[Thor Joachim Haga]

FSM # 8: October 4, 2000 (but actually posted as early as August 11, 2000, on moviemusic.com, and then reposted on FSM a couple of months later)

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Well, I’ve been walking around with this somewhat silly, pointless competition in my head recently: Which is John Williams’ most avantgardistic piece of work?

Now, I should probably define “avantgardistic”, but I will dare no such endeavour (hmm, I just sounded like Cpt. Picard). You know the drill: Modernistic, often atonal, dissonant, seemingly chaotic etc.

I have narrowed it down to these three nominees:

1. THE FLUTE CONCERTO

A dynamic, trembling orchestra backs up a long string of wooded outbursts by a flute that thinks it is a shakuhachi. Mesmerizing, and the likely “winner” in this competition, IMO.

2. IMAGES

The hypnotizing score to this Robert Altman film, coupling frenetic-exotic percussion performed by Mr. Yamash(i)ta with human moaning, deserves a nomination. However, melodic tracks such as the Bachian “Blood Moon” leviates some of the musical pressure.

3. IRWIN ALLEN TV SCORES

Yes, third comes the sturm und drang cacaphony that is the Irwin Allen TV series of the 60’s (especially LOST IN SPACE). Intense and Bernard Herrmannish on a large scale, but also moments of intricate beauty.

Honorable mentions: His WIND SINFONIETTA and most of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.

Any other suggestions for this fantasy prize?

[Thor Joachim Haga]

Talk about a “bomb” of a topic….and here I was, thinking John Williams always “sells”. 😉

In any case, the three candidates mentioned up there, 25 years ago, still stand. But in recent years there have been some new works, especially for piano (“Conversations”, “Piano Concerto”, “Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra”) that are up there amongst the challenging ones.

Also, plenty of suspense cues from yesteryear that would qualify, I think.

[GerateWohl]

I think, your selections pretty much cover the question.
But if Avantgarde can also be just weird, not necessarily dissonant then John Goldfarb, Please Come Home might qualify.

[Sigbjørn]

What about his newer concert works?

[GerateWohl]

Does the avantgarde still exist?

I find Williams’ Essa, For Strings quite challenging, too.

[Thor Joachim Haga]

The avant garde will always exist in one way or another, I think. But the way I coined the headline there, in the year 2000, was originally a fancy-schmanzy word play – ‘avant garde’ literally meaning ‘front troop’, and ‘Caesar’ then as the leader of said front troop, as were it Roman times.

I suppose it doesn’t have to be all abstract and dissonant, as Gerate says. It can be weird juxtapositions in other ways, like we often think of John Zorn or even Carl Stalling. The Arab go-go music of JOHN GOLDFARB would indeed be a contender that way.

[Thor Joachim Haga]

As I listen to Williams’ Irwin Allen scores again now, especially LOST IN SPACE, I maintain this as a candidate for the “prize” as most avantgardistic work by the composer – as alluded to in previous posts. Very challenging — lots of sturm und drang. Screaming brass. Not for the faint of heart.

[Thor Joachim Haga]

I think we sometimes forget that Williams quite often pushed the envelope even in his early TV days. If some of you have listened to my podcast series about this aspect of Williams’ career, you would have heard this, but if you haven’t – or have no interest in doing so – here are some examples that would fit into this thread:

“The Jail” from ALCOA — Ray Bradbury-written, dystopian sci fi episode where Williams goes nuts with dissonance and even early electronics, as far as I can hear.

“The Hunt” from KRAFT — Robert Altman shadow-directed this episode about people who hunt people for sports. Weird, spacey sounds.

Plenty more. These would all be candidates for the “Caesar of the Avant Garde” award, alongside previously mentioned entries.

[Thor Joachim Haga]

Uhm, the embedding didn’t work. But the links are there.

[Malte Müller]

You tried bbcode embeds which don’t work here or in WordPress in general. In posts you can embed audio and video but these are not in the system so you can’t via the link button (A reason more to upload to the site instead, we talked about it ;-)).

You have to use HTML directly:

<audio controls src="https://celluloidtunes.no/non-website/alcoa%20-%20the%20jail%20-%202.mp3" loading="lazy"></audio>

Spaces or any special chars in file names may cause trouble.

For a video replace “audio” with “video” and best set also a width:

<video controls src="https://celluloidtunes.no/somevideo.mp4" loading="lazy" width="700"></video>

[Malte Müller]

Or just use direct links. Any browser will open it and play it. mp3 and mp4 videos any browser not stone age can play right away 😉

[Thor Joachim Haga]

I did use direct links. The board added the code itself, and I can’t remove it. I removed the spaces, but it still looks the same. But changed to in-text-link instead, that works.

[Malte Müller]

Indeed I see the forum indeed added those. No idea why…

[Author]

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