A great article on the composing process

http://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/hans-zimmer-film-composer-inside-his-studio?s=mobile

Oblivion OST - Original Music by M83 Score Composed by Anthony Gonzalez and Joseph Trapenese

Oblivion - An Odd Blend

Found that this score helped make the film both surreal and grounded.  What are your thoughts?

Take a listen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRywL8RKIQE


Original Music by M83
Score Composed by Anthony Gonzalez and Joseph Trapenese

Hopeful Resurrection

I recently came upon an expanded version soundtrack for a movie that came out in 1994 that wasn't that popular to begin with; The Shadow. Seeing this makes me hopeful that other albums will come out with expanded film score so you can hear those tracks that aren't usually put on commercially available albums.  I often find that there is music in movies that is not included on something you can purchase whether it be CDs or mp3 downloads. Jerry Goldsmith's work on this album is a welcome edition and mayhap a sign of things to come.

To Boldly Go

Been watching a lot of the old Star Trek movies and enjoyed Into Darkness so I had to reflect on the music.  Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner were major players in the film franchises' score.  This article explains it well.  Not bad for an encyclopedia. Check it out!

List of Star Trek composers - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_composers_and_music#The_Original_Series

Review: Game of Thrones Soundtracks

Preview and purchase the Game of Thrones soundtracks and episodes at Itunes

Photo credit: Entertainment Weekly

Source ew.com

The first time I remember hearing Ramin Djawadi's score was on a film I very much looked forward to and thoroughly enjoyed: Iron Man.  The music didn't much impress me, most of it sounding like the contrived music preceding a professional wrestler's entrance into the arena.  Despite this, a few songs appealed to us Marvel reading, Nintendo playing fans, sounding like something out of a Capcom arcade game.

The next time was the remake of Clash of the Titans and I remembering being altogether more satisfied with this album.  The leitmotifs were rather simple, but catchy and did the film more justice than its visual direction did.  I don't know if I just liked Ralph Feinnes in the role or if it was Djawadi that made me love  Hades, god of the underworld, and I'm inclined to think the latter.  Tracks built up with a melodic intensity in ways reminiscent of the late, ever great Jerry Goldsmith. This work was better, some tracks more than others, than Iron Man was, but as an album, nothing to blow the hair back.

It was only when heard his compositions for HBO's Game of Thrones series did my appreciation for Djawadi skyrocket.  It's hard not to talk about how good I feel the series is. It's even harder to separate my appreciation of other facets of the show, it's dramatic narrative and acting to start, from my appreciation of what Djawadi set the GoT world to.

The theme song is catchy like some of his prior works, but also reflects the complexity that is the show's, and the novel series', intricate plot.  To me it almost sounds like someone is composing a medieval tapestry with violins and cellos and that people are at work conspiring.  And many tracks on both the first and second season albums have a stringed eloquence to them that adds feature film depth to television, something, in my opinion, that is very hard to achieve.

When watching a scene displaying the Red Priestess presiding over a seemingly dark ritual, I heard an extremely eerie and haunting melody almost chanted in the night air with her disciples.  The track is called "Warrior of Light" and its leitmotif seems to be the theme for Stannis Baratheon and the Lord of Light he and Melissandre stock their faith in.

"Warrior of Light" - starts off incredibly haunting and then turns heavier toward the end of the track.

  In tracks like "Don't Die With a Clean Sword" this eerie melody is made louder and thrust into battle, much the way Stannis' troops are to the Lannisters. The notes seem to powerfully invert things.

Speaking of Lannisters, I haven't been able to get "The Rains of Castamere" out of my head for weeks now.  It is called the Lannister Song and tells a somewhat sad story from what I can gather.  We can thank George R.R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, for the lyrics to the song and only wonder if he collaborated with Djawadi for the musical part of it.  Even if not, it is the theme for members of House Lannister and when the soldiers or "smallfolk" sing it, it makes me feel like I'm somewhere between high fantasy and historical reality.  It sounds like a royal anthem or drunken sea shanty, depending upon how you look at it and definitely takes you somewhere else.

