Hi Mike,

i listened a few months ago to your score for the "forbidden warrior" movie.

What a really pleasant music.

I liked the dark moments;

any strings and brass parts too a lot.

But oh my god the sound...

oh the recording...

the recording and mixing are so impressive.

I ' ve recently upgraded my monitors and converters... i am speechless.

It sounds so smooth,

the depth, the wideness... oh the precision of each instrument in the stereo field.

warm yet crystal clear.

It sounds like the orchestra is supended in the air like " the audio hanging gardens of Babylone".

Who contributed as sonic architects and which tools they used to create this beauty ?

Best regards.

Laurent

@mverta said:

About John Williams: he is the reason I'm a composer. His melodic sensibilites are remarkable, but you also don't have to dig very deep to hear exactly where he learned his "thing," and that's what I study. There are tons of pieces to mention, but pieces like William Schuman's Symphony No. 3 or Prokovief's Scythian Suite, or Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antartica are just dripping with higher-order manifestations of most of his favorite orchestral sounds.  I study film scores for the thing that makes them truly unique: their structure.  For the orchestrational study, I listen to repertoire pieces.  And of course, not just listen, but absorb, study, transcribe, re-arrange, re-harmonize, etc.  

In the end though, I'm just a typical Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrator, with French-School efficiency tendencies - the "less is more" philosophy.  I enjoy finding that full, rich sound that somehow looks deceptively simple on paper.  "That's IT?"   And more importantly, good orchestration is just part of the deal - I prefer to focus on what I'm doing harmonically and melodically.  Without those, it's just a lot of forgettable, pretty noise.

Hi Mike, 

just to let you know that I have researched and found so far the score to Vaughn Willaims Sinfonia Antartica and I've also downloaded the music from my membership with the emusic site. Fantastic Orchestration! Wow! I'm also soon to download the Schuman Symphony no 3 and also the Scythian Suite by Prokofiev from emusic also.

In listening to the Antartica symph, I was struck by the immense imagination and sheer power of the orchestration. Excellent model for all the types of orchestration where you want big sweeping melodies and yet the contrasting delicacy he achieves in one particular area of the Scherzo. I did procure the score, and I will see if I can do this for the others. I also came across the Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances score in our Local State Library also, and downloaded from emusic the tracks. These more recent 20th century scores have opened my eyes to the wealth of orchestration techniques these composers came up with, and there just seems to be a virtual treasure trove of orchestral technique ideas in these.

Thanks again for the mention of these composers Mike. If you have anymore works you know of - please mention them. You have started me on a very interesting  journey  here.

best,

Steve.

I agree the Vaughn Williams Antarctica is a great orchestration.  It has been imitated by many film composers.  Of course it originally was a film score, for Scott of the Antarctic.  He later made it into the 7th symphony.  Vaughn Williams in general is responsible - along with Holst in The Planets - for most of modern film orchestration, along with Rachmaninoff in the piano concerti and Isle of the Dead (which you really ought to check out if you haven't already - incredible orchestration as well as themes) for the more espressivo styles.  John Williams is probably most influenced by Vaughn Williams, Holst, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Richard Strauss and Stravinsky (a couple passages from Star Wars are very similar to The Rite of Spring and the Lois Lane theme from Superman is a re-write of the main theme of Strauss' first tone poem.)   That is not to say he is a plagiarist like James Horner, but rather he is so knowledgable that he is highly influenced by a lot of great music.  But his own styule is unmistakeable, even if he is influenced by many composers which he is familiar with.

Anyway I am a big Vaughn Williams fan also.  You ought to check out the Ninth Symphony, which has a more subtle but beautiful orchestration that includes three saxes and a flugelhorn, the 8th which has a second movement that is winds alone and third movement that is strings alone and a fourth movement with a huge compliment of percussion (including as Vaughn Williams said "all the 'phones and 'spiels known to the composer"), the 6th which has a quiet last movement that rivals Holst's Neptune for its eerie, metaphysical quality, and above all, the awesome Symphony in f minor, which is his most dissonant work and extremely powerful.  That last movement uses a variation of B-A-C-H for the main theme, but transformed into a violent frenzy of dissonance.

