miniaturo
12-20-2018, 12:28 AM
I like good film, classical, new wave, plenty of styles and tupes of music, but certain composers are of my predilection above others, and of those I try to read and follow to a certain extent

for instance I can't have an in depth conversation about marco beltrami because frankly I dont like his music and therefore I havent investigated about his music or persona, but althopugh perhaps "expert" is stretching a bit my knowledge and analysis about them, I do think I can have educated opinions about John Barry, Miklos Rozsa or Mario Nascimbene.

But since I already know my opinions on the subject because I have to live with myself 24 hours a day (torment enough if you ask me), Id like to hear in which composers or bands do you consider yourself "experts"?

Shad
12-21-2018, 05:12 AM
A lot is relative to an artist's overall popularity. I could talk at great length about Nobuo Uematsu, but there are going to be people who know a lot more than I do, because the information's out there and he's a big name relative to his genre. For a more obscure name, simply being able to list all of their works off hand is going to leave you about as qualified as it gets without knowing the musician personally.

I guess within that sphere of people we call "composers", maybe Tim Follin? I can recall the majority of his works without having to go back and listen to them, and have a lot of general knowledge of his career path. Another niche fascination of mine is the music of Snatcher -- a game of some historical significance and a modest cult following that saw very little publicity outside of Japan despite being regularly ported to new platforms throughout the 80s and 90s. It has a bit of a treasure hunt appeal to it, because there are a dozen versions of the soundtrack and a lot of details out there about who was responsible for what, but little of it has been compiled in a concise wiki sort of way in English.

I think in general my verbosity comes down a lot more to genres than to artists though. VGM is obviously par for the course here, but it's a pretty obscure topic in music more generally and only a (significant) fraction of what I listen to. I can talk a lot of subgenres of metal at length. I went on a vaporwave binge for a while. There aren't many genre topics in music that I'm clueless on.