Well, that IS a surprise! There's definitely some attempt to "Kanno-it-up" in the samples we've heard so far!

Or it could be a collaboration, not the first time that happened. Kanno is occasionally composing additional music for the Romance of the Three Kingdoms franchise. But never happened with Nobunaga though.

I think Otsuka is worthy of continuing Kanno's and Yamashita's Legacy. My favorite music so far being this piece, especially the coda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAUeuQ7FUIU&t=1m41s

If that trailer is really her 100% then she really stepped up her game.

Her. :)

Apologies. :)

Today I listened through a bit of Seikou Nagaoka's non-anime works, and was pleasantly surprised at how terrific of a pop composer he is. I never thought much of him before, but like Sagisu, his true passion lies in jazz, with a small touch of funk. Just listen to those strings!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT25G-vwqbE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPjH3MiKwwE

Atlus, please fire Shoji Meguro and replace him with this guy in your future projects.

Sorry, it' just because I'm a horny bastard - I jump at any chance to welcome new females into this sausage fest. ;)

She's pretty young too - 34 years old.

By the way, in Japanese, names that end in -ko are female. Easy way to know. There's some exceptions like -hiko, but that uses different kanji.

Well, that IS a surprise! There's definitely some attempt to "Kanno-it-up" in the samples we've heard so far!Sure, Kanno's orchestrators need to find other sources of income now that their boss has been slowing down with the projects.

Speaking of orchestrators, Mitsuda's Black Butler doesn't sound anything like his usual style. Very polished, but I feel like I've heard it all from somewhere else before. For instance, why was there a Hisashi piece in it?

Black Butler... to me, it still sounds like Mitsuda, at least peripherally... It may be uncharitable to Mitsuda to say, but it sounds like a better composer is there and doing an impression of Mitsuda.

It doesn't sound like a crap composer / super orchestrator relationship in the style of Sagisu/Amano, Hamauzu/Hirano, etc - it sounds like a genuine extension of Mitsuda's style, like it's Mitsuda's natural instincts but with an unprecedented bump in technical capability underpinning it. Mitsuda could simply be far, far better than we thought he was - although Mitsuda has never hidden the fact that orchestral music isn't his strength and he has always meticulously ensured that everyone who contributes to his scores receives credit.

Edit: I found it in FLAC. I guess you know what that means. ;)

It's screaming out for the symphonic suite treatment and is borderline-unlistenable in its album presentation. A great many film scores are written like this, but a great many of film scores have some thought gone into their soundtrack releases - combining cues in a way which enhances the way the music works when taken alone - Black Butler, by comparison, is simply 62 cues dumped on a CD, presumably in film order, complete with silly stingers that upset the flow of the score. 20-30 minutes needs to go straight away, and the remaining 40-50 minutes of music need to be 10-15 tracks. On the whole album, only two tracks are longer than two minutes, and TWENTY-THREE are under a minute. Some really good music, spoiled by atrocious presentation.

Black Butler... to me, it still sounds like Mitsuda, at least peripherally... It may be uncharitable to Mitsuda to say, but it sounds like a better composer is there and doing an impression of Mitsuda.

It doesn't sound like a crap composer / super orchestrator relationship in the style of Sagisu/Amano, Hamauzu/Hirano, etc - it sounds like a genuine extension of Mitsuda's style, like it's Mitsuda's natural instincts but with an unprecedented bump in technical capability underpinning it. Mitsuda could simply be far, far better than we thought he was - although Mitsuda has never hidden the fact that orchestral music isn't his strength and he has always meticulously ensured that everyone who contributes to his scores receives credit.
I actually have a lot of respect for Mitsuda. It's true that orchestration has never been his strong suit. After all, he went to a college that specialized in rock, pop and jazz music - not classical and film music. I'm sure when he started at Square Enix he never would have thought that orchestral music was the future of video game music. Even so, it seems like he has made a genuine effort to learn the craft over the years. Recently, it seems like he's been trying really hard to be taken seriously as an orchestral composer. You can tell it's something he's passionate about, even if it's not his strength. Luckily he recognizes this and has very talented orchestrators like Kameoka and Abounnasr to support him. He's still very involved in the production though.

Not really a surprise in the least Masako is aiming for a Kanno sound, seeing how Kanno practically invented the Nobunaga sound, and every composer to come after has made an attempt to follow in her stylistic trademarks for the series. It's an interesting case where Kanno has an almost Uematsu-like fingerprint on the franchise's musical legcay that you can't really say about a lot of her other work(unless you wanna stretch and include the behemoth that was Macross Frontier.)

