked the game as a kid since it felt more like a "interactive movie" than a real game (and much more satisfying than the film, which generated awesome scores of it's own, however).

So, in short, my most played score is indeed Bill Brown's score to Timeline. What's yours? And why do you think it is, even if it isn't one of your top favorite scores of all time (although maybe it is)?

[Smeltington 1,436]

Both Tintin and KotCS are well below my top ten, but I find myself listening to them more often than some of my favorites. For me, it's partly about the idea that I want the experience of listening to my favorite scores to be more special. I only want to hear them when I can sit down and just listen. Something like Tintin is fun and energetic, sounds great in the car, etc. It's not a "big commitment" to listen to it, whereas with something like Star Wars I want to listen to the whole 2 hours plus and I want the conditions to be "right."

I'm also conscious sometimes that if I play something too often while having a certain experience, I will make an association between the experience and the music. So I don't want to associate extraordinary music with something like, say, my daily commute. I want to be able to get lost in my favorite scores when I do sit down to listen to them.