Hans Zimmer started on INTERSTELLAR

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

First off, Nolan doesn't temp. Zimmer writes preliminary material, and Nolan uses what comes from that.

Second, Zimmer hasn't really done many interviews about this score yet. I'm sure we'll hear about the genesis of this at some point.

Third, the Gladiator/Holst thing was soooooo over-dramatized and it was shameful that so many people made such a big stink over it. Really shameful.

Fourth, it's right along those same sensationalist lines to call this "close to illegal level." It's obvious that Zimmer had this moment in mind, his music is still rather distinct from the Wagner despite being cut from the same cloth, and it's not like he's trying to pull a fast one on people. Besides, old Wagner doesn't have an estate of greedy descendants and lawyers to hop on the latest plagiarism prosecution bandwagon.

Homage away, Hans.

[karelm 2,903]

Third, the Gladiator/Holst thing was soooooo over-dramatized and it was shameful that so many people made such a big stink over it. Really shameful.

No. West Side Story credited Shakespeare up front. In your world view, they wouldn't have to. You are amazingly permissive of your hero's failings.

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

And you are amazingly hell-bent on demonizing the man. Do you genuinely believe that Zimmer thought, hunched over and villainously wringing his hands, "oh, I'm gonna sneak some Holst in here and no one will notice, and everyone will think I'm great!"? No chance in hell. Not even if the Zimmer cue were closer to the Holst than it is, would it have been some shady attempt at passing it off as his own. Homage is homage. It happens in music all the time. There's a passing resemblance and nothing more.

And Karim, you've spent enough time talking about Williams' issues, "plagiarisms" included, to know about being an apologist for one's hero! I can supply examples, if necessary - there are a few Williams "homages" that you've cheerfully pointed out in the past and I'd love to get your thoughts on what exactly makes them different from when Zimmer does it - other than the fact that you adore Williams and somewhat revile Zimmer.

But on second thought, we've been over the issue of plagiarism/homage/etc. on this board way too many times. As tempting as it is to start posting the reams of obnoxious but seldom truly wrong "John Williams is a plagiarist LOLLLLOLZ" articles to be found on the internet for you to refute, I think I'd rather just listen to this score with my daughters again instead.

[KK 3,307]

I definitely think the Detach moment was a lovely homage to Wagner.

The Holst stuff in Gladiator, well like some particular Williams moments, is more of a grey area.

[Jay 37,287]

New article about the score

Hans Zimmer scores the universe

[KK 3,307]

Most of it is flowery nonsense, like most of the PR bs surrounding the promoting of this score, and even the film.

[Not Mr. Big 4,639]

Didn't read the article. Great picture though...

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

What a shit article, and about par for the course for Slate. Rife with all the latest cliches, weary anecdotes, and classic misinformation.

I can't wait for this movie to be 20 years old.

[KK 3,307]

Amen. Read some of his other articles too

He's a Zimmer fanboy full of shit.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

Urgh...Zimmer fanboys! (spits)

[Bilbo 3,709]

"Before Zimmer could apply string theory to his string section" made me want to puke violently.

[Sharkissimo 1,973]

New article about the score

Hans Zimmer scores the universe

The only remotely interesting quotes are these:

The only way I knew how to do that was I wrote a ginormous, very sort of Mahleresque, Straussian love theme, with the notes forever reaching upwards. There’s a musical trick, if you will, whereby I was trying [to make it seem] like the notes would carry on going upwards all the time, whereas really what happens is the counterpoint to it was going downwards. You kept having this idea that things are going upwards, to infinity, like a barber’s pole.

In hewing to acoustic instruments—deployed with the added colors of bridge-slapping, mouthpiece-buzzing extended techniques

[gkgyver 1,645]

I didn't take it in any way. I just didn't get what you meant at all.

Ok.

Anyway, don't know what else to say to make myself clear.

I understand perfectly well what you mean.

Zimmer was looking for sounds that fit the tone of the movie in his mind, and then went on to do music which he thought puts the effects of these sounds in the best possible light.

And musicality came second.

Don't know what's not to understand about this.

[Sharkissimo 1,973]

That's a pretty narrow view of the creative process.