It's just extremely odd... I wouldn't rate Otsuka anywhere near Kanno based on what we've heard from her so far, yet she's a reasonably good impressionist. I would usually disapprove wholeheartedly of a composer going after someone else's style, but this could turn out to be quite interesting - if she can pretend to be someone more interesting than she is herself, that can only be good news for the score.

Finally could spare some free time I had to make my take on this one. Forget about Pokemon, broke a new record of 44 tracks during the making of this suite:


Black Butler: Book Of Atlantic - Atlantic Suite

MP3 provided by nextday/Arrangement by pensquawk




Yasunori Mitsuda, Mariam Abounnasr, Shunsuke Tsuchiya, Kazune Ogihara, Akio Noguchi, Sachiko Miyano


MP3 (http://www.mediafire.com/file/i355f2k25ruen08/BB_-_BOA_Suite.mp3)

[Description coming soon!]
Enjoy listening on the meantime!

Well, less work for me :D Now anticipating Tango's film soundrack album.
Though, now I'm tempted to do a little film concert suite. Oh, so much to do, so little time a day.


Mitsuda is truely on a roll. New projects left and right, and all feature Abounnasr (so far) and employ a big orchestra. Hope he launches another splendid orchestrator on a big new franchise.
If anything, his orchestral work is joyful, competent and good fun. Not challenging in the least but so damn satisfyfing. Like a fast food meal that tasted surprisingly well for the price you payed. Will give Kid Icarus another spin soon.

Well, less work for me :D Now anticipating Tango's film soundrack album.
Though, now I'm tempted to do a little film concert suite. Oh, so much to do, so little time a day.

I hope the post did not ruin what you two had in mind or worked on. I'd be more than eager to hear on your take and Tango's as well. :)

Oh I did nothing... yet. And it wouldn't ruin anything even if I did ;) But thanks for being overly considerate and kind, that's the real reason why we stay anyway :)

The more the merrier, I say! :D

If I could make one request for anyone planning to work on this... Use the FLAC source. PLEASE. ;)

Thanks for the suite. This is a lot better than I expected it to be. You could have told me this was Joe Hisaishi or Patrick Doyle and I would have believed you.

Some notes as I listen:

Jaws/Stravinsky references at 17:13?

Also, maybe some of that Elfman pastiche we heard in Valkyria.

30:00-32:36 is pretty nuts. Who orchestrated that, Shirley Walker?

Mysterious Island reference at 42:07?

The more the merrier, I say! :D

If I could make one request for anyone planning to work on this... Use the FLAC source. PLEASE. ;)

By the time I was working on this, I only had nextyday's copy that was shared here, but I can add a FLAC version to the post later on ;) (not today nor tomorrow any soon, spare these ears some mercy!).

Kentaro Sato
DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY -London Sessions-
The London Symphony Orchestra & Crouch End Festival Chorus



Download (https://mega.nz/#!5uRWCQKT!AQfU89ODcEvExwfqVTU8FCBERFgrZEtYSTO8Jzx1REA)


Bombastic Orchestral Pop for London, symphonic arrangements for Prague... oh Japan.

You may remember Kentaro Sato way back in the thread for the excellent Peter Pan Symphonic Tale:

Symphonic Tale "Peter Pan"
Hamamatsu Symphony Orchestra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuxBepEgMuA)


He's actually quite active on twitter and had a few days ago a recording in Budapest for one of his orchestral works:



Phoenix - Suite for Choir and Orchestra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DPyZ25Hom0)

I hope he can get past the arranging job and actually get a composing job for Final Fantasy or other Japanese media one day.

On his website it says:
"Two Orchestral CDs; �Symphonic Tale Peter Pan� and �Symphonic Overtures� were recorded with Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra between Feb 2 and 6, 2016. CD release date to be announced soon!"

:)


In other news: that Sahashi game will be released on September 1st. Also, Toshiyuki Watanabe is releasing an original album in November.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bczS5X0sHTY

Makes me wonder if Tanaka will actually sell his London Philharmonic dream album next comiket.

How do you even find this stuff?

The video says the music is by Junichi Nakatsuru, a Bandai Namco composer who has worked on the Soul Calibur and Ace Combat series. And yeah, it definitely sounds like something from Ace Combat.

Sato-san twittered about it ;)

He also was at C92 where it was shown. He's most likely on board as orchestrator.

