John Williams
 

Just curious if any of you other GF peoples have a favorite John Williams soundtrack or other movie soundtrack that really stands out to you. My favorite is probably the Hook soundtrack but I have many others.

The Hook OST is indeed some of the best Williams stuff.
Unfortunately, he completely ripped it off when he made the Harry Potter soundtracks :(. It pisses me off to no end, for whatever reason.

I also enjoyed the Witches of Eastwick music, especially his arrangement of the theme for solo violin and piano (as performed by Gil Shaham).

I'd coment in this thread, but then LeHah will probably show up and Zantesuken everyone's opinion, so I'll just watch from this safe distance.

I thought the harry potter themes were pretty unique is there a particular track that reminds you of hook? cause if so i would love to listen.

Star Wars is by far the best, although I refuse to rank them (Albums) because I just really cannot place one above the others!!!

My favorite tracks though:
Throne Room/End Title (ANH)
Across The Stars (AOTC)
Rebel Fleet/End Title (ESB)
Princess Leia's Theme (ANH)
A New Hope/End Credits (ROTS)
Grievous Speaks To Lord Sidious (ROTS)
Panaka And The Queen's Protectors (TPM)
Arrival At Tatooine and Flag Parade (TPM)

...and those are just my most played off the top of itunes...as you can see, it's well spread between movies...

Okay...I'm way to tired to edit and put the two parts next to each other, but just listen to "Hook-napped" from the Hook OST and "Hedwig's Theme" from the HP and the Sorceror's Stone OST. There's a figure in there that is almost exactly the same. Even so, if you listen to the two they sound like they're from the same soundtrack, with similar use of the strings and horn entrances.

A friend of mine pointed this out when we played the Harry Potter music in orchestra a few years back and I was really irritated by it, because the Hook music is my favorite.

I will do so. Thanks for the input.

My father played a song that sounded damn near identical to "Across the Stars" from Star Wars Episode II. I need to ask him the name of it. I would be surprised if Across the Stars predates it.

I don't think it's by John Williams, either :/

That would be interesting to find out what that piece is...Across The Stars is amazing, and I'd like to hear more like it!!!

....although the John Williams tag makes it just that much better..(and Star Wars)

Arkhangelsk, I just listened to them both and I agree with you the part in Napped is almost exactly the same as Hedwig's Theme with exception of a couple notes and tempo differences etc. But yeah good observation.

John Williams - Lapti Nek
John Williams - Jedi Rock

Those two are ++win.

We all know it's coming. I actually find his opinion on the man har to discern; half the time, Williams is compared favorably to other artists, and the other half, he's compared unfavorably to his predecessors like Wagner.

My personal opinion on the guy is that a lot of his music is so iconic that it's occasionally tiresome. Take Star Wars for example; it was a watershed in flim scoring, but it's been played endlessly and everybody knows it backwards and forwards. It's good, but I don't listen to it often.

I prefer Williams' lesser-known works, especially ones with a fantasy edge. Thus, Jurassic Park and Hook are in my CD wallet, while Star Wars remains on the shelf.

Oh, come on. You should all know by now to regard what LeHah knows, not what he thinks.

The heck with that - try Home Alone against either of those

(Note that all three movies take place or have something to do with the season of winter at some point)

It could be John Williams actually. "Across The Stars" sounds a great deal like what he wrote for Seven Years In Tibet or even Ethan Frome.

Eh, thats really kind of unfair. You don't say Paul McCartney sucks because Mozart came first. John Williams is John Williams - if you had to compare him to another composer, it would have to be someone from the 20th Century - perferably to someone from his generation (as I'd loathe someone to try and pigeonhole me into a Stravinsky versus Williams arguement)

John Williams is never bad. At his worst - I'm not a fan of his first two HP scores - he's better than most. Elliot Goldenthal said of the man "He has never, ever gotten a note wrong" which is pretty damned close to what I think.

Are there better composers? Well, yeah. Bernard Herrmann scored On Dangerous Ground and The Devil And Daniel Webster - which is better than Heartbeeps or Guide For The Married Man. But then again, Williams scored The Fury and Artificial Intelligence - which is better than Fahrenheit 451 or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. You can hem and haw over this and that but then you remember than Herrmann - who was notoriously hard to work with - doted on Johhny Williams.