And the score on the East side of the Narrow Sea is no less interesting.  It reflects the often quite different environments and cultures that are present in Essos with the Targarian side of the story.  When in D'othraki lands and with the horde there is a very tribal sound, but an eclectic one.  Again, I'm no musician, but at times it sounded like a fusion of African drumming, Peruvian flutes and with a Arabian tones all at the time time.  A melange of different cultural sounds, different from a more European Westeros, but no less regal.

Then you have tracks like "King in the North" that sort of convey a certain royal dignity and hope that only gets you further immersed in the events of the series.  Djawadi does a great job with it all, whether it be playful score behind "The Sword Dance" or the ominous and dreadful drumming and string-work in "Three Blasts". It's amazing how so much disparity, of character and setting, is so artfully mirrored in the series' score, and yet still retains a cohesion. Despite the diversity, all the tracks sound ancient and mystical.  Djawadi has made me a believer in dragons, white walkers and the Red God.  The show would simply not be as epic without his haunting and mystical contributions.

Did you like the Game of Thrones soundtrack or what music you hear in the series?  What are your thoughts on this or other Djawadi works?

Update 6/13/13

Djawadi did it again for the Season 3 soundtrack, now available for purchase.  Imagine the Unsullied marching and dragons flying to silence or the Red Wedding with the Rains of Castamere and you'll realize just how important orchestral score is to even a TV show.  Tracks to check out for sure "Dracarys", "White Walkers" and of course "Mhysa", a tribal reworking of Daenerys' leitmotif.

Update: 1/19/2016

Season 3 - Suggested Tracks:

         Dracarys

        Mhysa

Season 4 - Suggested Tracks

Let's Kill Some Crows

Thenns

The Real North

Season 5 - Suggested Tracks: 

A Dance With Dragons

                                   

The Dark Knights: Zimmer & Howard

 

To preview or purchase The Dark Knight trilogy movies or mp3s, got to Amazon

Photo Credit: http://eyemdope.com/?tag=the-dark-knight-trilogy

Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy has definitely earned a place in the canon of modern superhero movies.  Nolan's attention to complex narrative detail lends a realistic gravity to all his films, even ones involving the masked and caped.  His dark, yet direct visual style is greatly supported by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard through this intense series.

I remember watching Batman Begins and wondering if I was watching a superhero flick or a military/espionage thriller.  However minimalist at times, there was always a sense of a something being imminently revealed.  In the same way the viewer could feel like every frame of the film was somehow crucial, Zimmer and Howard audibly elicit a sense of awe and hope that comes as a result of the Caped Crusader's ethical austerity.  At once the score dances between a mission driven momentum and some dark primal honor.  

The hype of theatrical performances aside (even though to an extent they are warranted), The Dark Knight's score added another element to this consistently dark and driven soundtrack in much the same way the Joker character introduced anarchy to Gotham City, and to Batman's soul.  The opening shot of the movie provides the clearest example of what the composers imposed, the gradual sound of what to me sounded like a violin plugged into an amplifier with reverb on it.  Now, like I've stated in previous posts, I have no musical training beyond middle school general music, so I may be totally wrong on what this effect is, but nevertheless, it's eerie in the same way Ledger's portrayal is.  In fact, there was a sort of grunge/punk feel to much of the crazy clown's image and some of the music building dead-ended in electric guitar riffs.  I found this to be crude at first, but once I embraced the film's psychological texture, I began to appreciate it.  

 The Dark Knight Rises is definitely the biggest and boldest of the three soundtracks and in my opinion the best of them.  Zimmer and Howard continue their tradition of keeping a string driven, serious sounding score, lacking the big brass that we heard in Silvestri's work for The Avengers, which still impressive in its own right. But, at times, they got quite creative with the strings.  In tracks like "The Fire Rises" we hear something new and even more chaotic than oddly timed guitar riffs.  We hear the alternating strings unleash havoc like that of Bane; a sense that time is ticking out for us helplessly.  With "Gotham's Reckoning" and its recurring chanting and bells throughout other tracks, I detect a possible theme for the villain, which makes me very happy.  I really love different themes for different characters in movies, because they lend a sense of depth and culture. Still with tracks like "Why Do We Fall?" and "Rise" we're grounded in the emotion that is at the heart of any good heroic tale.

