[Nicolai P. Zwar]

What is your opinion on the topic of re-arranging in general? What do you think are some good re-mixes or re-arrangments of certain songs or tracks – film music or otherwise (note: I’m not talking about re-recordings of entire scores here)? Got anyone you DISlike? If so, why?”

Generally, I think it’s perfectly okay to re-arrange songs, tracks, themes, whatever. It’s perfectly normal for one composer to re-visit his own or other people’s material. Bach scraped Vivaldi and re-arranged some music for his own concerti, so why shouldn’t someone else to the same with John Williams? If someone metamorphed themes by Carl Maria von Weber into a symphonic composition, why not? Everybody from Miklós Rózsa to Sergei Rachmaninoff tried their hand at re-arranging and re-purposing Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 in A minor. Of course, it’s not the same to re-purpose themes for a new composition, or to re-arrange a composition for a different setting.
I liked what Michael Giacchino did with his two “Exotic Themes” albums, taking is own film themes and creating two exotica lounge albums out of it, a sort of modern day nod to Lex Baxter.

Indeed, I thought the Paul Oakenfold “Rule the Planet remix” quite good, enjoyed that. However, often time, orchestral arrangements of pop/rock songs reveal the compositional deficiencies of the source material, so they often sound “bland”. An exception was Peter Gabriel’s “New Blood” album, with new orchestral arrangements of classic Peter Gabriel songs. Now, not all of the songs “gain” by being performed with an orchestra, but at least this album took the orchestra “seriously” and explored the songs with it, instead of just treating the orchestra and just a different kind of background layer sound.
Especially “San Jacinto”, a song I always loved, became more powerful in the orchestral version.

Basically, every arrangement of the songs on New Blood was inspired by one of Gabriel’s favorite composers… I could never help feeling that this “San Jacinto” version has a strong “Thomas Newman” vibe (and Gabriel has worked with Thomas Newman before).

Since I also like Jazz, many of the film arrangements I like tend to be jazz versions; the advantage of jazz is: you can just have a theme and let great musicians have a run/jam at it.

Got anyone you DISlike? If so, why?

I’m sure there are lots… the thing is, I tend not to remember them or get hung up about it. If I don’t like a piece of music, I tend not to pay too much attention to it. I mean, take the Giorgio Moroder synthesizer arrangement of the SUPERMAN theme (on the Superman III soundtrack). Sounds like a “demo” today. Who needs it? I don’t “hate” or “DISlike” it, it was an experiment, it’s more of a curiosity item nowadays, and why not have Moroder do a performance ofSUPERMAN on synthesizers, but in the end, it proved that synthesizers were no match for the London Symphony Orchestra. 🙂