You might be right. However, I don't believe my father owns those CDs (unless the songs are on another CD he owns or were performed by someone else.)

Wouldn't be the first time John Williams has quoted classical music (Artificial Intelligence), borrowed from classical music (The Star Wars main title) or outright stole classical music (The Quidditch Fanfare from the first HP movie).

But everyone has done that.

Star Wars albums are my favorite Williams works ever. Can't really rank them though some songs are better than others. Though best tune to me that he has ever done is Jaws.

True enough. But what I was trying to say was that I didn't really know what *your* opinion of John Williams was. I certainly don't ding composers for borrowing the work of others (I could never be a James Horner fan if I did :D)

Well, think of it this way - no original music has been written in over a 100 years.

The hell are you talkin about, Willis?

The last original idea in music was from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde - the Tristan Chord (F, B, D# and G? I forget exactly), as it was the first idea that moved towards "atonal" sound. Everything before or since is just ideas that are taken one step further (rock and heavy metal) or just variations on the same idea (prepared piano - be it with blocks of wood or peices of meat).

Because of that - nothing original has been made since 1860.

Pertaining to Williams' work, I was trying to figure out what the difference was in his Revenge of the Sith soundtrack and the Extended version? Does anyone know if that is another album similar to that of the Phantom Menace's Ultimate Edition? If so, I think the cds like that belong in a type of format where there is no gaps in the original tracks....is it like this?

Superman is John Williams' best score.

"The Planet Krypton," ok.

Williams certainly had some good tracks in Star Wars (in general, not just A New Hope) such as "Duel of the Fates", "Battle of Yavin" and other battle tracks, along with "Leia's News/Light of the Force" and others. Hook had some good tracks, too. I can't say I've listened to the HP stuff. Indiana Jones (particularly The Last Crusade) had some awesome stuff, like "No Ticket" or "The Name of God - A Leap of Faith". I'm surprised that I seem to be the first in this thread to mention Indiana Jones.

Everything is both old and new. Every composer has been 'borrowing' from their predecessors since the beginning of Western music (and probably before that, too): the first composers were creating Masses and organ works that were variations of tunes composed by anonymous church musicians. Even atonal composers create their works based off of foundations created by Haydn and Mozart (like motivic unity). So really, everything is a 'step forward/variations' on previous musical ideas, even over 200 years ago. All pre-18th century composers used some dissonance, but in such small amounts that it didn't offend any ears. When Wagner, Bartok and Stravinsky (among many others) introduced atonal chords, the thing that made it stand out is the fact that the listeners were not familiar with the sound because it wasn't frequently encountered in the music they were used to hearing. So it is with music composed today, which is at the same time new and old. With the advent of electronics, composers are finding new ways to incorporate tape, feedback and all sorts of things that are traditionally not musical, and it forces the listeners to approach the music differently, to discover how the composer is trying to express through the sound -- which makes it new.

In the case of Hook and HP, his orchestration is standard for the "Mysterious- Magical" common theme, not Winter. Hell, this can go for Home Alone also, because Christmas is the "Magical" time of the year. It's all in his horn usage, I swear.

Thanks. Not that it's some kind of offense against all things orchestral that he did that... even though he quotes himself -- and I often don't like it -- there are an awful lot of composers who quote their own earlier works in later ones (Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances is the quickest example I can think of). That's why I get pissed off when 'classical' musicians go around saying that John Williams is "The worst composer ever omg." Even though I don't think Williams is the most *original* composer, he does know how to craft memorable and resonating themes for his music: Jurassic Park, multiple things from Star Wars, Indiana Jones,Hedwig's theme.... In the end, that's what really matters to the audience at large.

Also, Lehah is probably unfamilar with Scriabin's "mystic" chord. But anyway, it's not as if harmony is the only area for possible musical innovation.

There will (thankfully) never be another UE album. Sony has said such.

I like how some dumbass on the internet can decide to ignore the rules of music theory for the last 140 years just because.

Well, then name some type of experimentation that was not an offshoot of what I previously made an example of.

I just wanna remind you all that I was just curious to here other members' favorites of John Williams not an argument of what's his best. :)

What about Jazz? Music pre-dating Jazz was composed almost entire in Ionian (Major) or Aeolian (Minor) modes. Jazz's "blues scales" are actually a mode that was almost never, if ever, used previously.

