Theoretical: A more complete Prisoner of Azkaban?

[SpotTheDog 39]

My understanding is that, despite the best efforts of John Williams, Mike Matessino, Jay, & co., the Prisoner of Azkaban album is not as complete as it could be if Warner had been more diligent/less stingy. Will we ever get a more complete album from La-La Land?

 

Edit: I just realized that next year is the 20th anniversary of Prisoner of Azkaban. Wow, time flies, even without a Time Turner!

[Jurassic Shark 13,158]

Yes.

[SpotTheDog 39]

2 minutes ago, Jurassic Shark said:

Yes.

Assuming a Prisoner of Azkaban reissue does happen, do you think Stone and Chamber would be similarly reissued months before, simultaneously, or not at all? Those albums are pretty much perfect, as far as I am aware, but inevitably there will be people who missed out on the box set/new fans discovering expanded JW soundtracks years from now.

 

EDIT: For the record, I voted "no," but I'd gladly be proven wrong.

[Jurassic Shark 13,158]

I'm just assuming all of these albums will be re-released at some point, and if better sources have turned up since the initial release, they'll redo the mastering from the best available sources.

[filmmusic 2,195]

Excuse me, what is missing? 

[Disco Stu 15,501]

1 minute ago, filmmusic said:

Excuse me, what is missing? 

 

[Richard P 4,189]

5 minutes ago, SpotTheDog said:

Assuming a Prisoner of Azkaban reissue does happen

 

This assumption is how hopes are crushed on each new batch, when someone decides that a label has to be working to improve that product they did which wasn't 100% perfect.

 

Yep, I do think that if somehow proper elements turn up, LLL would take the opportunity to do another edition, but that it's most likely they are spending their resources on making other unreleased and unrealized projects happen, and not on exhaustively trying to improve upon a release that's only a few years old.

[Edmilson 8,920]

Yeah, and it'll arrive on the same year as the Matessino-produced "The John Williams Star Wars Collection" and "The John Williams Indiana Jones Collection", two boxes containing every single second of music recorded by JW for all SW and IJ movies he ever worked on. Besides, it'll be only an year after the four-disc Hook complete edition, which will include songs for the movie that even Williams himself didn't remember writing. All JWFans who haven't left Earth to work on the Mars terraforming project or weren't enslaved by a despotic artificial Intelligence known as "Meta-Google-Apple" will celebrate with their flying cars on the street.

[SpotTheDog 39]

1 minute ago, Disco Stu said:

 

@filmmusic I'm going to hazard a guess that's a picture of a shawm player; the instrument famously plays in the Leaky Cauldron right before/during Arthur's warning to Harry. I don't know whether John Williams vetoed it or the source couldn't be located, but it has been discussed quite a bit in other topics.  

[filmmusic 2,195]

Just now, SpotTheDog said:

the instrument famously plays in the Leaky Cauldron right before/during Arthur's warning to Harry.

It's been years since I have seen the film so I don't know what you're talking about. Anyway.

So, we're missing just one cue? Or more?

[SpotTheDog 39]

3 minutes ago, Richard Penna said:

 

This assumption is how hopes are crushed on each new batch.

Hey, I'd prefer Goblet of Fire before a few missing Azkaban cues. Or a Desplat box set would be beautiful. I just think it's a shame that the studio couldn't (wouldn't?) locate its own music the first (only?) time around.

2 minutes ago, filmmusic said:

It's been years since I have seen the film so I don't know what you're talking about. Anyway.

So, we're missing just one cue? Or more?

It's not the most iconic scene, but it's been made famous by discussion on this forum about shawm music. The music itself is pretty distinctive, however. There are more cues missing for sure, some of which have been identified by name, but I do not remember them. Let me do some digging, I'll come back to my own topic more informed.  

 

Also, there are apparently several cues that made it to the DVD special features menu but not the soundtrack, and I have no idea how that happened. So technically to have the most complete score collection, you should buy a used copy of the 2-disc DVD from your local thrift store and play through the old DVD mini-games to hear the maximum John Williams content.  

 

[Datameister 2,279]

Yeah, the amount of unreleased music we know was recorded is pretty small. There's more stuff that was written, but it may never have been recorded.

[bollemanneke 3,593]

We have no proof whatsoever that more was recorded. Off the top of my head, the only recorded pieces that we don't have are:

- Marge Points the Finger (original)

- the shawm (if only that stupid isolated concert score would leak)

- percussion overlay before Sir Cadogan (same remark)

- Sir Cadogan (film take) (same remark)

 

Is there anything else?

 

Also, I would not assume a re-issue is going to happen at all since the original set is still in print (HOW?) And it also seems pretty unlikely to me that a whole bunch of recorded stuff somehow didn't make it to Mike, who is as meticulous as we can hope for.

[Jay 39,429]

On 04/02/2023 at 5:21 PM, filmmusic said:

Excuse me, what is missing? 

 

 

There's 3 things you can hear in the film that are not on the set. 

 

3 very minor, very short things.