Zimmer has never disappointed me and neither has Howard.  From what I know of Howard's work, primarily album's like the OST for Falling Down, he was likely a big influence on the crime thriller sounding realism behind The Dark Knight Trilogy. Not that Hans Zimmer is any stranger to this, but I do feel that he's more diverse of composer, addressing a wide array of genres.  The fusion of these two provides this series with an musical ambiance that's just realistic enough to be believable, but epic enough to be the stuff of comic books.  

Continuity Problems

Imagine now, if you will, it’s 1980.  Three years ago you were blown away by a science fiction movie so epic and revolutionary that you could barely believe your eyes and ears.  The movie was Star Wars: A New Hope and you’re now sitting in a theater, eagerly awaiting the anticipated sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.  But as the gold opening credits fly into outer space you hear something different from the recognizable fanfare of the Star Wars theme.  What if John Williams only composed ANH, but not the other two films?  Would the experience be the same?  What if the ever classic themes of the Imperial March and Han and Leia never existed, but something else was heard in its place?  Would there be any musical connection to the film that started it all?  What I am trying to elicit is the culture that movie music provides and how it supports any film series by providing cohesion between sequels and depth in story.

One of my biggest pet peeves involving film score is when movie directors and producers decide to not keep the original composer on for a film sequel.  I feel this happens way too frequently these days and it is exceptionally disappointing when the first film in a series has a really impressive score attached to it.  I do understand that not everyone appreciates film score as much as we do, listening to it on our mp3 players and embracing it beyond the movie, and I’m also aware that budgetary and logistical concerns do play into the choosing of a composer for a movie. But to me it is just as important as having an actor reprise their role.  What is film score if not another actor in the movie, one that has a remarkable impact on the tone of the entire work.

One movie’s whose score I did not initially appreciate was the remake of Clash of the Titans (2010), but over time I grew to enjoy it.  It definitely had thematic elements in it that greatly added to the tone of the film.  Tracks like “You Can’t Hide From Hades” build from soft to loud in such a way you’d think the god of the underworld was really conjuring his presence among you.  Another thing that struck me was how the main theme of the movie was altered based on what was going on in the film, deepened and made harsh when enemies were faced, and made triumphant upon heroic actions; hardly a new notion, but very well done for this movie.   Though I’m still a great fan of the original Clash of the Titans, the film score definitely supplemented the visuals in the experience. 

The sequel, Wrath of the Titans (2012), was visually enjoyable with a plot that was fairly interesting, but one thing it was lacking was musical continuity.  The same way it was good for us to see Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and Sam Worthington reprise their roles, I watched it hoping for musical themes to be reprised as part of the saga.  To my utter disappointment, it was not Ramin Djawadi who composed the score, as in the first film.  That’s not to say Javier Navarrete didn’t do a good job on Wrath, but it was simply lacking something that may have helped make it epic beyond the plot and numerous special effects.

Unlike Star Wars, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was planned to be released as a trilogy and was not simply banking on the success of one film, before filming the others.  In this vein, Jackson signed on Howard Shore to score the films.  As a result, the trilogy was jam packed with recurring themes and a musical continuity that made the films a sort of mythology, even apart from Tolkien’s canonical novels.  It simply would be a different experience if there were different composers for each film.

Some of my favorite movies are ones that stem from other media such as comic books and one franchise I came to love is X-Men.  Of all the X-men and X-men related movies, not one of them had shared a composer, even the first two films which were both directed by Bryan Singer. As much as I did enjoy the films, I can’t help but wonder why Singer did not have the same composer attached to both films.  After all, Hugh Jackman, Anna Paquin and Patrick Stewart (among others) came back to portray their characters.  So why not make the movie comprehensively continuous?  The same is true for both Iron Man movies, and because of this, I found the movies lacking something that could’ve made them greater and ultimately more entertaining.

So what are your thoughts? Does the lack of composer continuity annoy you as well? Or do you like the musical variety?