Williams is great when it comes to memorable themes though the meat between those bones got kinda old over the years. But that's probably a question of personal taste, I do for example enjoy every minute of Elfman's recent scores, no matter how re-hashed they may sound.

Edit:
As for my favorite works, it's a pretty close tie between the original SW trilogy and the Indy movies.

Is anyone else really sick of Hook? I know it's great, and I loved it for a while but I find it a tad overrated. I'm also starting to find ESB the same (but conversely my appreciation for the original Star Wars continues to climb).
Anyways, yeah, Williams fan here. Been one since as long as I can remember, but I started collecting back when I was 11 and Harry Potter came out. Great score. Not so good sequel though (actually, a terrible sequel, both film and score - Fawkes' theme is overrated). But enough overratedness. Give me "For Gillian" and "Epilogue" from The Fury any day. My current absolute favourite tracks.

I didn't like Hook when I got a chance to listen to it. It just seemed to drag on, but maybe I wasn't in the right mood for it at the time.....

Now, it's a huge cliche to say my favourite Williams score is a Star Wars score - and probably even more cliche to mention that it was the first Williams score I bought - but The Empire Strikes Back probably is my favourite John Williams score. I listen to it very infrequently but, when I do, it manages to capture my attention completely, no matter what else is going on. I don't think I've heard many other scores that can manage that.

Excluding Star Wars, I'd probably say E.T.

I run the risk of sounding more of an ass than usual - so allow me to say this much. I am not a music professor and am not as well versed in theory as some people seem to paint me or how I sometimes paint myself. This stuff is a hobby for me and I'm learning it slowly - and in a sense backwards, since I have a hard enough time reading sheet.

I also need to correct myself. I earlier misstated the Tristan Chord - I looked it up and it's actually F, B, D# and G#.

This being said, lets move on to Minion's topic.

I've been questioning the whole "unoriginal music" thing for sometime and haven't been able to come up with a truely solid answer. Because while Wagner's Tristan... brilliantly introduces dissonance in the peice, there are other things that were musically created afterwords. Take for instance pandiatonicism which was a method of connecting notes that didn't nessessarily "make sense". It's commonly found in americana music like Aaron Copland.

However, pandiatonicism was a word made in the early 20th century by a Russian composer who's name I cannot remember. So how can something written 60 years prior be the "final" thought in music?

However, despite my misgivings and possibly because of my undereducation on music theory, I don't find myself able to contradict or dismiss the idea that Tristan is what it is seen as. I might be an ambulatory penis on the internet for the last decade, but I know better than to think my "world's smartest cockroach" mentality means anything to all the people who've studied music for the last century and a half. I cannot fight the concensus of that many people.

Does that make me right in this arguement? Not really. Not any more than any of us can say "I know Seattle is the captial of Washington"; we all learned that by rote, not because it was ingrained into our very beings by trial and error or some survival instinct.

This isn't a knock at you - but Elfman writes like a commercial jingle. You remember it because it's catchy, not because it's good

Dude, no one mentioned "Raiders March"? C'mon, that's the shit.

The funny thing is, I've read that many composers, including Bach and Beethoven, and even some pre-baroque composers used the Tristan chord somewhere in the body of their works. It's in a Beethoven sonata and some piece in Bach's WTC. Actually, pretty much everything you can think of appears in Bach's WTC or Beethoven's Sonatas. Part of the reason they are so highly regarded is because they are a kind of microcosm of music. Everything is there. If you can play them, you can play anything. But that doesn't make Wagner any less original because his originality is in his style. When you can listen to a piece you've never heard before and say "yeah, that's definitley Wagner", that's how you know Wagner was original. He wasn't the last of his ilk, though. You should check out Scriabin's music, Lehah. And I'm sure you're familiar enough with Prokofiev and Debussy.

I mentioned Indiana Jones in general several posts back, but you're the first to mention them again since then, interestingly enough. I like "Raiders March", particularly the version of it in The Last Crusade. Can't believe I forgot about 'Escape From Venice' too. That song's awesome.

You just off-handedly agreed with me about my original Tristan... statement, Minion.

