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Oh, that would have been a very nice cover!
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I have a very distinct memory of that LP with the original cover displayed at our local music megastore Peaches in 1978.
I haughtily skpped it even though it had Jerry's name dang clear on the cover. "Disaster movie!" I sniffed and went to another rack.
What a fool I was.
Happily found it on cassette a decade later, and then both version on CD of course.
Great Jerry G tribute today! Thanks for posting.
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Yes, a double post.
Why?
That's a complicated story. It begins a year ago. But let's skip that.
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If this ends up being the very last “Expanded Archival Edition” due to the current difficulty with Warner Bros., it was an amazing final entry in the series.
Yavar
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I just listened through to the LLL film presentation and now on to the album.
So of course I went back through this thread to read what I said about the fundamental silliness of the project, even though brilliantly done. (And I mean the score, not just the drecky film.)
And though I can't retract what I went on and on about earlier, I do have to say this remains a favorite listen.
I have to admit Goldsmith worked in the evocation of bees brilliantly. What I'm paying attention to now is how he does this primarily through both trills and triplets. With different effects. I'll point it out in the OST album main title version, because it incapsulates both.
Trills go back and forth between two notes very fast, and often here up and down a minor second, which gives you as well a vertiginous feeling almost of hovering like, well, bees. Great example around :20 in the main title. The trills show up all over the orchestra at different points - strings, brass, woodwind - foreground and background.
The triplets (three quick notes to a single beat, like a machine gun burst) are all on the same note, traveling up and down, again I think mostly minor seconds. Listen at 3:20 in the same track, the muted trumpets in the background.. So not the buzz sound you get from a trill but still sounds like bees. Also featured at the beginning of The Bees Arrive.
The close interval of the minor second throughout (the two closest notes in the equal temperamant scale) is the closest you can come to imitating buzzing in music without using microtones, which he doesn't (and we won't get into that now). Plus lots of brass mutes which make a thinner buzzing sound. The strings can do it more easily with bowing, but I'll skip that detail too.
And he does other things too, like the up-sweeping horns that open The Bee's Picnic (and heard both up and down in Bees Inside), and later see-sawing pairs of 32nd notes near the end of the same picnic.
These familiar orchestration techniques are building blocks for these effects. And the music is not defined by the bee sound, but in some cases driven by it, in others more like a color or rhythmic feature added to the music, similar to how he uses electronics. Interesting that he does not rely at all on electronics for the bee effect in this score.
For all I know, Yavar and company may have covered all this in their podcast episode - sorry, haven't listened, I have too many podcasts to listen to for work.
I get why people think this is such an inordinately strong score. Goldsmith pulled out all the stops to try to give this tedious and inert film some punch and thrill and action and pathos. It's a tour de force from a master of this kind of thing - and also the musicians and orchestrators etc. he's working with.
And it's a lot of fun! (But it's still kinda silly, and that's ok.)
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Yes, a double post.
Why?
That's a complicated story. It begins a year ago. But let's skip that.
LOL!
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