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Timeline - complete!
Which score/composer?
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Excalibur, I call on your power...
As far as EXCALIBUR is concerned, I really like the movie (and I saw it several times in the 1980s), but I don't remember any actual Trevor Jones music for the movie except for the dancing scene of Igraine. Ok, there were a few other cues as well, but not that much, and they were all but dwarfed by the classical compositions. The music I remember was Wagner and Orff.
Has Trevor Jones music ever been released anywhere (in acceptable form(at))?
Was the use of classical music always planned that way or was this a director falling in love with his temp track? I don't even know. I know the classical compositions used were surprisingly effective, but I wonder what Trevor Jones actually wrote for it?
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Has Trevor Jones music ever been released anywhere (in acceptable form(at))?
Was the use of classical music always planned that way or was this a director falling in love with his temp track? I don't even know. I know the classical compositions used were surprisingly effective, but I wonder what Trevor Jones actually wrote for it?
There was an "unmentionable", but never an official release of his score.
There was an official Excalibur LP, containing the classical selections used in the film (but it was just a reissue of old catalog recordings owned by the record label, not the performances made for the film).
John Boormann had always intended to use classical "needle drops" in Excalibur, with Jones supplying more "incidental" cues, as well as all the source music.
Jones composed the music for the dance of Igrayne as you noted, and the later sequence when Arthur dances with Guinevere. He also wrote the music for the wedding scene and the "dinner music" (when Gawain challenges Lancelot's honor). His most prominent dramatic cue is for the Quest for the Grail sequence, in which the knights ride off in search of the grail and the film moves into the story of Percival. Jones also wrote a main title, and music for the final scenes of the film (neither of which were used; Boorman used Wagner's "Siegfried's Death" instead).
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My favorite is Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, with music by Erik Nordgren.
Other titles to create a top 5 list include:
Jacques Rivette's Joan the Maid
Franklin Schaffner's The War Lord
Robert Bresson's Lancelot of the Lake
James Clavell's The Last Valley
Also, there are numerous classic Japanese chanbara (sword fight) films with samurai, but I expect the
OP is focused on the lore of European (French or British) knights.
[if one is inclined to explore European cinema further east, there is a classic Polish epic directed by Aleksander Ford called Knights of the Teutonic Order about Germanic knighthood with music by Kazimierz Serocki]
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Cid for me. Great film and music.
When i was a kid i had an uncle Sid.
I used to call him El Sid. 
I was gona suggest Last Valley too (although thats pushing it) and war lord but zardozsp beat me to it.
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John Boormann had always intended to use classical "needle drops" in Excalibur, with Jones supplying more "incidental" cues, as well as all the source music.
Jones composed the music for the dance of Igrayne as you noted, and the later sequence when Arthur dances with Guinevere. He also wrote the music for the wedding scene and the "dinner music" (when Gawain challenges Lancelot's honor). His most prominent dramatic cue is for the Quest for the Grail sequence, in which the knights ride off in search of the grail and the film moves into the story of Percival. Jones also wrote a main title, and music for the final scenes of the film (neither of which were used; Boorman used Wagner's "Siegfried's Death" instead).
Thanks, that was very interesting. I always thought that Boorman had the classical music selections already in mind when shooting and editing the movie, they were practically staged to the score. That is why I don't remember much of Jones' music, as the big dramatic stuff was all Wagner and Orff. The dance and source music scenes were good though. Do you know about how much music Jones wrote for the movie?
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Do you know about how much music Jones wrote for the movie?
I'm not sure. According to Paul Tonks' interview with Trevor Jones in Film Score Monthly (back in the 1990s), the composer stated "The original Excalibur with John Boorman ran four and a half hours". So, one can only speculate, but I'd guess he wrote more music than anyone has heard.
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