Tony Scott was a mensch. I often wonder what a movie like The Rock would look like in his talented vision. As adept as Michael Bay is at this kind of production (Thor even going so far to consider him an auteur), Scott "McOldsmobile" McOldsmith's opinion that The Rock is an irritating movie has a lot of truth behind it. And it is a film I love, but I do recognize that it must be annoying to a large percentage of potential viewers of the film. Tony Scott is practically a sensitive soul compared to Michael Bay! While Michael Bay could've been capable enough to make something like Top Gun or Unstoppable, he has never once shown the ability to make something like The Hunger or Revenge.
Hahah, I never get tired of "McOldsmibile!" And I'm surprised anyone reads my posts.
Aside from the usual Michael Bay "Everything Is Important in Slow Motion Even Helicopters" style, I remember vividly watching this thing in the theater wondering why he was zooming in and out of people in the cars to simulate movement. It was such a cheesy technique. Just rock the damned car.
He stoped that kinda stuff later but the "Slow Motion and Choir" crap became a signature. An auteur? Maybe but an annoyingly over dramatic one. However, I was pleasantly surprised at Pearl Harbor. I was expecting the worst. 90's action movies...go figure.
Great. Another C&C vs OST discussion. I unironically really love those. To give my own to cents on the topic I'll play the ultimate "Depends on the Score" card.
When it comes to producing an OST, I'd say Zimmer is the pro at that. Could be that most of his scores are in D and therefore you can move cues easely around and combine them without creating awful transitions. The one instance where I disagree with his choice of cues is Interstellar and the exclusion of "No Time For Caution" but then he put out the 2020 Expanded edition where disc two flows just as good as disc one and on top of that includes that cue.
I think the link works just fine. Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg is certainly considered classical music. It was written for a play, to support acted drama just as a film score does, and later a concert suite was made out of it. There are plenty of other examples of this in the classical music world, from Mendelssohn to Sibelius. Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker is certainly considered classical music, and that music was written to accompany the movements of ballet dancers. Tchaikovsky later turned it into a concert suite himself (and IMO left out most of the very best music, just as happens all the time with abbreviated film music albums). I honestly don't see how this is in ANY way different from Sergei Prokofiev adapting an Alexander Nevsky Cantata from his film score Alexander Nevsky (except in that case he thankfully left out far less significant music).
Problem with those examples is that they were written as absolute music FIRST, and then the ballet or stageplay was choreographed and fit to the music. I'm not aware of any examples where a composer was asked to write music after the fact, to the specific timings of the movements of the dancers or the duration of a scene, the way it is in film music. Maybe you know some.
I am not sure how splitting hairs like this proves your point. For those of us who like C&C/expanded albums, it is because there is music we heard in the film that we would like to hear independent of the film, but can't because it was left off the OST. So an album like this is exciting for me, and I ordered it the day it was announced, much like I have ordered plenty of other expanded albums. Do I love every expanded album? No. Sometimes my tastes and the tastes of the composer and/or original album producer align, but not always. Other times, not so much.
He stoped that kinda stuff later but the "Slow Motion and Choir" crap became a signature. An auteur? Maybe but an annoyingly over dramatic one. However, I was pleasantly surprised at Pearl Harbor. I was expecting the worst. 90's action movies...go figure.
Hey Mr. McOldsmobile! If you want to see a truly grown up Michael Bay production, I cannot recommend last year's Ambulance enough. Unfortunately I missed it in theaters and when I finally saw it I kicked myself. A virtuoso display of camera work and editing alongside a rather mature story. It may be a simple story, but it is not one dictated and distracted by Bay's typical juvenile habits. It was a rollicking good time, to me. While I don't consider Bay an "auteur" (nor anyone for that matter, 'cept maybe I'd make the case for filmmakers like Neil Breen or Anna Biller if I had a gun to my head), I think he certainly is the author of innovative camera, editing, and FX showcases that wouldn't exist without his cocaine-blistered mind.
I think the link works just fine. Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg is certainly considered classical music. It was written for a play, to support acted drama just as a film score does, and later a concert suite was made out of it.
Peer Gynt is actually a very good analogy. It is incidental music written for a play (rather than a movie... but there weren't any movies back then). In any case, it's music to support a drama. The complete score is usually around 90 minutes long (the "expanded album", there are several recordings out there) but there are also two suites that are often played in concert (as in the "30 minute Varèse album", many recordings out there), and there are probably two "main themes" from the score everybody knows (even if they don't know they know them), like "Morning Mood" and "In the Hall of the Mountain King". (Like "film themes" everybody knows.) All of the music is considered "classical music".
Loved the film and loved the album. Yes, like many, I have heard the sessions and extras but happily ordered this excellent official presentation. I do prefer the album edits for many of the key sequences but do enjoy a lot of the extras that were missed. Could this have been a 4 disc set? With the 3rd disc being alternates and edits etc. and the 4th the album? Perhaps. But I will keep the album and enjoy this new set.
