@bluejay said:

I know Horner gets a bad rep around here...

What's wrong with Horner?  I don't know about his present work but I think his score to Glory is still one of the best scores to a war movie ever composed.  The angelic boys choir, which soars above the ensemble, perpetuates the yearning of freedom the former slave soldiers felt and the sacrifice of life and innocence to earn that freedom.  I enjoyed the score more than I did the movie.  

The movie kind of pissed me off because it was historically inaccurate.  In reality, Col. Shaw was a whining mama's boy who had no desire to lead a regiment of black soldiers during the American Civil War because he knew that they would never be used in combat, only as laborers.  Upon constant whining to his parents, who were close personal friends to President Lincoln, did he finally get his way.  But, this is a thread for another forum.

@bluejay said:

 How about Krull?

I know Horner gets a bad rep around here but at least that's him at his most fun and exciting (and with the LSO!) and Krull is about as bad a movie as could be made.

It is fun and exciting, until you hear each of the things he stole deliberately.  That is the problem with Horner - the calculating plagiarism.  It is not influence such as John Williams' many influences within his own originality.  With Horner it is different, and out and out thievery.  And he did this repeatedly.  The fact he has the LSO to record his plagiarisms makes it worse and very depressing to me. 

I don't understand how you can continue to love somebody who does this.  Is this what you do?  To get a musical idea for a film score just listen to a classical symphony.  There's your theme.  The dumbells in the audience will never know because it is from classical music?  Well guess what Horner - I know.  Every time.  I sat in movie theaters hearing to my amazement one stolen theme after another, including actual stolen uncredited orchestrations along with the themes! 

One other thing on Horner - he is an example of the REVERSE of this thread mentioned earlier - bad music for great films.  The example I am thinking of right now is Wrath of Khan.  I recently wanted to see that again for the great story, the best acting ever by Shatner and Nimoy, great FX - but then stopped when I remembered the totally sucking incredibly trite score by Horner, with endlessly repeated augmented arpeggios in the violins signifying "OUTER SPACE" and the evil Khan motif stolen - as usual  - directly from Prokofiev's score to "Alexander Nevsky."

Hahah - I think the Wrath of Khan is a great film within that genre. Ricardo Montalban was great in that and interestingly - it would have been his birthday today. The music in that film is great and you of course know by now Bill that I never comment on James Horner for musical masonic reasons. [:P]

The score for Glory was stolen, I knew that even as a teenager although memory doesn't serve me with the particular source; I think it might have been Carmina Burana, don't quote me, but I certainly remember thinking then how derived it was. Perhaps it was the director's adherence to the temporary track, who knows...

The Wrath of Khan music may be what it is, but I was always impressed with the tutti cue where the two ships are confronting each other in orbit of that planet (Seti A V?).

Horner is a grand larcenist but his score to Aliens - in my opinion his best of the ones I know, is homogeneous and exemplary! Another good job he did was the whimsical, minimal score to one of the best light films ever, Sneakers.

@Errikos said:

The score for Glory was stolen, I knew that even as a teenager although memory doesn't serve me with the particular source; I think it might have been Carmina Burana, don't quote me, but I certainly remember thinking then how derived it was. Perhaps it was the director's adherence to the temporary track, who knows...

 

I believe you're reffering to the attack on Fort Wagner theme which, I'll grant you, does bare some similarities to, not Orff's Carmina Burana (I don't know where people came up with that) but more to that "Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tails or tells" or something (I can never remember the name of that piece) by the British composer Ralph V. Williams.  So goes the Horner debate.  To me, it sounds more like a strong influence rather than an out right rip off.

At least I didn't mention Titanic.

After a brief Google search the name of the piece is Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis,  by Ralph Vaughan Williams and I mean it resembles other portions of the Glory score not just the storming of Fort Wagner Theme.  Let me be clear on that.  I still don't see the connection between Storming Fort Wagner Theme and Carmina Burana.  I'll dig out both works and compare them again.

Why all the fuss? I said I don't exactly recall Horner's source for his Glory soundtrack... Only that I vividly remember thinking it was derivative.

No fuss Errikos.  More like a gentleman's disagreement?  You also said that Horner's Glory score was "Stolen."  To my ears, the score is more residual to other works rather than a derivative and if being residual to other works is a crime then why stop at Horner.

Whether Horner is stealing from others or "paying homage" to others seems to be the source of heated debate amongst his peers.  I can't really comment on that because, as I said before, I don't know about his present day work.  Since Apollo 13, I haven't been keeping abreast of the latest Horner developments as I find his post Apollo 13 body of work to be innocuous and rather bland. 

But then again, maybe I'm right.

I myself have stopped following Horner's offerings long before the Titanic since I didn't deem him worth checking out. I remember thinking as a teenager when I first encountered him that he was very influenced (at best...) by Goldsmith only without his melodic flair, or wonderful dramatic instinct. The soundtracks that have vaguely remained in my memory in a semi-positive fashion are Brainstorm, Cocoon, An American Tail, Aliens, Sneakers. But seriously, who cares... The only really positive thing I can say about him in my opinion, it is that even he has/d more 'character' than the golden boys of today (not the few remaining from the old guard still working)... I swear besides technique, no one I can think of comes even close to eliciting an emotional response in me, scary!! (the handful of exceptions I can come up with are not enough to mitigate for over a decade of soundtrack indigence...)

 Yes, J. S. Bach is a truly great composer.

@William said:

 Yes, J. S. Bach is a truly great composer.

