GerateWohl
Forumsvar Lagt Inn
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Innlegg
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Yeah, nice box… but I didn’t pick up that one either… I mean, I have all these scores already anyway.
I didn’t have everything. For example the Cinderella Liberty OST or the Checkmate bits or The Man Who loved Cat Dancing. And the song CD was a nice addition. Or Sinfonietta for Wind Essemble or Prelude and Fugue. Also I like some compilations of stuff I have in complete form like the desaster movie compilation or the Oliver Stone compilation. It’s nice to listen to the JFK highlights without the songs.
Btw, sorry for my off-topic.
The John Williams 20 CD box is in the meantime down to under a hundred Euro at Amazon. Has maybe something to do with the new Anthology being announced? Anyway, this box is still the better choice.
To be honest, I had a look at my collection and from the pure number of albums per composer I took the first indication for my ranking.
And that was the reason for my high Goldsmith ranking. Yes, he wrote great scores. But I am not a huge fan of his 80s and 90s super reverb synth heavy sound. And often I think, he didn’t produce great albums. But each time I considered my Goldsmith collection complete something great that I didn’t know before comes along.Here I have to admit, that John Williams is my absolute top favourite. From all other composers in my top 10 I like aproximately 30% of their work. And their ranking results from how much I like their great 30%.
And of course the list is just a momentary picture.
And main criterion for me is how much I like their music. How well it works in which movie is secondary for me.1. John Williams
2. Miklós Rózsa
3. Jerry Goldsmith
4. Elmer Bernstein
5. Philippe Rombi
6. Joe Hisaishi
7. Philippe Sarde
8. Bernhard Hermann
9. James Newton Howard
10. Dario MarianelliHonorable mentions:
Danny Elfman
Franz Waxman
James Horner
Alan Silvestri
Howard Shore
Christopher Young
Patrick Doyle
John Barry
Ennio MorriconeI’m a huge fan of film music scores since a few years (got interest about it when I was 14yo, so it was 7 years ago now), particularly synth and horror scores, my favorites composers are likely: Graeme Revell, Jerry Goldsmith, Tangerine Dream, Elliot Goldenthal, Daniel Licht, James Newton Howard, Goblin, Marco Beltrami, Paul Haslinger, Vangelis, Steve Moore, Tyler Bates, Charlie Clouser and John Carpenter.
@Fanny: Reading that list and your comment about horror scores I immediately wondered, no Christopher Young? And is this because you don’t particularly like him? Or are you too young to know him? On the other hand Goldsmith and Carpenter are even much older veterans in that area.
Planet of the Apes and Terminator Salvation are great examples of Elfman adapting a old quite bulky scores and making them his own in a good accessible way.
And then there are scores like “Men In Black”, “The Frighteners” or “Hellboy and the Golden Army” which have that typical Elfman quirk and bore me after 10 to 15 minutes.
With Elfman I really have an up-and-down relationship. At times I am a little annoyed by his music.
But still I think, he would have been a perfect match as composer for one of the Harry Potter movies. Williams’ Double Trouble from HP 3 already sounded like a leftover track from A Nightmare Before Christmas. His Sleepy Hollow style would fit very well into tha Wizzard world. Never understood why he wasn’t offered that.
Reminds me somehow of that weird horror movie De Lift from the Netherlands. In the late 70s and early 80s the, made horror movies about everything. Cars, animals, any household appliance.
I have just watched Dune part 1. And the music managed to make a long slow movie even longer and slower.
In that sense, I fathom the score and its effect.A score I couldn’t fathom was Ludwig Göransson’s score for Tennet. Most of the time to my ears it was just distracting annoying noise.
Another example, the German movie “Das Leben der Anderen”. The score sounded often like a String quartet from the room next door but had very little to do with the action on screen. At least it felt like that.
One more thing on this. Dissonance stresses me usually more in golden age scores than in good modern horror or thriller scores.
By no means does that mean I like all dissonant (though I don’t find Sur Incises dissonant in any way) or atonal (Sur Incises is certainly not classical “tonal” music though) music, no more than I like all tonal or melodic music. Obviously not.
By the way, I often mix up dissonant with atonal. Atonal means for my understanding noise that cannot be associated with certain frequencies. While dissonant means, a chord of clear tones in a non-harmonic composition. Right?
In my twenties I was much more tolerant when it came to dissonant music. Much later to my surprise I realized how dissonant some music pieces actually were that I used to enjoy a lot in my youth.
Still I find dissonance ok for certain effects in film music. But it also can be too much. Talking about Chris Young, that is what I thought, when I checked out his score of “Pranks”. If I have a delicious tonal horror score with some sprinkles of dissonance like JNH’s The Village, that is the degree that I can still enjoy.
Apart from that it always depends if there is something actually interesting happening in the music, tonal or dissonant or not.
For those interested in 20th century orchestral music avoiding dissonance I strongly recommend to listen to the works of Ruth Gipps. But that’s not film music.