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Which Goldsmith score, when you first heard it, made you think it didn't sound a THING like Goldsmith?
For me, it's always been Fierce Creatures, an absolute favorite of mine, but I swear it sounds absolutely nothing LIKE Goldsmith!
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I don't know that I've ever had that experience. Although he was incredibly prolific, had an incredibly wide palette and rarely repeated himself, I found there was always some stylistic nuance that gave it away as a Goldsmith score.
Back in 1986 when I was brand new to soundtrack collecting, John Barry and Jerry Goldsmith were my two favorites and I was reaching out to get to know the films they'd scored and hear scores I hadn't yet heard.
Well, one day I switched on the television and a Western was playing. A music cue came up and I instantly thought, that's Goldsmith! So I checked the television listings, discovered the film was HOUR OF THE GUN and ran to my room to check my MAGIC magazine with a list of Goldsmith scores. And sure enough I was right.
All that said, FIERCE CREATURES is a film I never watched and a CD I never bought, so you could be right about that.
Cheers
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According to Goldsmith himself he turned on the hotel TV one night and THE DETECTIVE was on. He said to himself, "That's pretty good music -- I wonder who wrote it?"
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Mr. Baseball
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Mr. Baseball and Fierce Creatures immediately come to mind.
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Six Degrees Of Separation
(the only one Goldsmith score I can't stand)...
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Six Degrees Of Separation
(the only one Goldsmith score I can't stand)...
Yeah, this one sprung to mind as well. I'll also nominate "The Illustrated Man".
The Illustrated Man? Really? To my ears, that is bona-fide A-list top-drawer "pure" Goldsmith. If I came across that movie on TV channel surfing and had I never heard of it, I'd have guessed the composer correctly.
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Criminal Law. Who would have thought Goldsmith would so shamelessly (be forced to) copy Peter Gabriel??
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I don't find any full score to be un-Goldsmith like, but a few examples here certainly are uncharacteristic, esp. Last Run and Criminal Law, at least in the themes. Ransom is similar to Last Run to me. And the most glaring example for me is the theme for In Like Flint. If I didn't know that was Goldsmith, I'd swear it was Neil Hefti. At least until the big crescendo - that sounds like no one else to me.
Curiously I find Six Degrees and Fierce Creatures to be quintessential, finding a striking solution for each film. I'm guessing he quite enjoyed writing both of those.
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MacArthur was one that never sounded like "typical" Goldsmith to me. There are moments that do (like the "minefield" cue, or the Japanese surrender scene), but the string arrangements (particularly in "I Shall Return") were quite unlike those in any of his other scores. I'm also hard-pressed to think of anything like the jaunty MacArthur march in his other work.
I would have expected MacArthur to be more like a cross between Patton and the more stalwart moments of In Harm's Way, but as Noel Coward would say, Goldsmith's always came out of a different hole.
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The Russia House? Wasn't that hard jazz?
Mostly not, certainly not compared to what the soprano saxophonist Branford Marsalis does under his own name. Jazz runs through it, but mostly more mainstream-almost-but-not-quite smooth jazz. Something like Grusin.
But an extraordinarily beautiful score, and as Spymaster said one of the brilliant jobs he did for Schepisi. I loved a lot of Goldsmith's scores in that period, but coming out of Russia House I thought - wow, that's a masterpiece.
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