[TownerFan 4,983]

It seems to me that Zimmer's approach is usually to score the mood of the film, not particularly story or characters. This is the main difference with the traditional Hollywood music style approach. Hence why he thinks mostly about how to color the soundscape. Interstellar is no different in this sense, even though it seems to me that he tried to be more "musical" than in other circumstances. As someone said a few posts above, Zimmer doesn't "compose to picture", in the sense he doesn't seem to write around dialogue or specific on-screen action. It's a very different approach than traditional film scoring. To use a worn out analogy, he paints with big strokes of color, while someone like Williams for example is more like a sculptor, who carves and chisels the music around the film's narrative needs.

When it comes to Zimmer though we shouldn't use the same judgement patterns that we use with traditional old-school Hollywood composers like Williams (or Herrmann, Goldsmith, North, Korngold and so on). Even though he uses orchestra (and sometimes even traditional forms and structures), I think he's more akin to a composer like Vangelis than anyone else. Mood and ambiance comes first.

[crocodile 7,984]

Very aptly put, Maurizio!

What did you think of this score (and Nolan's film), by the way?

Karol

[Sharkissimo 1,973]

Even though he uses orchestra (and sometimes even traditional forms and structures), I think he's more akin to a composer like Vangelis than anyone else.

Or European composers like Edward Artemiev, Zbigniew Preisner and the band Popol Vuh. They were more interested in the metaphysics of a scene.

[filmmusic 1,823]

It seems to me that Zimmer's approach is usually to score the mood of the film, not particularly story or characters. This is the main difference with the traditional Hollywood music style approach. Hence why he thinks mostly about how to color the soundscape. Interstellar is no different in this sense, even though it seems to me that he tried to be more "musical" than in other circumstances. As someone said a few posts above, Zimmer doesn't "compose to picture", in the sense he doesn't seem to write around dialogue or specific on-screen action. It's a very different approach than traditional film scoring. To use a worn out analogy, he paints with big strokes of color, while someone like Williams for example is more like a sculptor, who carves and chisels the music around the film's narrative needs.

When it comes to Zimmer though we shouldn't use the same judgement patterns that we use with traditional old-school Hollywood composers like Williams (or Herrmann, Goldsmith, North, Korngold and so on). Even though he uses orchestra (and sometimes even traditional forms and structures), I think he's more akin to a composer like Vangelis than anyone else. Mood and ambiance comes first.

well, you're describing the latest Zimmer then, right?

Because I wouldn't say the same thing I said for Interstellar , for Lion King too. Or The Thin Red line. Or The Prince of Egypt..

(and he didn't compose to specific scenes in Thin Red Line either. But there, the orchestration serves the score)

[Sharkissimo 1,973]

That's true. Zimmer's method of scoring films has become his own. Unfortunately it's not unique, since many lesser composers are following his example with the 'theme suites' and general conceptual approach.

[KK 3,307]

Yeah. The Zimmer of the 90s and early 00s was more of a traditional composer with a unique style (bringing the whole prog rock edge to film music).

In recent years, for better or for worse, he's veered away from traditional scoring entirely, from process to product. And as usual, his enormous influence will make this a more common practise in the industry, and I'm afraid his clones can't quite pull it off like Zimmer does when he's at his best.

His method has flaws, but it's the one that seems to work best as an asset to his current creative voice. He's clearly exploring a very different side to himself over the last couple of years, and at the very least, that's more than can be said for some other composers who continue to produce the same type of work over and over again.

[TownerFan 4,983]

It seems to me that Zimmer's approach is usually to score the mood of the film, not particularly story or characters. This is the main difference with the traditional Hollywood music style approach. Hence why he thinks mostly about how to color the soundscape. Interstellar is no different in this sense, even though it seems to me that he tried to be more "musical" than in other circumstances. As someone said a few posts above, Zimmer doesn't "compose to picture", in the sense he doesn't seem to write around dialogue or specific on-screen action. It's a very different approach than traditional film scoring. To use a worn out analogy, he paints with big strokes of color, while someone like Williams for example is more like a sculptor, who carves and chisels the music around the film's narrative needs.

When it comes to Zimmer though we shouldn't use the same judgement patterns that we use with traditional old-school Hollywood composers like Williams (or Herrmann, Goldsmith, North, Korngold and so on). Even though he uses orchestra (and sometimes even traditional forms and structures), I think he's more akin to a composer like Vangelis than anyone else. Mood and ambiance comes first.

well, you're describing the latest Zimmer then, right?

