Happy Equinox

I love autumn. Now it's here.

It's great living in a part of the country where you have no idea what kind of weather will be bestowed upon you for the Autumnal Equinox. It could be 68° (1997), 77° (1998), 87° (2000), 78° (2004) or 90° as is forecasted today.

I love the Midwest.

First Contact

My film music odyssey began in January 1994. It started with a John Williams obsession but within a few years it was Jerry Goldsmith's music that caught my fancy more than any other. I don't remember the first Goldsmith score I bought but it was a beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.

Today's Film Score Friday is an all Goldsmith affair.

Rio Conchos (1964) - Jerry Goldsmith had the good sense to reclaim the Western from Copland imitators in this terrific little score.

Planet of the Apes (1968, Oscar nominee) - Mmmmm...12-tone + Stravinsky + Bartok. Yummy.

Patton (1970, Oscar nominee) - This might be one of the most intellectual scores ever written.

The Wind and the Lion (1975, Oscar nominee) - Jerry goes swashbuckling.

The Omen (1976, Oscar Winner) - Jerry dances with the devil in the pale moonlight. This movie is nearly unwatchable without his score.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979, Oscar nominee) - The subtitle of ST:TMP should have been: Jerry Goldsmith Saves Our Crappy Boring Film.

Legend (1985) - Damn you, Sid Sheinberg for taking Jerry's score off the American release of the film.

Total Recall (1990) - A great score, one Jerry was really proud of. He swore off action movies after this because there was almost no critical response to his score.

First Knight (1995) - According to an interview done in the mid-90s, one of Jerry's personal favourites among his scores. Kind of strange since the movie stinks. Good music from top to bottom though.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996) - The Pikey's list made me realise I hadn't listened to this in a while so I pulled it out. I almost forgot how good it is.

Air Force One (1997) - Lean. Muscular. Hyperpatriotic. I'm glad Jerry only swore off action films for the time he did.

The 13th Warrior (1999) - I have nothing to add to the gagillion times I've written about this before. It's just awesome and great composition to boot!

This gives me an idea for another post...

10/10

So I got to thinking last week during Film Score Friday. I know each of us has delivered our all-time favourite scores, our all-time favourite cues, etc. but what about narrowing it down? What about making it harder?

We haven't talked film music in a while so here are my nominees for 10 best/most interesting cues of the last 10 years in no particular order.

• "Toccata and Dreamscapes" - Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Elliot Goldenthal, 2001). Combine Penderecki, Ligeti, late-Romanticism and a former blues pianist and mix vigorously.


• "Main Title" - Signs (James Newton Howard, 2002). Three pitches. Three rhythmic durations. Build your entire score on that. Go!


• "Lighting of the Beacons" - The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Howard Shore, 2003). Few music/cinema moments are as satisfying as this. Ever.


• "Glamdring" - The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Howard Shore, 2002). It seems unfair to use two examples from LOTR, but I don't really care because it's my list. What captures it for me is the part where Gandalf falls until the end of the cue. Genius. Especially the long shot of Gandalf and the Balrog falling together into the lake. Cinematic beauty.


• "Trinity Infinity" - The Matrix (Don Davis, 1999). I know. I could've picked "Mona Lisa Overdrive" or "Neodämmerung" or even "Ontological Shock". But "Trinity Infinity" set the tone beautifully for all three scores and their films. It was one of those beautiful rare occasions of something unheard of in film that is used not as a gimmick but as an honest-to-dog structural tool.


• "Dead Already" - American Beauty (Thomas Newman, 1999). This is too different and quirky not to include. While it's a great score it has inspired a host of imitators which, I guess, is the sign of success.


• "The Battle" - Gladiator (Hans Zimmer, 2000). This is where Pirates of the Caribbean really began. This might be the first Zimmer blood-and-thunder cue in which you don't get bored or wonder where the hell he's going with it. Nope. It actually sustains interest from beginning to end.


• "Buckbeak's Flight" - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (John Williams, 2004). Don't ask me. I don't know why. I just love this cue. I fell in love with it the very first time I heard it. I guess it has something to do with the way it almost too perfectly captures both the wonder, excitement, melancholy and sadness of Harry's existence.


• "The Fire Dragon" - The 13th Warrior (Jerry Goldsmith, 1999). A cue built from a single idea that gradually increases in intensity, is completely relentless, and never loses interest. Awesome.
  
• "Journey to the Line" - The Thin Red Line (Hans Zimmer, 1999). This is the single greatest piece of music Hans Zimmer has ever written. Comparisons to Barber's Adagio aside it just seems so audaciously simple. And as we have learned in recent months, audacious and simple aren't necessarily bad things.

Now it's your turn. Go!

Windfall, Part I

I got the call last week that two works of mine are going to be performed at a new music festival the first weekend of November. The festival is the 20th anniversary of the Iowa Composers Forum, to which I have belonged for about a year-and-a-half now. So the first weekend of November we'll be heading to the tropical paradise of Davenport, Iowa.

So what are they performing? I'm glad you asked.

The first is Angels and Demons for violin alone. This will be its first performance. I hope it's as interesting as I think it is. It originally began life as a work for violin and chamber ensemble. Ultimately I was forced to revise the concept heavily and I took about 5 bars from the original piece and used that as the starting point for the solo. The piece is probably best described as a tripartite (slow-fast-slow in this case) fantasia. It is inspired quite a lot by Polish postmodernists like Henryk Gorecki and, to a lesser extent, Krzyzstof Penderecki. The whole piece stems from a single four-note chord that, so I've been told, is really difficult to play. Other than that I prefer to riff on a quote by Sir Harrison Birtwistle: "I went to the piano and found a chord that I liked. Then I learned to make more of it". Aren't crotchety British composers are great?

The second piece is a wind ensemble piece that I wrote in graduate school. I was writing a paper comparing and contrasting the postminimalist techniques Don Davis used in his score for The Matrix with the early orchestral works of John Adams - Grand Pianola Music, Harmonium, Harmonielehre (I'll save you the suspense, there are a lot of similarities, but Davis uses it to imbue the music with subtextual meaning). So I did a lot of listening and studying of Adams' works and transcribing bits of The Matrix that seemed most representative of the score as a whole.

It was during this time that the president of the Phi Mu Alpha chapter at my alma mater called and asked if I would like to contribute a piece to a concert they were putting together. Sure, why not? That was March 31st. 13 days later, after much hemming and hawing about how little time they'd given me, May Music was born and I conducted the premiere on May 3, 2003. Later I revised the piece to its present form (making the woodwind parts more noodly mostly). It's not a minimalist piece. It utilises minimalist techniques. That's it. Because it also has elements of rock, jazz, film music and anything else I could think of whirled together like some sort of postmodern cocktail. To this day I still think it's one of the best things I've written. At any rate I'm pretty excited and moderately nervous because this will be its fourth performance but the first in which I haven't a) been conducting or b) had an office down the hall where the conductor could ask questions about the piece.