What is your favorite way to score study Williams' music?

[Sam s. 6]

As a composition student, studying JW's music offers nearly unlimited lessons in orchestration, development, and just about every other compositional technique out there. 

 

I tend to gravitate towards the Hal Leonard signature series when I can, but these are limited in terms of JW's full discography (and expensive)! Another way is to watch some of the great score reductions that exist on YouTube.

 

I am curious to know if other methods exist and what they are. 

[karelm 3,259]

So much to learn from these.  Type set them into notation software so you can pull items apart and focus on specific sections.  You learn A LOT from transcribing by ear or typesetting it and breaking it down.  One simple example, you can get rid of so many elements and it will still sound great and finished.  Like it needs nothing else.  Then you start adding elements back and see how the sparkle and nuance emerge.  Also pay lots of attention to voicing.  There is so much to gleam from how he deals with voicings.  

[Loert 3,089]

You say you watch score reductions on Youtube. But it's even better to try and make these reductions yourself.

 

Some other ideas:

- transcribing by ear, then comparing against the original score

- arranging for piano (this is especially good for isolating the harmony)

- making mockups (trying to create a realistic-sounding mockup is a good way of understanding orchestration and balance)

- copying the full score

- trying to write a piece in JW's style

 

I tend not to do much "chord analysis" of JW's music because I find that there are often many ways to interpret a given snippet (e.g. is that a Cadd6, or an Amin7 1st inversion?). Especially when it comes to labelling chords, you are required to pick one option, when the reality is that the music often "implies" many different harmonies. In fact, you tend to have more success focusing on scales/modes rather than chords when it comes to JW.

 

Having said that, one thing I have done in the past is to extract a short snippet of music (i.e. a few seconds), write a bunch of questions and answers about it (e.g. "Which instruments are playing the main melody?" or "What is the second chord?"), then converting this into a flashcard in a spaced-repetition app like Anki. It's not so important here whether your interpretation of the chords are "correct" or not, but it at least gets you thinking about JW's music on a regular basis.