I just realized that John Williams is one of the last major figures of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

[GerateWohl 4,373]

Same hair stylist.

[Marian Schedenig 8,211]

11 hours ago, Yavar Moradi said:

But also Odna by Shostakovich which I shared above… started production as a silent film but ultimately ended up being a sound film with almost 80 minutes of score, some of which was diegetic (heard by the characters) and some of which was non-diegetic.

 

I have Odna on CD somewhere. I should give it another listen; I had no idea it was written so early!

 

I have Metropolis and Die Nibelungen by Huppertz on CD, and while there's much to admire and the overall concept of big late-Romantic leitmotif scoring is surely there, Steiner's Kong still feels more like a through-composed score. Die Nibelungen in particular, in complete form, is very much an endless sequence of the same motifs repeated over and over again. With different orchestrations, certainly, and with the occasional standout moment here or there, but they still feel (to me at least) much more redundant than the typical Hollywood score that is usually attributed to Steiner, Korngold, & Co. This may apply less to Metropolis, which is also much more modern in parts. I actually have the Blu-ray here and am looking forward to watching it with the original score for the first time.

 

In the end, it seems to me that the fact that silent film music had to uniformly score the entire film from beginning to end without either contribution or competition from dialogue and effects, combined with the rather wild concept of having a huge mammoth score composed for just one performance at the premiere, may have given composers (or at least Huppertz) a frame of mind that's distinct enough from that of the early Hollywood sound composers to draw a certain line between the two. My impression at least is that the Huppertz scores, for all their merits, and Die Nibelungen in particular, are much more Gebrauchsmusik (with the negative connotation that it can't stand on its own, or rather needs serious curating to produce an adequate listening experience) than the typical Hollywood scores that usually, for whatever reason (perhaps because so many were written by exiled opera and theatre composers who used films as a vehicle to keep writing "serious" stage music) form a pretty coherent and entertaining whole.

 

Militant anti-completists like Thor may not see anything in my argument, but I certainly think that at least many big scores from the Hollywood Golden Age up until the end of its semi-revival at the end of the century, were conceived as through-composed works with drama-musical development and thus can hold their own in mostly unedited form without the film. Scores to more modern films which rely much more on sound effects and sound design than on a "classic" score and therefore often have only a smaller number of less coherent cues, are certainly a different category.

[Jurassic Shark 12,091]

3 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

My impression at least is that the Huppertz scores, for all their merits, and Die Nibelungen in particular, are much more Gebrauchsmusik (with the negative connotation that it can't stand on its own, or rather needs serious curating to produce an adequate listening experience)

 

Where's @Thor when we need him?

 

3 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

Miliant anti-completists like Thor

 

Do you mean militant?

 

3 hours ago, Marian Schedenig said:

I have Odna on CD somewhere. I should give it another listen; I had no idea it was written so early!

 

Have you looked in your CD shelves?

[Marian Schedenig 8,211]

1 hour ago, Jurassic Shark said:

Do you mean militant?

 

Obviously. Typo fixed.

[Jurassic Shark 12,091]

9 minutes ago, Marian Schedenig said:

 

Obviously. Typo fixed.

 

It's not very obvious though. I see @Thor more like a peace-loving fella.