Because I wouldn't say the same thing I said for Interstellar , for Lion King too. Or The Thin Red line. Or The Prince of Egypt..

Mostly his more recent output, of course. Lion King is more traditional in that sense, even though he already went for a different kind of approach than the common type of animation scoring (he reduced mickey-mousing to a minimum and went for kind of broader strokes of color). The Thin Red Line seems instead very mood/ambience-based type of score. Prince of Egypt was a musical and there was a troop of composers and arrangers working on it.

Oh, and since Croc asked--Interstellar is a mixed bag for me, I enjoyed a lot parts of it, but found it extremely flawed in others. A good film overall, though, which at least doesn't follow any paint-by-the-numbers studio blockbuster rules. Zimmer's score is surely very effective in the film, although it adds sometimes even too much religious gravitas (excuse the pun) to the overall mood. I still have to listen to the album as a stand-alone experience.

[filmmusic 1,823]

The Thin Red Line seems instead very mood/ambience-based type of score.

I would disagree on this.

Yes, a certain mood is created, but there are themes. There is a kind of development, there is movement of music. Even the "journey to the line" which has a similar way of structure to interstellar, by adding and adding instruments, it goes somewhere later (in the unused in the movie part).

I find the music in Interstellar too static.

[TownerFan 4,983]

The Thin Red Line seems to me a kind of Morricone-like approach--stand-alone pieces with a certain musical progression that were used with different kind of emotional reaction in several parts of the film. There may be themes in the score, sure, but it's not the "Max Steiner"-type of leitmotiv approach.

[filmmusic 1,823]

The Thin Red Line seems to me a kind of Morricone-like approach--stand-alone pieces with a certain musical progression that were used with different kind of emotional reaction in several parts of the film. There may be themes in the score, sure, but it's not the "Max Steiner"-type of leitmotiv approach.

Yes, of course.

But you said ambient and i have connected ambience in music to something really static...

Interstellar is to me ambient.

The Thin Red Line isn't..

Anyway, I really like our discussion here, but have to get up really early tomorrow unfortunately, so goodnight!

[TownerFan 4,983]

I meant mood. You can create a certain effect in different ways, not just with a long one-note synth pad.

[KK 3,307]

Then, for the first time, Nolan began describing his idea for "this vast canvas," as Zimmer put it. Confused, because he had written "this tiny, intimate piece" for a parent-child story, Zimmer questioned its relevance. "Yes," Nolan responded, "but now I know what the heart of the movie is." That original piece is the music that moviegoers will hear at the very conclusion of the film, as the story ends and the credits begin to roll.

It was the start of two years of conceptualizing and composing, while Nolan was writing the script and shooting the film. "We work in parallel," Zimmer explains, "so by the time he finishes the cut there is actually a complete score in the movie. Yes, it was all done on my computers and my synthesizers. And there was a certain quality about it, a singularity, because I played every single note myself." Yet Zimmer's score still needed to be performed by real musicians.

"We went to London and quietly made a pact: If we got even one great note out of that organ, we had fulfilled our mandate." Zimmer wasn't sure what he had written could even be realized on that instrument. "Organs are, by nature, incredibly complicated beasts," and he wanted it to be "incredibly virtuosic. As soon as Roger started to play," Zimmer adds, "both Chris and I knew, this was going to work. Roger was our star."

The concept of air and breath resonates throughout the score, fittingly for a movie that spends so much time with astronauts in spacesuits. He asked Richard Harvey (who, with Gavin Greenaway, conducted the score) to assemble a group of top woodwind players, then asked them to make strange and unusual sounds with their instruments. Zimmer was amused by Harvey's later remark: "You know, they've worked their whole lives never to sound like this."

The choral elements were also experimental. "There is an enormous amount," Zimmer says, "but I use them in strange ways. I wanted to hear the exhalation of 60 people, imagining the wind over the dunes in the Sahara. I got them to face away from the microphones, and used them as reverb for the pianos. The further we get away from Earth in the movie, the more the sound is generated by humans – but an alienation of human sounds. Like the video messages in the movie, they're a little more corroded, a little more abstract."

http://www.filmmusicsociety.org/news_events/features/2014/110614.html

Now that's what you call an article worth reading!

