Nicolai P. Zwar
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I have always had an affinity for computers, and periodically play video games. By that I mean the first video game I ever played was Pong—I don’t think you can get much older than that. (I did not have this game as a kid, but a friend of mine did.)
Back with some friends in the 80s, I played on the NES completely through the first two Zelda games and Super Mario Bros. 3… Then I didn’t play for years. Then, in the late 90s, I played the first two Tomb Raider games, Total Annihilation, and all the Monkey Island games (that were available at the time). Then I stopped playing for years again. In 2017, I bought the then-new Nintendo Switch because I really, really wanted to play Mario again.
The thing with Super Mario Bros. games is… I have to play them completely through… all the way, every level, every star or moon or whatever. And say what you want—they do get insanely difficult at times. At least for such a casual player as myself.
Which inevitably, sooner or later, leads to situations like the one pictured below (from New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe… perhaps my favorite “classic” Mario game), where I curse that §$%§! piece of §%&! “one-wrong-move-and-you-are-dead” plumber! (Yes, that is an actual screenshot of me playing the game in 2019.)
So I have periods where I play one or more games intensively, and then sometimes years where I don’t play any video games at all.
These last few months, I have not really played many video games because I spend my time on other (presumably more important) things—but I still like video games.As far as music is concerned: yes, some of it has been really great. I mean, by nature, most (though not all) video game music is mood- rather than context-specific, so it is generally not very dramatic music, but rather sets the atmosphere. It must not be too specific or dramatic, because oftentimes it has to be able to be played in a loop, depending on how long a player stays within a certain scene. So it’s different from film scores in many ways. Some of it is quite nice. Grant Kirkhope’s music for Mario + Rabbids, for example, is terrific, with many charming melodies, songs, twists, and turns. The music was performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Nic Raine, so I guess film score fans certainly know these names (James Fitzpatrick was listed as the orchestra manager).
There was some music with a definite “Danny Elfman” touch in an early level of Super Mario Odyssey (I’m pretty sure it was an intentional reference).
I do have a few soundtracks of video games, like the BALDUR’S GATE III soundtrack (which came with the game, which I played a bit last year—but on the PC, not a console), and some of it is indeed very good and very “filmic”.Two “live to picture” concerts I have attended that were splendid:
KOYAANISQATSI
FANTASIA 2000I’m sure because these movies are basically just images and music, they lend themselves to these types of concerts more than movies with lots of sound effects and dialog.
I can see why you said that…. both Tori Amos and Agnes Obel are singer/songwriters with a classical piano background, so I see the connection. I actually do have all of Tori Amos’ albums and liked Agnes Obel from her debut album “Philharmonics”.
Agnes Obel – Aventine
Sorry, I didn’t pay attention to the fact that the cover doesn’t have any text.Yeah, nice box… but I didn’t pick up that one either… I mean, I have all these scores already anyway.
ENTER THE DRAGON is a must, but only in later expanded and remastered editions, as the original album contained inserted yells and “Kung Fu vocals”.
I can say Rózsa, North, Herrmann, Goldsmith and Morricone would be “fixed” as my top five favorite film composers, but I like a lot of other composers as well, so the other five slots may be “rotating”.
I just name these off the top of my head (in chronological order of birthyear)
Miklós Rózsa (1907–1995)
Alex North (1910–1991)
Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975)
Ennio Morricone (1928–2020)
Jerry Goldsmith (1929–2004)
John Williams (1932–)
Howard Shore (1946-)
Elliot Goldenthal (1954–)
James Horner (1953-)
Thomas Newman (1955-)I’m flipping around a few names… I mean, there are so many more that are favorites… There’s John Barry, Leonard Rosenman… Don Davis (because I LOVE his Matrix scores), James Newton Howard (really cools stuff)…, Bruce Broughton… Vangelis (I like his film scores, but don’t consider him primarily a film composer, Hans Zimmer, Maurice Jarre, Danny Elfman… and more… cannot decide really, so I could flip a few names now and then, and probably will. 🙂 Wojciech Kilar is a favorite too…
Not to mention composers such as Shostakovich, Copland, Glass, Nyman, Vangelis… I like them all, but I don’t consider than primarily film composers, even though they obviously were film composers… Ah, well, I did my “off the top of my head top ten” list. 🙂I like quite a bit of Danny Elfman’s music; I first took notice of him in the 1980s. He had done the theme for the funny TV series SLEDGEHAMMER, and then of course came the two punch when he scored Tim Burton’s huge hit BATMAN and the theme for the still running THE SIMPSONS.