However, I failed to mention that timing is important for the Tristan Chord. The "motif" (though I loathe to use that word, most people know what it is) is only stated in fragment until the end. Wagner did that to give the story a sense of longing (as its romantic tragedy) for both the characters and as a sense of tonal completion.

As fantastic as Last Crusade is, I still find Temple Of Doom to be far and away the best of the three Indy scores.

Yeah, that is how they justify it being his, although I can't see any technical reason for regarding a chord as anything more than 2 notes in harmony.

I agree with you in part and in part I disagree. Nothing is new under the sun, but originality is in the presentation, not so much the materials. In that sense, Wagner is original as are many who came after him.

"It's not what you say anymore, it's all in how you say it"

-http://imdb.com/title/tt0202677/

Apart from 'Cavatina' from 'The Deer Hunter', I'm not a fan of Williams. I just find him a bit OTT and lacking subtlety. I much prefer Hermann.

Herrmann was many things - but I don't think he was ever once subtle.

Problem is, that goes for any sort of expanded set, UE or not...

I guess those who gave them crap on the set are getting what they want, nothing! :D

How about Taxi Driver?

You mean outside of the gigantic building drumroll and brass hits?

My dad acted like a dolt and couldn't remember the name of the song that I previously mentioned sounded like "Across the Stars", even though I sang it out for him and mentioned involved instruments. It sucks ass that I share half of his genes. Maybe in some future I can fix that.

I like John Williams' work on the olympic themes.

Agreed. However, the 1996 "Summon The Heroes" album was a hell of a lot better than the one that followed it.

Really? Hmm... If so, I should start looking for it then.

Which were off-set by the smooth jazz, representing Travis' mental decline. Hermann's scores often mirrored multiple facets of the film. Just listen to the music from Vertigo.

That... does nothing to defuse my earlier point. Taxi Driver is not subtle.

'In Taxi Driver, just as the torment of his personality refuses to leave him, the movie stresses us out with a dreary, hypnotic narration, and the famous Bernard Hermann score, whose percussion is loud, commanding and scary, and underlined by a queasy saxophone track, unrefined and sleazy.'

'Bernard Hermann's soundtrack, which he wrote shortly before his death, turns Travis's ordinary life into what is sometimes a heroic epic, sometimes a horror film, and other times no more than just another New York story. Two major themes dominate the score of Taxi Driver. The first features an eight-bar melodic sighing of a solo saxophone. The theme evokes the lonely melancholy of an individual alienated from his environment. The smooth, jazzy tones of the saxophone also complement New York's urban terrain, which we see as Travis passes through the various neighborhoods of the city in his taxi. The theme varies somewhat, particularly in tempo, but it follows Travis in his taxi as he drives his often sordid passengers around the city.
Travis's psychotic tendencies shine through in a second theme, characterized by an unresolved, dissonant chord played by trumpets over rhythmic snare drums. At various points in the movie, a harp joins the trumpets and snare. At the beginning of the movie, the trumpets punctuate moments that augur Travis's instability, such as when he hits Iris with his car. While Travis descends gradually into psychosis, this theme becomes dominant in the score. The unresolved chords of the blaring trumpets echo Travis's feelings of discord with the city, and the snare drums propel him to action. The unresolved quality of this theme is characteristic of several Hitchcock movie scores, particularly that of Vertigo, which Hermann also composed.'

There's a difference between loud and unsubtle.

Come off it already.

Anyone else like the Hymn to the Fallen?

Not really. It's certainly the highlight of SPR, but it's nothing special, even if it does beat half of the stuff coming out of everyone else. It also reminds me of "Cadilac of the Skies". Must be the fact I get sick of the choir.

I didn't particularly like the SPR score. Just like the rest of the movie...
Okay-ish with outstanding moments.

Im a huge fan of John William's, I think his best work was in Home Alone, and Jurassic Park. I personally love "Setting the Trap" from Home Alone, and the Jurassic Park theme from the first movie. Another good composer from this century is Basil Poledouris, he did some scores for the Free Willy movies, "Friends Montage" being one of them. Nonetheless, John will always be one of my favourites, with Basil following close behind ~_^.

Excellent, excellent news. The Witches of Eastwick, one of Williams' best and rarest scores, is being re-issued by "Collector's Choice". This score for me is what Hook is to a lot of people, and does sound like a precursor to that score (having been written close to the same time as Williams started writing the original musical version of Peter Pan, which ended up as Hook) which is evident in the "Dance of the Witches". I also happen to think everyone should experience "The Balloon Sequence" once in their lifetime.

