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Posted: |
May 1, 2012 - 10:15 PM
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By: |
ToneRow
(Member)
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As we are currently in year 2012, I've reflected on my favorite soundtracks now as well as what titles my favorites list contained 12 years ago.
I think it's interesting to compare "then" with "now" to witness what (and how) tastes have changed and that which, if anything, has remained unaltered.
Each of us members have different experiences with respect to when we started to collect soundtracks and for how long we've been doing so. Rather than specify calendar years, certain age thresholds would be more illustrative of how we've "grown" in our field of interest/hobby.
Feel free to post in this thread whatever your favorites were at age 12, then at age 24, and so on in 12-year increments.
Here's my input (I'm currently under age 48):
Age 12
• Dominic Frontiere's "The Architects Of Fear" score from THE OUTER LIMITS
• George Duning's "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" from STAR TREK
• Harry Lubin's "Demon With A Glass Hand" from THE OUTER LIMITS
• Sol Kaplan's "The Doomsday Machine" from STAR TREK
• Dudley Simpson's "The Masque Of Mandragora" incidental music for DOCTOR WHO
• Alexander Courage's "The Cyborg" score from VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
Age 24
• ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA by John Scott
• PAPILLON by Jerry Goldsmith
• HARLEQUIN by Brian May
• SUMMER AND SMOKE by Elmer Bernstein
• LADY CAROLINE LAMB by Richard Rodney Bennett
• ONE EYED JACKS by Hugo Friedhofer
Age 36
• THE ILLUSTRATED MAN by Jerry Goldsmith
• L'IMPRECATEUR by Richard Rodney Bennett
• FANTASTIC VOYAGE by Leonard Rosenman
• THE MECHANIC by Jerry Fielding
• AFRICA by Alex North
• BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB by Tristram Cary
Age 48
N/A
Age 60
N/A
Age 72
N/A
Age 84
N/A
Age 96
N/A
Speaking for myself, reruns of sci-fi TV shows, which I watched during my age 12, are the genesis of my interest in film soundtracks (though at that age I had not yet gotten any soundtracks).
By my age 24, I had accumulated a soundtrack collection plus an interest in music from 'before my time'. At this stage, my favorites were essentially melodic scores.
Not long after 24, my interests in classical music developed such that the spectrum of 20th century harmonic vocabulary expanded my tastes into appreciation for dodecaphony and beyond. This gradually re-shaped my sensibilities and predilections so that by age ...
...36, my favorites are quite different in substance than my favorites from a dozen years prior. It's interesting to note that I have been acquainted with music by Jerry Fielding since watching STAR TREK reruns at age 12, but it wasn't until I was in my 30s that a Fielding soundtrack resided within my favorites list.
Similarly, I've owned soundtracks by Alex North or Leonard Rosenman from before I was 24, but - again - not until my 30s did my appreciation of their music escalate to where it is today.
Both Goldsmith and Bennett appear on the 2 different lists, but with different works. 
I'm in my 40s now, and I don't expect much change in whatever my favorites may look like at my anticipated age 48.
There's plenty of unreleased film score sound recordings yet to hope for, though...
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Posted: |
May 3, 2012 - 12:35 AM
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By: |
lexedo
(Member)
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Hi lexedo!
Thanks for your comments. I'm certain you've grown musically, too.
Never learnt to play any instrument, though my father played both piano and accordion.
I was doing heavy fusion stuff by the time I was 14-15: Chick Corea, Lalo, Shire, Mike Post, Tom Scott, Mancini (again - Charlies Angels, 10, Thief who, Whats Happening), Joe Zawinul, Goldenberg, Conti-Maynard, Colombier, Herbie.
And that's the same exact stuff I'm most happy hearing still.
I like all the good stuff.
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I seemed to miss this thread first time round, but as ToneRow directed us to it on another thread due to something I said which went a bit off-topic, I feel obliged to contribute here. Blame me or blame ToneRow - feel free to be uninterested in MY story!
I don't think I can do the "12-year-increment" jobby originally proposed. The following is just a ramble off the top of my head - you should know me by now. Don't expect a cohesive read.