My favorite Danny Elfman scores? Hmmm… off the top of my head:EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990)
Just a beautiful score… love it from start to finish.ALICE IN WONDERLAND & ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (2010/2016)
Danny Elfman meets Philip Glass with chorus.PLANET OF THE APES (2001)
I didn’t care for the movie, but wow, what a score. At the time I said it sounded like the Vienna Philharmonic took acid and started banging and clanging on anything that made noise. Forget “heavy metal”, this is much more in your stomach.FIFTY SHADES OF GREY/DARKER/FREED (2015-2018)
These scores for the silly “pseudo-BDSM” love story show a different side of Elfman. While the movies are of course high-concept fan-fiction nonsense, the music is elegant and has class, and goes well around the selection of classical pieces and pop songs also used in the movie.DOLORES CLAIBORNE (1995)
Elfman provides a restrained and brooding score for one of the best Stephen King adaptations ever.Bonus mention:
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993)
Of course, it’s a film score, but basically it’s a musical, so I mention it apart from this others. But yes, I love it. Great, fun songs, lots of good music. And the album with Patrick Stewart’s narration is just perfect.I mentioned only film scores, I put his concert works aside for now and did not include them in consideration.
I have seen John Williams give concerts twice live, both times with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl, but that was 30 years or so ago. Certainly both great concerts.
THE CAR is an interesting movie… it took the setting from DUEL and the plot from JAWS… It sounds like a cheap exploitation rip-off, but the production values are quite high actually. Great team behind the camera and a solid cast. (So maybe it was a mid-price exploitation rip-off. 😉 )
I saw this as a kid and it stuck… It was probably among the first Rosenmann scores I noticed, and it’s quite a dark score. I mean, the music sells this…
It’s one of the scores I never thought would see the light of day and was elated when it did.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVlUDaI-HwITHE CAR – Opening Scene
But is it more expensive with the new tarrifs, or have they been like that for a couple of years?
It’s been like that as far as I can tell. US releases are more expensive at Music Box Records, European ones are cheaper. But shipping is much cheaper for me from Music Box Records… in fact, it’s even gone down a bit.
I very much enjoy DUNE, both part 1 and part 2, and the DUNE Sketchbook too. Wonderful sonorities and engrossing soundscapes, very melodic actually. I think it’s one of Hans Zimmer’s best scores.
Not sure why, but the forum seems to — quite often — put posts of mine into “Spam”, even though I do not actually intend to spam.
Last post that happened to was my reply in the “10 favorite soundtracks” forum. Not sure what could have triggered the filter.Ah, oh, wow, lots of good stuff I see. I just thought at first it was film music related, and I don’t recall any film music on Harmonia Mundi ever.
Top Ten Film scores:
Of course, this is an “old favorite topic”. And that question gets often asked like it’s a clean question. But there are many ways to answer it. What am I going to list? I can love the way the music sits in the movie, how it underscores scenes. Or I can love it on its own, stripped of image, just as music, without much concern about the movie. Or both.
So I try to “go with the flow” and lists scores that are… well… simply favorites. Maybe it’s one of the scores that pulled me into the world of film music. Maybe it’s the one that lit the match for your favorite composer. Or maybe it’s the one that really kept lingering and spoke to me and I wondered: “What is this? And why does it feel like it knows me?”Okay, so here is mine, my personal “top ten” list. Not etched in stone, it’s a “new” list every time I’m asked, though perennial favorites keep shaking hands on this list. So it’s not about rankings. It’s chronological in the way the music came out (not in the way I encountered it… would be a different chronology). It’s about those scores that, for one reason or another, are “essential” for me.
