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.