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WITNESS works really well in the film. The synth music is perfect for the badguys in the film as it gives them a really terrifying edge. For the pastoral sequences, I think it does tap into the cosmic ambience of the environment in an oddly fitting way.
I really wish it would get a full score release - I don’t know if it actually is complete or not, but I’d love to get that score.
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Posted: |
Jun 17, 2021 - 12:31 AM
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By: |
Nono
(Member)
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He was an old school orchestral romanticist at heart, as scores like Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago attest; to me, his electronics always sounded clunky, and badly-arranged.
You don't seem to know Maurice Jarre's music very well to tell he was "an old school orchestral romanticist at heart". He had a long career before Lawrence of Arabia which shows he wasn't, and his music was more modern than romantic even when he worked in Hollywood.
Reading your review of Witness you don't know what an EVI is, since it's not a keyboard:
"However, in hearing the finished score, it begs the question why Jarre didn’t just use live instruments? One keyboard is clearly programmed to sound like a flute."
Maurice Jarre early electronic scores are also reminiscent of organ music, with its rich palette of sounds. And since organ is a keyboard instrument, his approach was all the more interesting.
We can hear the influences of Messiaen, especially in The Year of Living Dangerously, and Building the Barn from Witness is obviously a tribute to Bach.
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'The Year Of Living Dangerously' and Mosquito Coast' are among my favorite scores !!!
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Posted: |
Jun 17, 2021 - 10:20 AM
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By: |
Jon Broxton
(Member)
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You don't seem to know Maurice Jarre's music very well to tell he was "an old school orchestral romanticist at heart". He had a long career before Lawrence of Arabia which shows he wasn't, and his music was more modern than romantic even when he worked in Hollywood.
I was using the word "romanticist" in the sense of the emotion related to romantic love, not in the sense of a specific and defined period of classical music history.
Reading your review of Witness you don't know what an EVI is, since it's not a keyboard: "However, in hearing the finished score, it begs the question why Jarre didn’t just use live instruments? One keyboard is clearly programmed to sound like a flute."
I certainly do know what an EWI is. I've heard it enough in Trevor Jones scores to know what it sounds like. I wasn't referring to the EWI tones in Witness - they are very noticeable - but some of the other woodwind-esque keyboard sounds which to me sound very poorly rendered.
We can hear the influences of Messiaen, especially in The Year of Living Dangerously, and Building the Barn from Witness is obviously a tribute to Bach.
Sure. And this is exactly the point. His actual compositional style - which, as you say here, is often inspired by the very traditional and classical - mostly sounds terrible to me when he tries to arrange it for synthesizers, because 1980s synths simply can't produce the sounds his brain writes. As I said, he's writing orchestral music but playing it on synths, instead of writing music specifically for synths.
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It might be less a matter of making his synths sound orchestral, but more about how he composed music overall, with his unique colors, rhythms, and intonations, which synths exposed and amplified and, as a result, made more obvious, like demo templates to finished works. He never created experimental melodies like Goldsmith or relied heavily on ostinatos as Remote Control does, but the color and depth remained.
I haven't heard much of his synth oeuvre, but of what I have, most of it works in and outside the film for me, with the glaring exception of Dreamscape, which I still swear was Tangerine Dream.
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I also wonder how "new" posters coming out of the blue always start useless threads on questionable topics about which we are all sick and tired.
I've actually quite enjoyed reading everyone's thoughts on this topic. And that's going way back to previous discussions as long ago as the 1990's. Calling the topic questionable and the thread useless is a bit over-the-top.
I do enjoy most of Jarre's electronic scores. Just got done listening to "Ghost" for the first time in years. Not sure if I'm just in the right mood, but it was a lot more enjoyable than I remember. And I think the ghostly qualities of the synth fit the film perfectly, even by today's standards.
My favorites are "No Way Out" and "Witness". The original album of "No Way Out" was the ideal length, and had really no weak moments. And while some find the use of synth in "Witness" (an Amish movie) to be jarring, I disagree. I actually can't imagine a real orchestral score for that film. The music matches the almost ethereal rural landscapes so well!
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Posted: |
Jun 24, 2021 - 3:16 PM
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By: |
mark_so
(Member)
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When it came to Maurice and Jerry, their all-synth 80s efforts SUCK, and suck hard, these classicly-trained musicians noodling around on Casio keyboards because it was what "the kids" were into in those days. There are all-electonic scores I like (like some of Carpenter's work), but Jarre and Goldsmith didn't have the ability to make an all-synth ensemble work.
LOL i appreciate a strong opinion! used to feel this way about MJ's and also Horner's electronic scores, but have since 'evolved' quite a bit. it is in my opinion simply fatuous to pretend that these kinds of scores are merely signs of the conservatory composer going commercial; Jarre was an out-there composer from the start, writing some generally quite 'jarring' (sorry...) pieces for avant-garde music festivals through the 50s, generally for chamber and percussion ensembles. to my ear they have a dated air of kitsch modernism, but that's neither here nor there -- the neoromantic orchestral scores he later became known for were really the "selling out" point (something Wojciech Kilar bemoaned first-hand when i interviewed him in the 90s). i think his big symphonic scores vary quite drastically between classic and not so much. very few of them are recorded well (i can't even listen to The Damned, Gorillas in the Mist, Grand Prix, Winter Kills, etc etc), which complicates my ability to appreciate them, i suppose. even in this area, it's mostly the oddballs, which have some combination of diverse ensembles and/or electronics, that stand out for me: Mad Max 3, Enemy Mine, Judge Roy Bean, The Man Who Would Be King, The Message. i do think Lawence and Passage to India are great, but by far, the small electronic ensemble scores have for me the most personality, and really exist in their own territory, true blue (or beige, or gray, whatever), for better or worse. i'm continually surprised that the discussion around Witness to this day centers around whether or not electronics are appropriate to the Amish, which strikes me as being as reactionary as Hitchcock's objection to the use of cello in Lifeboat because where would it be coming from. for me, it's all about establishing the tone and color of a spiritual, archaic society, a way of building atmospheric tension and mystery by being oblique/opaque (much like Chinatown, or Alien), conjuring a total sense of a world without giving anything away. Jacob's Ladder and No Way Out are masterpieces, utterly inseparable from the impact of their films. By another token, i've worn out my record of The Year of Living Dangerously (though i haven't seen the film in decades) -- which i find as satisfying an album listen as Goldsmith's Under Fire. i also perennially play my tape of After Dark, My Sweet, with the added 'secret' discovery that the opening is incredibly beautiful when paired alongside Morton Feldman's A Very Short Trumpet Piece...
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