I is very happy.

Where is the four-disc SACD rerecording of the Indy scores?

Indeed. It's one of my other favorite scores of his, but I especially like the arrangement he did of the theme for violin solo and piano. Devilish and full of showy licks for the soloist.

We may never see an american release of Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom due to many mitigating factors. While a rerecording would be possible - Silva did a nice Indy Trilogy disc in 2004 - the original masters are lost and thought destroyed. The only place to order the CD is overseas, usually in Asia.

I actually think a rerecording is in the works, LeHah, from Silva Screen Records. Whether it's better than the trilogy rerecording remains to be seen - I for one am hopeful, as I was disappointed in that album. But maybe I just don't like the Prague Philharmonic.

Are masters the unmixed, raw recordings or what? Can't the sheet music be used for a new recording?

The masters would be the raw recording sessions, which are probably on a BETA tape since I think they got rid of reel-to-reel in the... 1970s? (John Barry's The Black Hole was the first digital recording for a soundtrack)

I dont know about the sheet music but it's not unheard of. Sometimes music is locked up by a composer (Alex North's 2001) and sometimes the music is just plain lost (all the choral sheet work for Basil Poledouris's Conan The Barbarian) and sometimes is destroyed (Hugo Friedhofer's Joan Of Arc)

Then again, how hard would it be for someone to sit down and transcribe this music from the movie itself?

You'd be very surprised.

First off, for reasons beyond me, film score people are idiot snobs that turn their noses up at rerecordings. I personally love some of the Telarc and Silva Screen CDs but a lot of people wave their arms and scream that if its not the original recording, its flawed somehow.

Also, attempts to 'fill the gaps' with new transcription end up very badly. Silva did this for their Conan The Barbarian suite and its a godawful mess.

Couldn't a computer basically do all the work for you? Just take the sound track from the movie, minus human voices and translate the wave form into a midi/sheet music?

And wow, that is pretty elitist. Even classical snobs relish in how often a piece is performed in different ways by different people.

I don't personally know enough about such technology but I don't think thats possible considering the depth of sound. I mean, a 100+ peice orchestra and 80+ person choir (I forget the number of people in the London Voices when ToD was recorded) is pretty damned dense, especially if you consider the really "big" moments of music in the score (The Mine Car Chase, the Temple Of Doom).

It would be more fesible to hire a professional orchestrator and have them transcribe than have a computer do it - but thats just me.

Three things you never bring up on a film score message board:

*Danny Elfman's Batman was so good becuase Shirley Walker orchestrated and conducted it
*John Williams is better than Jerry Goldsmith
*Rerecordings can be good and are sometimes better than the original recordings (IE: Silva's recording of First Knight compared to the original album release)

The track "The Face of Pan" is simply superb. I never really liked Hook as a film, but the scene where that little black kid (can't remember his name) starts touching Peter Pan's face, with that music playing, is beautiful...

I can only comment on the Sliva "Indy" compilation as that's the only full rerecorded album I own, but it's a mix of both worlds for me. Some parts are transcribed horridly, such as the "Medallion" theme in "Ark Trek" which is missing notes and has wrong harmonisation, resulting in the effect of the orchestra skipping over notes because they were hard (which I know is not the case, but it's still there after eharing the original). On the other hand, I think the rerecording of the End Credits suite from ToD is rich and wonderful, particularly the Love Theme (which, in my opinion, is up with "Balloon Sequence" as best love theme ever). It's slower than the original recording, but I think it works much better.

I think most of the time it's not just the fact it's a rerecording that annoys people. It's when there are blatantly wrong notes, terrible acoustics (which apparetnyl plague Prague recordings) and other issues in addition to questionable interpretations (which in itself isn't really a problem as that's the idea of interpretation). Charles Gerhardt's rerecording of ESB is one example of a brilliant rerecording, one which some argue is superior to the original but of course which others would consider blasphemy.