Yes indeed. Unfortunately, many writers that are seduced by film scoring today have either forgotten or are not capable of understanding how great this composer still is. Counterpoint and contrapuntalism in music should be an essential ingredient - NOT block chords followed by an excuse for a melodic phrase - all covered up by clever clever orchestration. Rubbish.

Yes- the piano came about because the harpsichord indeed has no dynamics - but I don't really like Bach on the piano for some reason. It is not written for the piano obviously - it is written for an instrument that plucks - not hammers!

@William said:

 Yes, J. S. Bach is a truly great composer.

I agree.

Now, if only he would come up with some new gigs...  At least another Brandenburg.

@PaulR said:

Yes- the piano came about because the harpsichord indeed has no dynamics - but I don't really like Bach on the piano for some reason. It is not written for the piano obviously - it is written for an instrument that plucks - not hammers!

If my music history serves me right.  Bach actually didn't like the piano either, at least at first.  In fact I think he said that it wasn't dynamic enough.  I could be wrong on that.

Your history may be better than mine in that case because my memory may be shot - but my recollection is that the first piano as such came about in 1749 and Bach tried it. This is only one year before Bach died - so I don't know anymore off hand. But todays pianos are entirely different things. Bach played organs and used a clav for writing his weekly cantatas etc etc. - not just the harpsichord - which is an instrument for the virtuoso player and built for speed apart from anything else.

@PaulR said:

Unfortunately, many writers that are seduced by film scoring today have either forgotten or are not capable of understanding how great this composer still is. Counterpoint and contrapuntalism in music should be an essential ingredient - NOT block chords followed by an excuse for a melodic phrase - all covered up by clever clever orchestration. Rubbish.

Yes, the use of counterpoint by Bach has got to be the greatest ever in music history.  If you listen for example to his chorales, each part is a perfect line, and there are no accompaniment chords whatsoever.  It is purely horizontal music that just happens to form perfectly the harmony - - -  an ideal of music.   Some the chorales also represent the absolute simplest combined with the best musical ideas.  To achieve utter simplicity with greatness of ideas is the hardest thing to do and Bach did it over and over again.  Though his fugues also represent the most complex work  ever conceived intuitively by a musical brain (as opposed to intellectual contrivances of many later composers). It would be very easy to make the case that Bach is the greatest musician and composer who ever lived. Mozart had tremendous facility and overall consistency  but not a tenth of the intelligence of Bach.   Beethoven would be the only other composer in the same class, especially considering the symphonies and the late string quartets.  But the sheer amount of tremendous work by Bach - chamber, cantata, vocal, keyboard, organ, orchestral - is the most startling thing.  They are now selling a CD collection of EVERY WORK by Bach in a single box - 155 CDs.  This blows me away.  We think the Beatles are so astounding today, with their dozen or so albums of simple little songs. Compare that to the titanic genius of this  master! 

o.k., I'll settle down now.

@William said:

 It would be very easy to make the case that Bach is the greatest musician and composer who ever lived. 

Yes - very very easy.

But of course you then get into genres and styles. Basically, more intelligent and studied music theorists and historians than I would say that all music is a sort of continuation of what goes before. Ergo, Mozart takes elements of Bach - Beethoven takes elements of Mozart, Haydn and Bach and so on and so forth.

It's also worth remembering that Bach did not invent the Baroque style - he and Handel were just complete masters of it in many different ways. One, seemingly not driven solely through the constraints of payment with an enormous bias toward so-called sacred composition - the other far more commercial in his outlook and certainly more than capable of writing sacred music for as much money as he could get. Either way - they were both 'true' geniuses.

So we now go from 300 years ago to today. Jaded people could be forgiven in not necessarily seeing that much in the way of any improvement.

Well, Bach had many opportunities to compose not exactly "commercial" music, but music that did support him, for example with the chuches where he was in charge of music. The cantatas were a "gig" in that he had to do one for each service.  So he wrote a ton of cantatas.

Handel seemed like quite a character, ending up as a big shot in England and writing for just about everything conceivable.  The most insane thing he wrote has got to be the original Fireworks Music, which was scored for 9 Trumpets, 9 Horns, Timpani, 12 Bassoons and 24 Oboes, all of which were listed as "Warlike Instruments."  

 All right, now that I diverted the intensive discussion of James (I"ll steal anything that moves!) Horner with Bach and Handel I feel much better...

Perhaps the greatest of all these scores for a bad movie is one I have mentioned before but is worth mentioning again - "Obsession" by Herrmann.  This was for the stupid Vertigo-ripoff film by Brian de Palma which made no sense and was essentially "let's take Vertigo and screw it up in many different ways!"   But the score by Herrmann is absolutely beautiful, with a full orchestra augmented by choir and pipe organ supplying intense drama and vivid imagery to compensate for the lame story. 

It might be worth recounting Herrmann's own advice (as recounted by John Williams);

When he was talking to a class of Composition for the Screen students he asked the class what kind of composers they wanted to be. The students answered "film composers". Herrmann said "Wrong - you want to be a GOOD composer".

I'm sure I haven't quoted it verbatim but you get the gist...

M

I like the idea of Handel becoming a BIG SHOT in England!!!!!   :D:D:D

Herrmann wrote that whistling piece for a film called Twisted Nerve - not a great film by any standards - but if you're  ever forced to go into a supermarket, you can whistle it while you're walking down the aisles and it really annoys the dirty scum. HAHAaaaaaaaa.

Standards are very different today. Last night I watched Whistle and I'll Come to You - a 40 minute BBC Omnibus program from 1968. Based on a story by MR James, a part - time ghost story writer - program makers today just don't seem to be able to access that class of material.