Thank you Intrada team for your efforts and money to make this a reality! You are my Rock!
I will get this new album since I don't have it at all. Can you program the OST album from the Intrada tracks? I could listen to both with an open mind.
When it comes to crossfades, this new album doesn't have that much. Cues like Opening Titles / Naval Weapon Depot are mixed together as they were meant to be (such as it is heard in the film or in '96 album). The same goes for Mason Into Furnace/SEALs Tunnel/SEAL Attack (called "In the Tunnels" on '96 album), or Hammer Head (Pre-Launch + Missile Launch).
When it comes to Haircut Escape / The Chase!!, there are no crossfades, there's just a 10-seconds-long silence after the intro that was trimmed down for listening comfort.
To quote album producer's note on hans-zimmer.com : "The score presentation is pretty straightforward. Cues were assembled where it made sense, Nick & Marc Streitenfeld's assembly from 1996 was a blueprint to start with but it also had a few things that needed corrections."
Yes thanks, that's why I selected it. I could have gone with something else like Pelleas et Melisande by Sibelius, but I decided to go with something more well known. And I could have gone with Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream which is perhaps even more well known, but complete recordings of that are much more common because it's a shorter score than Peer Gynt.
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Me: I think the link works just fine. Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg is certainly considered classical music. It was written for a play, to support acted drama just as a film score does, and later a concert suite was made out of it. There are plenty of other examples of this in the classical music world, from Mendelssohn to Sibelius. Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker is certainly considered classical music, and that music was written to accompany the movements of ballet dancers. Tchaikovsky later turned it into a concert suite himself (and IMO left out most of the very best music, just as happens all the time with abbreviated film music albums). I honestly don't see how this is in ANY way different from Sergei Prokofiev adapting an Alexander Nevsky Cantata from his film score Alexander Nevsky (except in that case he thankfully left out far less significant music).
Thor: Problem with those examples is that they were written as absolute music FIRST, and then the ballet or stageplay was choreographed and fit to the music. I'm not aware of any examples where a composer was asked to write music after the fact, to the specific timings of the movements of the dancers or the duration of a scene, the way it is in film music. Maybe you know some.
Indeed I do, and I brought them up. Thor, with all due respect... you are simply demonstrating your ignorance about classical music, here. You've formed this idea about ballet which is quite simply NOT accurate. Maybe there are some ballet scores that are written that way, but most are not. (By bringing up The Nutcracker, I am of course talking about music originally written for ballet, not talking about examples where choreographers will select a pre-existing piece of music and come up with some original choreography to it.) Most ballets are a collaboration between the composer and choreographer, with give and take similar to a composer and a lyricist, and sometimes a piece will start 100% with choreography and have music written to it entirely after the fact, just like a composer sometimes starts with words and composes music to them rather than a lyricist making up lyrics to an already existing tune. It can go either way, or neither, and be a more organic ongoing conversation between the two. (This is also the case with opera, by the way. The composer -- unless he's someone like Wagner -- is rarely if ever the "sole author" of those either, because they very much constitute a collaborative theatrical art form encompassing many aspects besides just music.)
In the case specifically of The Nutcracker, choreographer Marius Petipa gave specific instructions to Tchaikovsky for how many bars he wanted for each section of a dance as well as the character and tempo. One might think of their collaboration as a similar process to a composer "spotting" a film with a director.
And when you wrote "Problem with those examples" you seem to have blanket IGNORED my very first example of original music written for plays, and focused only ballets. While Peer Gynt originally debuted with Grieg's music, do you seriously think the great playright Henrik Ibsen had Grieg compose music first, and then constructed the writing of his play around that music? I also mentioned Mendelssohn, whose incidental music to Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream is probably the most famous music written for a play in the classical repertoire.
Um, how shall I put this? William Shakespeare lived 1564-1616, while Felix Mendelssohn lived 1809-1847. The score in this case was written CENTURIES after the play it was written to accompany (an even more extreme example of what Carl Davis did so well with scoring silent films many decades later). The music (great music!) came entirely out of the play, unambiguously -- NOT written as "absolute music FIRST" as you claim about pre-film examples of dramatic incidental music.
Here are a couple 20th century examples where composers Alex North and Laurence Rosenthal (later better known for their film work) were hired to write original music for Death of a Salesman and Rashomon, respectively: http://www.kritzerland.com/salesman.htm
Are you going to contend that they wrote the music first and then a play was constructed around that music? Maybe you would, but similarly to Mendelssohn hundreds of years before, Alex North *also* composed original music for the Shakespeare plays Coriolanus and Richard III, excerpts of which were included on a Varese Sarabande album conducted by Cliff Eidelman.