The technology that exists to do so is too sensitive; natural sounds and effects in a proper recording such as reverb, breathing, page turning/chair creaking and general noise don't transcribe at all well, resulting in blobs of notes all over the place. And that raises an important issue that I believe will soon confront the film and classical mediums of music - using technology to make things "easier". I'm not about to say I disrespect Danny Elfman for not arranging or orchestrating or doing anything else to his own music beyond humming it into a tape recorder, nor praising Howard Shore simply because his LotR opus was written, orchestrated and conducted himself. But is it really a good idea for such technology to be used in the mainstream orchestral industry? Sure, people complain that human transcriptions are flawed and don't sound right, but I'd take that over a robot's interpretations of something as sensitive as music. I know you weren't suggesting it for anything more than for lost sheet music/masters, but if and when the technology is developed I doubt it will stop there.

And just to add a little bit more on the subject of lost tapes/music and ToD, the masters are apparently nowhere and I don't know if someone holds the orginal scores. Williams certainly doesn't keep most of his music except for his initial sketches (i.e. before it's sent off to be professionally printed for the orchestra).

Don't get me wrong - not everything Silva has done is gold. Their earliest discs are especially painful, but they've really put out some real gems in terms of new recordings. Their version of "The Mine Cart Chase" on that Indy disc is above and beyond the original recording in terms of performance, enthusiasm and sound quality. They also did a fantastic version of "Dance Of The Witches" from Witches Of Eastwick that puts a gigantic over-emphasis on the tuba/bass trombone "answer" (enough to crack speakers) and they also did a powerful cover of "Never Surrender" from First Knight.

John Williams is easy to mess up. His scores tend to be more dense than a lot of stuff by John Barry or Jerry Goldsmith (though Jerry has a *lot* more alternating meter, so when Prauge Philharmonic screws up on Explorers, I can forgive them)

Well, thats the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Did you ever hear Joel McNeely's recording of the Judge Dredd suite? Or Frederic Talgorn's "Duel Of The Fates"? Those are enough to knock the fillings out of your head - DotF is a much darker, more full-bodied peice under Talgorn's baton.

But for every great rerecording - you get 3 or 4 bad ones. The new Telarc disc is pretty damned awful because of the choir. Listen to that. Ugh.

While "wrong notes" can be argued, complaining about acoustics is awfully silly given that people on the internet will download DVD Rips and live concert bootlegs. Yeah, I like a nice clear recording too - but sometimes it also helps to hear it in it's original "live" format. I have a number of live classical discs that are helped because they're kinda low-balled quality and analoge recordings.

When I buy a disc, theres two things I look for to judge the disc by and the Imperial March is one of them. I've yet to hear a version as good as the one Williams recorded for the original ESB album - but I'm still looking for one. (What I want to know is - why has no one rerecorded the Asteroid Field cue? Theres a suite version - but its only the first minute or so of the movie version. Why isn't the movie version recorded?)


Well, sometimes timetables don't allow it. Michael Kamen used 12 orchestrators to get Robin Hood finished on time and thats one of the best scores he ever did.

And sometimes having an orchestrator helps you work out ideas. Goldsmith owes his Oscar to Arthur Morton for his orchestrations and choir work on The Omen. The problem is when a composer's "voice" changes depending on the orchestrator - a problem I've heard with Elfman sometimes.

On the other hand, like you mentioned with Howard Shore, Don Davis is the same way for the most part. He had to hand-off a lot of the Matrix sequels to orchestrators because of the sheer size and volume of the work - but he's also written and orchestrated and conducted scores just as complicated (Jurassic Park III, Warriors Of Virtue)

Theres probably a good chance that Williams has his conductor's sheet from the recording of ToD. I say this because on the Indiana Jones DVD set, they interview him saying he was looking over the "Indy's First Big Adventure" cue from Last Crusade and made note of how many synch points there were in it. I think it stands to fair reasoning that if he has that, he could definitely have ToD.

Ah yes, I believe that was the first recording I'd ever heard of that particular track. While the original recording has its charms - like the funny synth instruments and the sliding string ending - I do enjoy a bold, ear-splitting performance as much as the next person. It also helps that it's a particularly wonderfully orchestrated piece, even for Williams.

I'm interested in hearing First Knight though, I'm unfamiliar with the score outside of the film though I have seen it countless times.
I'd also like to hear Talgorn's "Duel Of The Fates"; I'll keep an eye out for it, and I'm hopeful about the ToD conductor's score too.