Jerome Moross: THE BIG COUNTRY (1958)
The perfect, quintessential Western score. And sheesh, I’m not really a genre guy, but I think I always liked Westerns a bit more than the other genres. This one I first saw as a kid, and it stuck.Bernard Herrmann: NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)
It’s nervous, sleek, always on the move… just one of Herrmann’s coolest scores. And the music is thrilling, often nervous; it is the anxiety Herrmann scores, civilization is a chase scene, and the music knows it.Alex North: THE MISFITS (1961)
I have always loved Alex North’s film music. When I first noticed his music, it was when I caught a movie called BITE THE BULLET channel zapping as a teenager… at first, I thought the music must have been composed by Jerry Goldsmith, but it turned out to by by Alex North, a composer I had never heard of. And there are many favorites I could list, including of course his big epic scores for SPARTACUS and CLEOPATRA. But there is something about his music for THE MISFITS which makes it an album I just love. The music is dry and haunted, a mix of American West, but mixed with a bit of (then) contemporary jazz/rock/pop sounds. Very eloquent at times.Miklós Rózsa: EL CID (1961)
Ah, wonderful music. The first time I saw this on TV I did not have a lot of Róza music, maybe just one CD or so. This movie changed that.
Leonard Rosenman: THE CAR (1977)
Dissonant, aggressive, and that great “Dies Irae” tune… from the “Main Title” forward the music announces: “Here comes Evil”. Of course, it’s ludicrously silly, because “Evil” in this movie comes in form of a murder-shark… I mean murder-car, but it’s a lot of fun. Indeed, JAWS in the desert with a car instead of a shark. Yes, it sounds as bonkers as it is, the car doesn’t just kill people, it kills sound reason. But who cares when you get such a terrific piece of horror scoring that is composed through by Hollywood’s most forward looking composer? Rosenman has written more famous works, but this is one of his best.Ennio Morricone: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)
This music doesn’t accompany myth, it is myth. Every theme is a psychological symbol, the feminine, the outlaw, the man with the harmonica, Morton, Cheyenne. I guess so much has been said about this score, I don’t have to add anything.John Williams: STAR WARS (1977–2019)
Same with STAR WARS… it’s the biggest longest opera of pop culture… I can take or leave STAR WARS (except for the first two movies, which are really great), but the music in all movies has been fantastic.Jerry Goldsmith: STAR TREK – THE MOTION PICTURE (1979)
Adventure and awe. That’s what this is. This is, perhaps along with STAR WARS, the one film score that single handedly made me a film score afficionado… and a Goldsmith fan.Philip Glass: KOYAANISQATSI (1982)
I came across this when I had a summer job at a film distributor. I had never heard anything like it, it was like a new type of music…. Music as a mosaic. Mesmerizing.Howard Shore: THE LORD OF THE RINGS (2001–2003)
Wow, Shore… now this is another big, long piece of wonder. Ancient modes, prophetic themes, leitmotifs that grow like characters. Shore’s music doesn’t just support the story, it is part of the story, Shore’s music completes it. This is the sound of Tolkien’s myth remembering itself. I always loved it, but I love it now even more than when I first heard it.I don’t know the exact reasons, so I’m just guessing, but if 50%(!) of the sellers do not do it, there are obviously very good reasons for not doing it. I mean, 50% is a lot. That is really a lot. So there are obviously hurdles. I mean, if you are a small scale seller who sells his inventory anyway, and the UK or any other country is more bureaucratic or has problems, you might just cross this off your list. I’m sure it is not because sellers specifically want to annoy UK citizens.
This may be, but the question is why they refuse to ship to the UK. I know at least from one seller (but not CDs, clothes) who stopped selling to the UK completely. Why? Because she didn’t feel like it? No, but because the hassle wasn’t worth it. Apart from the considerable additional paperwork that was allegedly necessary (I didn’t dig into that, so I don’t know), what happened a lot with UK shipments was this: Items shipped, entered UK, stuck in customs. Customer did not pick up package to pay additional fees. Customer demanded refund because he never received the item. (Easy to do with Paypal.) Seller maybe (or even maybe not sometimes) received back the package. Stuck with a lot of hassle, a lot of expenses, and maybe even with lost merchandise. Once that happens to a seller a couple of times, he is likely cross the UK from the list of countries he’s selling to. Stuff like that seems to have happened a lot after Brexit.