Thinking about other composers who are influential on filmmusic is interesting - you ought to listen to Varese's Ameriques.  It is a very powerful dissonant piece that is behind a lot of "suspense" or "horror" type film music.   I agree with mverta about William Schumann being a very interesting composer.  But also, from another era entirely, Robert Schumann with his intensely romantic symphonies has been extremely influential on film scoring. The egregious plagiarist I mentioned, the vastly overrated James Horner, stole directly his main theme for "Willow" from Schumann's 3rd symphony first movement.  But that is another story...

You know a composer you might love?  Sylvester Revueltas.  A mexican composer who is not well known, but his Sensamaya, a violent and dissonant work in 7/8, is probably in the running for single greatest orchestration of the latter 20th century.  Certainly one of the best.  And as usual, highly influential among film composers.

.

 Yes, Thanks William for the info.  I'm now getting into the emusic site and look some of these things up.

Thanks again, 

Steve.

 By the way, I also came across a link to  Marco Beltrami'swebsite, and he also gives free pdf files to some of his orchestrations, with also mp3's to these also.

The link is:

http://www.marcobeltrami.com/wocms.php?siteID=7&lngID=1

Steve.

Yes, a very spectacular piece besides Sensemaya by Revueltas is actually a film score "Night of the Mayas."    I agree on the Strauss Four Last Songs - that is an amazing orchestration and beautiful piece, and in fact, as it was composed late iin Strauss's life, it seems to be far less pretentious than some of his earlier huge orchestrations like Alpensinfonie, as if he was not trying to prove anything  or outdo anyone anymore.   Somewhat similar to Mahler in the 9th symphony writing (almost) in a "chamber" style instead of his usual gigantic forces.  Though the orchestration is actually fairly large, it is not used in a massive way.

 Mike, thanks for the suggested listening list. I didn't know about the Scythian Suite, that kicks ass! :) 

Wow! That's all I can say!

Any way you can pitch this to the music producer of Star Trek 11 and quite possibly get this on as the main title for the movie?

Or,better yet, work up an entirely new theme, pre '60's version, on how Alexander Courage MIGHT have approached it, if  HE had been asked to do the new main title.

At any rate,it's examples like this that go a long ways towards shutting up those people who insist that only a "real" orchestra is best and couldn't tell the difference between Giga and the LSO if you held a gun to their head. I get soooo tired of these "elitests" because they flat-out assume that every composer has an orchestra at their disposal,which certainly isn't true.

Myself,I think it takes a fair amount of skill to pass a virtual orchestra as real. It's kind of like visual effects if you think about it.

@skyy38 said:

At any rate,it's examples like this that go a long ways towards shutting up those people who insist that only a "real" orchestra is best and couldn't tell the difference between Giga and the LSO if you held a gun to their head.

I get soooo tired of these "elitests" because they flat-out assume that every composer has an orchestra at their disposal, which certainly isn't true.

... the inflatable ones are even better then the sampled ones

Angelo has made the single most important statement yet on this thread.  I have always hated flat-out elitists.  I always strive to be a fully inflated elitist.

@William said:

Angelo has made the single most important statement yet on this thread.  I have always hated flat-out elitists.  I always strive to be a fully inflated elitist.

.... also, Mike has to find someone who accepts the challenge to write a scenario for this fabulous music

"Mike has to find someone who accepts the challenge to write a scenario for this fabulous music"  - Angelo Clematide

In Hollywood it works the other way around. 

...or doesn't work, judging by the filmscores of late.

_Mike

Yes, that is for certain.

I knew, when I did the original version of this theme, that it was likely not going to be appropriate in flavor for the "hip, young" Star Trek that JJ Abrams was planning, but it was for fun, and it was my favorite style.

Well yesterday I saw 15 minutes of the new Star Trek, and yeah, it's basically like Fast and the Furious.  So last night I did another version: The Hollywood Hack version.  Hans Zimmer, watch out.  I don't expect you to like it anymore than I do, but I had to get it out of my system.

[url="http://www.mikeverta.com/Posts/Star_Trek_v2.mp3"]Star Trek Theme v2 - The Hollywood Hack Edition[/url]

_Mike

IKnowIKnowIKnowIKnow...  though I don't really feel better.  I feel a little bit dirty.

... Now, as for TDK: Not having composed enough?  Meaning what; they recycled too much music from the first film, or a ghostwriting thing?

_Mike