I started really paying attention to film music (or at least "being exposed" to it, without really being conscious that real people wrote that kind of stuff) when I was 9 or 10 years old. The Friday night horror movie on TV was what started it all off. Most of the films shown back then and during my early teens were British and largely, though hardly exclusively, from Hammer or Amicus. So by the time I was 14 I had already been steeped in the works of James Bernard, Elisabeth Lutyens, Gerard Schurmann, Clifton Parker and Tristram Cary (etc). I was also terribly excited just at the tail-end of that phase by TV showings of PLANET OF THE APES and FANTASTIC VOYAGE. So for me, the supposedly "challenging" nature of that school of sound (lumping everything together for ease here) was no hurdle for me at all. I'd grown up amongst crashing dissonances and unconventional harmonics.
This however somehow made it harder for me to feel comfortable with more conventional "film-music-sounding" scores. I remember waiting eagerly, tape-recorder in hand, for THE VALLEY OF GWANGI, and being disappointed in the score. I wanted something way-out and colourful like the Herrmann/ Harryhausen scores, but what I got sounded like "...a Western, like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN or something". I remember my outburst to this day. Silly youngster. I then went through a period when I actually began to watch films from other genres (among them, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, which grew to become one of my favourite scores/LPs of all)!
In my late teens and early 20s I really went wild with scores encompassing every genre - jazz, soul, blaxploitation - and a lot of what are now in hindsight quite tepid, unadventurous scores for routine movies, too many to mention. In later years I got rid of the worst offenders (I threw Francis Lai's BILITIS in the bin. I'd bought it only for the cover anyway) and since then have kind of been undergoing a slow regression.
Not a lot has changed in my tastes since I turned 25 (I say that as if it were yesterday). I see an awful lot of scores as hopelessly conventional and now am only really interested in the top-tier stuff which, curiously or not, dovetails back to my formative years. So I love the more experimental side of early-to-mid career Goldsmith, I never tire of Rosenman, I embrace the avant-garde Jerry Fielding as much as his supreme jazz-tinged scores, and I'm overcome with awe when I hear the work of true geniuses such as Gil Mellé or Basil Kirchin. Just this morning I was listening to Kirchin's "Quantum", which I believe was done in collaboration with the inmates of a psychiatric hospital, and it was simply amazing.
But there I've gone and sounded all elitist and poncey. I also listened to Hugo Friedhofer's ONE-EYED JACKS and Rozsa's Violin Concero (Op. 24), so I still have a heavy tonal leaning - it's not all electronically amplified insects.
That was a very potted history, with a million omissions, and probably off-topic again anyway. .
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I think the first soundtrack LP I ever got (or bought) was STAR WARS when I was about 12 or 13.
This was followed by the LP's for CE3K and SUPERMAN-THE MOVIE.
I had noticed Film Music (JAWS and other cool stuff from films on the telly) and TV Themes from shows I watched and loved (The Persuaders, Planet Of The Apes, Six Million Dollar Man, Bionic Woman, Thunderbirds and other Gerry Anderson stuff), but those early (to me) John Williams scores were my true awakening.
By age 24 (let's see, 1989) I would be still digging JW and Jerry Goldsmith, but also have Horner, Broughton, Poledouris, Holdridge and the Big Guns like Morricone, Jarre and Barry eating into my time and budget.
At 36 (2001), I was going off a lot of what Jerry was doing around then, still lovin my regular go-to guys (JW, Horner, Broughton plus the likes of Elfman, JNH, Doyle, D and T Newman...lots more I'm sure), but still enjoying new and old stuff alike.
Last year (damn, I'm 49), I still love all my old stuff and played the shit our of things like Frozen by Chris Beck (and those songbirds) and any other cool new stuff I liked.
Like Graham, I've waffled a bit and not really listed my faves from the respective ages (impossible for me, it changes by the day/week), but I've enjoyed every moment of playing my soundtracks.
I wouldn't swap my passion/hobby for anything in the world .
Here's to the next 12 years!
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