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He truly is the most mysterious of modern film composers. He scored a Best Picture nominee (Children of a Lesser God) and a box-office blockbuster (The Santa Clause) but has been off the Hollywood radar for years. His style is very similar to what Thomas Newman would develop, he and Newman (I believe) were in a band together, and he collaborated with Newman's brother David on the score to the original Tim Burton short Frankenweenie. His later scores like Liberty Stands Still and Straight Into Darkness tended to be unconventional and unmelodic. Could it be something as simple as that writing traditional scores for Hollywood movies did not interest him anymore?
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Aspen Extreme - Complete
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Does anyone have any details about this composer beyond the surface info already available? He's done many scores, several of which to me are quite haunting and whose orchestrations are done by the great John Neufeld. Curious if Convertino is strictly a synth man and if Neufeld really does the magic....Also in this day of the internet no pics of Convertino except an early one. The mystery continues....... The Santa Clause was orchestral, not synth.
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Posted: |
Jun 4, 2020 - 11:49 AM
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By: |
thx99
(Member)
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Didn't he become a painter, or photographer, or did I dream that? If anyone knows, my friend thx99 will know. Doug? A Home of Our Own - COMPLETE!!! Oh... I know nothing of his current whereabouts, unfortunately. Back in March 2012, his score for Wake Wood was announced as a release from Perseverance Records, but it never materialized. "22 tracks and a running time of roughly 70 minutes". Here's the announcement complete with three audio clips: https://web.archive.org/web/20120413173153/http://www.perseverancerecords.com/ He was also set for his film directorial debut with Too Cool circa 2011/2012, starring Evan Rachel Wood, but again, I don't think that ever came to be. He was also doing some screenwriting about that time. He's an accomplished photographer, and his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento, Italy back in July 2002.
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Given what composers from Desplat (on Black Widow) to Romer (No Time to Die) face these days, I can hardly fault a composer for wanting to leave Hollywood, especially if they have other professional and creative options like teaching and photography.
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Does anyone have any details about this composer beyond the surface info already available? He's done many scores, several of which to me are quite haunting and whose orchestrations are done by the great John Neufeld. Curious if Convertino is strictly a synth man and if Neufeld really does the magic....Also in this day of the internet no pics of Convertino except an early one. The mystery continues....... The Santa Clause was orchestral, not synth. By asking if he was strictly a “synth man” doesn't imply that the final score was was therefore synth. What I was saying was that someone else (Orchestrator) translated, arranged and orchestrated his synth demo score into performable parts for a real symphony orchestra. Ah okay that makes sense.
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James Horner caused a stir in 1992 when he revealed Mr. Convertino does not write music or orchestrate his music, he basically comes up with ideas on a synth and has others put it all together and sound nice. Hmmm interesting...not quite ghost writing. I guess as long as he's not pulling a James Patterson where he scribbles a few words on a napkin and passes it off to some intern to flesh out in novel form, it's okay. I feel like there are quite a few composers who did this at one time or another--Elfman and Bartek or Arnold and Dodd come to mind--one is the idea man and the name, the other is the classically trained workhorse who has to make sense of the sketches and scribbles so the copyists can distribute a coherent score to the players.
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There's a term in animation called "inbetweeners" (not to be confused with the British teen sex comedy), those artists who create the majority of the drawings/cels which go in between the key frames created by the principal animators. Every time I see a score today credited with an A-list composer and a lesser known one, I tend to think of the second composer as an "inbetweener." The A-lister probably writes the principal themes and cues and determines the overall shape of the score, while the second composer does more of the grunt work. I could be wrong, but it seems plausible.
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Didn't he become a painter, or photographer, or did I dream that? If anyone knows, my friend thx99 will know. Doug? A Home of Our Own - COMPLETE!!! Oh... I know nothing of his current whereabouts, unfortunately. Back in March 2012, his score for Wake Wood was announced as a release from Perseverance Records, but it never materialized. "22 tracks and a running time of roughly 70 minutes". Here's the announcement complete with three audio clips: https://web.archive.org/web/20120413173153/http://www.perseverancerecords.com/ He was also set for his film directorial debut with Too Cool circa 2011/2012, starring Evan Rachel Wood, but again, I don't think that ever came to be. He was also doing some screenwriting about that time. He's an accomplished photographer, and his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Trento, Italy back in July 2002. He and Robin, the owner of Perseverance Records had some kind of falling out which is one of the reasons why this never came out along with J. Peter Robinson over the Charmed soundtrack that La-La Land released the same year. That's another story that he told me about personally in passing years ago. Convertino has always been a solid composer and has done alot of great scores like Guarding Tess, The Waterdance, Bull Durham and Wrestling Ernest Hemingway. His last score for a film that I can remember was the Liberty Stands Still back in 2002 starring Wesley Snipes and Linda Fiorentino, which was a copycat thriller much like Joel Schumacher's much superior Phone Booth, which featured an electronic score which was a bit unusual since he usually wrote orchestrial scores starting with Children of A Lesser God (with the assistance of the late Shirley Walker) with the underrated, The Hidden that Varese released being an exception. He has a bunch of unreleased scores I'd love to see a label release like The Doctor and Aspen Extreme, which is a powerhouse. Since they're Disney owned, I'd guess Intrada would have at shot to release them.
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Regardless of who may or may not have done the music, we certainly don't have enough Convertino on CD.
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