I just wanted to order Intrada’s new FIRST BLOOD, I added Music Box Record’s new L’ÉTÉ MEURTRIER by Georges Delerue, so I had at least two CDs to order.
This would have cost me $71.98 at Intrada… because the shipping is so darn high. Add to that, there’s a good chance I’d have to pay additional fees then the package arrives. The exact same order at Music Box Records cost me €55.25, so considerably less, even though the actual FIRST BLOOD CD costs considerably more there. It’s crazy how much shipping from the US has become.I have no idea why and how Norway would be effected by all of this, I’m just pretty sure the culprit in most cases is not the actual store. I’m sure they don’t mind selling CDs or anything else to Norwegians or Norway just out of spite. But I understand that it’s annoying if you don’t even know what these “restrictions” are.
There is a lot of dissonance in tonal music… in fact, one could argue that actual “dissonance” can be found only in tonal music, because dissonance usually refers to harmonic tension, whereas atonal music lacks a harmonic tonal center to begin with, so there is neither “dissonance” nor “consonance” (its opposite) in atonal music.
There is a lot of dissonance in the music of Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, or Hector Berlioz, yet their music remains (mostly) tonal. On the other hand, Olivier Messiaen’s music often ventures deep into atonal territory (though it’s never strict about it, and it’s not “12-tone”… just not always within a certain harmonic tonal center), but I don’t find it particularly dissonant.In all fairness, I am sure it wasn’t Music Box who did the punishing. After Brexit, sending something commercially the UK from Europe became a costly bureaucratic undertaking, that many companies simply (and understandably) said “f$%! that”.
The other way around, too, which is why I don’t order anything from the UK anymore. Ironically, it’s cheaper for me to order Varèse Sarabande CDs from their US store than it is from the “international” (but in reality only “UK”) store.I have to admit, I don’t have a “problem” with dissonance or atonal music per se, I don’t see it just “interesting on an academic level”, but enjoy much of it on a very visceral, deeply engrossing — sometimes even soothing — level. I know most people probably just enjoy “tonal” or “melodic” music and don’t listen to any more abstract music at all, but I was always drawn to these type of compositions. Now if I were to view (or perhaps better “hear”) them as mere “paper music”, music with an “interesting” concept on paper or in (music) theory but just awful to listen to, I would not find much pleasure in listening to it.
One of my favorite works is Pierre Boulez “Sur Incices”. Now this is a composition by one of the most radical and uncompromising composers of “paper music” there is, and I understand why Boulez was a very important but also highly divisive composer. Still, when I hear “Sur Incices”, it’s like bathing in a soothing kaleidoscope of musical shimmers, colors, rhythms, and sounds. I find that music very spiritual, actually, and my mind can deeply relax to these sounds. Why? I don’t know. Then again, I don’t know why I like any piece of music, really. Because I don’t like music for rational reasons, but because some music somehow resonates with me. All the “talk” and “writing” about music is just an attempt to get a grasp on how and what a certain score does and why it speaks to some, and perhaps not to others.
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.
But perhaps because I already grew up with a lot of “classical” classical music (Brahms, Beethoven, Wagner, Schubert, etc.), I found it very interesting when I came across radically different works by composers such as Stravinsky, Schönberg, Webern, Ligeti (this one indeed via 2001), Stockhausen as a teenager. Again, I didn’t like all their music right away, but I found it quite interesting.
Yes, Morricone collections are great. I like them a lot, and they introduced me to a lot of his music. I have the “An Ennio Morricone Anthology” pictured by Thor up there, and a number of additional compilations. That’s because Morricone often composed self contained themes, which work great in a collection of individual pieces from individual movies. Compilations are a great way to get to know some of Morricone’s vast output.
I think my first (and I still have it) was this 3LP set, which I picked up in the 80s in Munich (it’s an ebay Link, so I don’t know for how long it will be there)Ennio Morricone – The Italian Western
Funny thing: Over the years, I tried to actually get all the Western scores in this collection.
I got most of them, but UN FIUME DI DOLLARI remains elusive.