[ymenard 54]

TTRL is still by far his biggest achievement, it felt for once like a true composition. But I like that he's thinking about textures, it still doesn't make him an innovator. Electro-acoustic is decades in front of what he's doing, there's nothing unique in his approach, except perhaps in the soundtrack business. Goldenthal was doing the same thing twenty years ago, and at a much higher quality.

[KK 3,307]

But hey, it's being done. And that's what matters. That there are still composers who are willing to play around and experiment with the way things are being done, regardless of how effective the end product ends up being.

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

Can't wait for another HOUR of this music. The man's greatest score, definitely. Will be particularly laughable when he doesn't get the Oscar.

TTRL is still by far his biggest achievement, it felt for once like a true composition. But I like that he's thinking about textures, it still doesn't make him an innovator. Electro-acoustic is decades in front of what he's doing, there's nothing unique in his approach, except perhaps in the soundtrack business. Goldenthal was doing the same thing twenty years ago, and at a much higher quality.

Umbrage, I take umbrage!

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

Dolores Umbrage?

[MedigoScan 324]

You mustnt tell lies Stefancos

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

My analysis of this score might not be mine at all - possible guest writer for this one!

At least 8 important musical structures to explore and chronicle this time around! Very excited.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

So like Zimmer you have an "additional writer"?

[filmmusic 1,823]

My analysis of this score might not be mine at all - possible guest writer for this one!

At least 8 important musical structures to explore and chronicle this time around! Very excited.

I'm sorry, what do you mean by "musical structures"?

[BloodBoal 7,538]

So like Zimmer you have an "additional writer"?

TheGhostPilgrim.

[KK 3,307]

My analysis of this score might not be mine at all - possible guest writer for this one!

At least 8 important musical structures to explore and chronicle this time around! Very excited.

I'm sorry, what do you mean by "musical structures"?

There are various motivic cells that Zimmer uses throughout the score. Not all of them being full fledged themes or motifs, but cells with a leitmotivic purpose. I can list 5 from what I remember.

[Romão 2,274]

I absolutely love that musical idea that dominates the first part of Dust and most of I'm Going Home. It's the sort of thing that creeps on you in the movie, that I instantly recognized when listening to the OST and is a fantastic mood setter

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

My analysis of this score might not be mine at all - possible guest writer for this one!

At least 8 important musical structures to explore and chronicle this time around! Very excited.

I'm sorry, what do you mean by "musical structures"?

Themes, motives, important recurring sonic elements.

[KK 3,307]

I absolutely love that musical idea that dominates the first part of Dust and most of I'm Going Home. It's the sort of thing that creeps on you in the movie, that I instantly recognized when listening to the OST and is a fantastic mood setter

Ditto!

That was the part I was looking for most when I came out of the film.

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

So like Zimmer you have an "additional writer"?

TheGhostPilgrim.

Will I be disqualified from the JWFan Oscars for having too many people listed as author?

[filmmusic 1,823]

I absolutely love that musical idea that dominates the first part of Dust and most of I'm Going Home. It's the sort of thing that creeps on you in the movie, that I instantly recognized when listening to the OST and is a fantastic mood setter

Ditto!

That was the part I was looking for most when I came out of the film.

I would have to agree that that was the most interesting part of the score..

[KK 3,307]

So like Zimmer you have an "additional writer"?

TheGhostPilgrim.

Will I be disqualified from the JWFan Oscars for having too many people listed as author?

We'll stop nominating you for about a decade, and then welcome you with open arms after you've analyzed a bunch of Oscar-bait film scores.

[Dixon Hill 4,233]

I really adore the sound of the organ with synths, like in the middle section of Stay. History's first synthesizer plus the latest Zebra technology. Works wonderfully together.

[KK 3,307]

I agree. Had a very organic sound to it. (Shut up BB!)

[BloodBoal 7,538]

I agree. Had a very organic sound to it. (Shut up BB!)

I didn't say anything!

[KK 3,307]

But you would have! I have foreseen it!

[BloodBoal 7,538]

But you haven't foreheard it!

[MedigoScan 324]

Samples are apparently up on itunes for the 23 track version

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/interstellar-original-motion/id932220056

apparently I say, because I sure as hell cant get them to work in Itunes

[Faleel 5,340]

Works for me.