 

 

1st up is "Shawm", a source music cue you can hear from 0:00-1:06 in this video (the score cue it overlaps with, heard from 0:44-end of the video, IS on the set)

 

 

 

Next up is a very short drum & tambourine passage that I can't find on youtube, but it plays after the Buckbeak scene and before the ghost knights bust through the stained glass window

 

And finally is a difference performance of the "Sir Cadogan" cue, where it was played at a slower tempo and there was drum and tambourine playing along with it.  You can hear it from 0:00-0:19 of this video

 

 

 

And then there is one piece of music that appeared in DVD bonus features but not the OST, LLL, or the film itself:  The original version of "Marge Points The Finger", which got replaced by a revision in the film, and that revision is what's on the LLL set. 

 

The original version is heard from 1:20-1:28 of this video

 

 

 

 

That's literally it in terms what what we know was recorded.

 

 

 

As for what might have been recorded, but we have no evidence of?  Well, there are at least SEVENTEEN things found in the sheet music  that we don't have recordings of.

 

You can see them all listed out in my google doc, at the bottom of the "Complete Cue List" tab

 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R7JM5QmRNh6PbgqeBH_lbj2C3WLbzxz9px3Z7GKLaAk/

 

You will also find links in that section to videos in which mockups of those exclusive sheet music passages are synced to film footage

[Holko 10,231]

There's also the extra piece of choir at the end of Apparition on the Train (might be synth from the editors), the film version descending harpsichord accent at the opening of Befriending the Hippogriff, the film mix opening of Time Past with the ticking starting later, extra strings and differently placed reverse overlay...

[Richard P 4,189]

It would've been nice to hear that film variation on the opening of Sir Cadogan, for sure.

 

And believe me, I hate it when an album cue doesn't match the film, but I seriously doubt you're ever going to get a reissue which changes all of those differences. They're not really representing unreleased cues, just accounting for variations in how the film was mixed and precisely which takes were used in the film (and most notably, accounting for what Williams wants to be heard, which probably doesn't include sound guys' bits), and no speciality release is ever going to get that 100% correct.

 

Especially where Williams is concerned, I'll ask the same question I hinted at a while back: do you want a 'Williams approved', intended release, or do you want exactly what was in the film. We can't have both.

[SpotTheDog 39]

Kind of off-topic, but how was it decided that Shawn Murphy would remaster Azkaban and Simon Rhodes would remaster the other two?

[bollemanneke 3,593]

2 hours ago, Holko said:

There's also the extra piece of choir at the end of Apparition on the Train (might be synth from the editors), the film version descending harpsichord accent at the opening of Befriending the Hippogriff, the film mix opening of Time Past with the ticking starting later, extra strings and differently placed reverse overlay...

I'm pretty sure that choir is just a sped-up ending of Train To Hogwarts.

[Holko 10,231]

1 hour ago, Richard Penna said:

and precisely which takes were used in the film

Like what the new JP reissue presents? You know Mike even includes pretty much zero difference alternate takes just because they were on a bootleg, right? But sure, getting everything 100% right when the opportunity arises wouldn't interest him at all...

[Jay 39,429]

8 hours ago, SpotTheDog said:

Kind of off-topic, but how was it decided that Shawn Murphy would remaster Azkaban and Simon Rhodes would remaster the other two?

 

Remaster? What are you referring to here? 

 

Mike received the original unmastered elements from the studio, built new programs from those, and mastered those new programs himself. The guys you mentioned didn't work on the box set. 

[SpotTheDog 39]

3 hours ago, Jay said:

 

Remaster? What are you referring to here? 

 

Mike received the original unmastered elements from the studio, built new programs from those, and mastered those new program himself. The guys you mentioned didn't work on the box set. 

I'm most likely misunderstanding something, but this is from the official LLL description (bolded emphasis mine):

"Produced, assembled and mastered by Mike Matessino, all three scores were fully remastered from the original 5.1 and stereo mixes by Simon Rhodes (SORCERER’S STONE & CHAMBER OF SECRETS) and Shawn Murphy (PRISONER OF AZKABAN). For SORCERER’S STONE, the original analog master tapes were newly transferred at high resolution and the score was meticulously re-edited and output from the first-generation material for maximum quality."

[Joe Brausam 218]

I think the wording can be skewed that way, but what they mean is that the original 5.1 and stereo mixes were by Rhodes and Murray.

[Jay 39,429]

Yea, those are the dudes who recorded the scores back in 01, 02, and 04

 

The blurb is saying that Mike produced, assembled, and mastered the new set, using the original mixes which had been done by Rhodes and Murphy back in the day

[Jurassic Shark 13,158]

On 04/02/2023 at 11:23 PM, Disco Stu said:

 

 

Is that Shawm Murphy?

[Richard P 4,189]

15 hours ago, Holko said:

Like what the new JP reissue presents? You know Mike even includes pretty much zero difference alternate takes just because they were on a bootleg, right? But sure, getting everything 100% right when the opportunity arises wouldn't interest him at all...

 

I'm just highlighting that getting everything 100% right in terms of the final intended score doesn't necessarily mean everything sounding exactly how it does in the film.

 

Again... I'd love to be wrong and a reissue happens which sounds exactly the same as the film. I just think on this particular project it's less likely to happen. PoA is a rather extreme case of lots of post-fiddling.

 

But my view on these things is that if given a choice between a reissue which corrects the last 2% of 'issues' with a prior release, or a brand new expansion, I'm going for the latter most of the time.