Or heck, here's another interesting 20th century example -- Dmitri Shostakovich (my favorite Russian composer) composed original music for BOTH a theatrical production of King Lear AND a film adaptation! Someone even had the bright idea of combining the two on album:
Now do please explain to me how the composer's work for the stageplay was "absolute music" and his different work for the film adaptation was somehow not.
And when you wrote "Problem with those examples" you seem to have blanket IGNORED my very first example of original music written for plays, and focused only ballets. While Peer Gynt originally debuted with Grieg's music, do you seriously think the great playright Henrik Ibsen had Grieg compose music first, and then constructed the writing of his play around that music?
No, but last time I checked, Grieg wrote the music in his office, based upon the general ideas/content of the scenes outlaid in the story -- which were then used in the stageplay. He didn't actually sit in the auditorium with a stop watch (which probably didn't even exist at the time), to time his music specifically to on-stage happenings, editing and scene transitions. Same goes for ballet pieces. They're more or less 'absolute' pieces of music, even if they accompany drama. It makes all the difference in the world, because it's the "schizophrenic" nature of film music that makes it such a bad listen on album (if you don't do anything about it, that is), the very fact that it's composed for, and timed to, a specific, unalterable stream of film. It's "gebrauchsmusik".
As for my "ignorance" of classical music, I will freely admit I'm not up to your or Nicolai's level. But I maintain that adaptations of classical music from one form to another (whether it's for drama or not) is fundamentally different from adaptations of film music to album. Apples and oranges. It has more in common with adapting a book to film.
Yes thanks, that's why I selected it. I could have gone with something else like Pelleas et Melisande by Sibelius, but I decided to go with something more well known. And I could have gone with Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream which is perhaps even more well known, but complete recordings of that are much more common because it's a shorter score than Peer Gynt.
I originally considered throwing in Beethoven's EGMONT into the ring (because, well, Beethoven!), but I think all the mentioned examples already suffice.
No, but last time I checked, Grieg wrote the music in his office, based upon the general ideas/content of the scenes outlaid in the story -- which were then used in the stageplay.
Hmmm... sounds rather like what used to be common practice for film in some European countries, no? Writing music based on a script, rather than tailoring it specifically to picture timings? So is most Morricone "absolute music" (and deserving of a complete release) because it wasn't composed directly to picture, while most Goldsmith is not? (Is the finale of E.T. "absolute music" because Spielberg edited the film to the Williams piece, rather than have Williams slavishly match to already edited screen action?)
When a modern concert composer today like Mica Levi or Hildur Gudnadottir or Jonny Greenwood writes music for a Hollywood film, but not to picture... is that now "absolute music" to you and deserving of a complete release on album, somehow?
He didn't actually sit in the auditorium with a stop watch (which didn't even exist at the time), to time his music specifically to on-stage happenings, editing and scene transitions.
You don't think "In the Hall of the Mountain King" would be at least roughly timed on a scene happening on stage? You don't think a composer writing music for the stage might need to score say, a duel, and at least roughly time that to the fight choreography?
Same goes for ballet pieces. They're more or less 'absolute' pieces of music, even if they accompany drama.
I literally just used my own example of The Nutcracker to prove this is not the case. Many times the choreography comes first and the music comes second, similar to pre-existing lyrics being set to melody. And many times it's an active back-and-forth collaboration between choreographer and composer.
It makes all the difference in the world, because it's the "schizophrenic" nature of film music that makes it such a bad listen on album (if you don't do anything about it, that is), the very fact that it's composed for, and timed to, a specific, unalterable stream of film. It's "gebrauchsmusik".
HUH? Not all film music is schizophrenic. Is Rachel Portman's Never Let Me Go "schizophrenic"? Not to my ears. Georges Delerue, "schizophrenic" most of the time? Really? John Barry?
But even with a composer like Goldsmith who is very tied to what's happening on screen, beat by beat... it's simply not the case that most people agree with you that this makes music a bad listen on album. Practically every Goldsmith score I've heard I found to be a much better listen on album in complete form, too, un-"curated". But you already know you're in the minority with that opinion, among fans of this music.
And you know what? Ballet music can be schizophrenic! (Try Stravinsky or Bartok!) Heck, *actual* "absolute" classical music can be plenty schizophrenic! A symphony by Mahler or Shostakovich can transition from the sublime to the ridiculous in the blink of an eye, very similar to sudden "turns" in film music dictated by on-screen events.
Only someone substantially unfamiliar with Mahler or Shostakovich would claim otherwise.
As for my "ignorance" of classical music, I will freely admit I'm not up to your or Nicolai's level. But I maintain that adaptations of classical music from one form to another (whether it's for drama or not) is fundamentally different from adaptations of film music to album. Apples and oranges.
How *exactly* is Peer Gynt being adapted into a "concert suite" or Tchaikovsky cutting down the full Nutcracker ballet into the popular Nutcracker Suite concert work "apples and oranges" different from Prokofiev cutting down his Alexander Nevsky film score into his Alexander Nevsky "Cantata"?