EDIT: Also goes without saying Nakatsuru was the best thing about Soul Calibur (I wonder if a next title will be announced at TGS)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIvyEZ5oWTY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1xB2FFr2AY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoO150b-isI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX0QM_Qhe_k

I would love to say I got the soundtrack to Hamaguchi's Megumi no Daigo but...
It's $110 through CDJapan's proxy and I ain't spending that much on a bloody CD I can tell you that much.
But is anyone interested in a... "RC" Compliation?

Thanks for the share, I will admit the first time Kentaro Sato was mentioned here, it flew under my radar, but hearing both of those last two suites totally sealed the deal. As for Dissidia, great ensamble, but I get the feeling that for 12 tracks, it gets a tad repetitive hearing each track starting with that "galloping snare rhythm" as I like to call it, of course I would blame that more on Square Enix's input rather than Sato.

I would love to say I got the soundtrack to Hamaguchi's Megumi no Daigo but...
It's $110 through CDJapan's proxy and I ain't spending that much on a bloody CD I can tell you that much.
If you really want it: http://buyee.jp/item/yahoo/auction/p559820877

I should have grabbed it when it was $5 on Amazon. I didn't know it was rare at the time.

In addition to Daigo, try getting his Tamagochi: Greatest Story in the Universe. Brilliant symphonic SciFi score but impossible for me to obtain atm.



I noticed this trend that "Japanese" composers/orchestrators who worked in LA are more and more migrating back to Japan or at least focusing on getting jobs there.

Who would have thought that a Hollywood orchestrator and concert composer with equal spark as Hokoyama would one day work for for an indy film project from Comiket that is as obscure as you can possibly get in addition to recording and conducting the LSO for a Japanese arcade game (probably why the music is "only bombast", can't exactly appreciate Hamaguchi's arrangements in a noisy arcade hall).




Kentaro Sato
Orchestral Works



Download (https://mega.nz/#!onJlBYiK!aonuqHG-qXis6rTo3Ysvh1h1Op8eAKvHNqbM_2RTvco)

Sato at work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFGsNaa95xw)

Originally shared by arthierr in 2011. I've only tagged and arranged it and added his orchestral contributions for DISSIDIA 012.


One piece he composed specially attracted my attention: a full, sumptuous symphonic suite based upon the story of Peter Pan. Frankly, given the extraordinary quality of this suite, I can't believe it's so obscure and rare. The music is in fact stunning; it features a large number of themes, so many that almost each track has its own theme and a quite strong identity (this is the mark of the greatest film scores). Is it needed to precise that the orchestrations are top-notch? Their richness, fluidity and diversity show an obvious expertise in orchestration: this man is a true master orchestrator.

Of course there are a few influences coming from the monumental masterpiece of John Williams on the same subject, especially in the track "The Lost Boys", and also some slight inspirations from an eighties fantasy score by Robert Folk (guess which) in the track "Flying to the Neverland", but Sato manages to be original enough, and it seems anyway that these occasional influences are some kind of homage to his masters more than anything else - as if he wanted to show that he *can* compose and orchestrate like them, some sort of showing off if you will!

I also included in this upload the other symphonic pieces I found at his website. For people interested in virtual orchestras, they totally should listen to the very lyrical piece called "Breath of Dawn", entirely made with the Garrritan Personal Orchestra, it shows what this virtual orchestra can produce when it's handled by a very skilled orchestrator.


Kentaro Sato (1981), Ken-P to his friends, is an award-winning composer, conductor, and lyricist who worked with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra among others.

Sato was born in Hamamatsu (Nowadays conducting the Hamamatsu Symphony Orchestra), a manufacturing city known for musical instruments. He received a Master of Music in Conducting with Distinction and a Bachelor of Music in Media Writing from California State University, Northridge. In addition to his music degrees, he holds degree in Cinema from Santa Monica College.

"I believe that most compositional and orchestrational process, although they appear genius to some, are skill-oriented; skills that can be learned through education and practice." - Ken-P's Laws of Orchestration

He was in his 20s when he composed Peter Pan! Even now, with 36, I would still count him among the young ones that could make it big.

His choral work body is also massive! You can listen to it all on his website: http://www.wisemanproject.com/comp-music-chorus-top-e.html
Currently he finished some choir recording session in Budapest. The CD releases of his works should be announced in the coming months.


Symphonic Tale "Peter Pan"
Hamamatsu Symphony Orchestra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuxBepEgMuA)


He's actually quite active on twitter and had a recording in Budapest for one of his orchestral works:



Phoenix - Suite for Choir and Orchestra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DPyZ25Hom0)

I hope he can get past the arranging job and actually get a composing job for Final Fantasy or other Japanese media one day.

I can only hope he can secure some composing jobs in the coming future.

He said for his next orchestral work, it might be a symphonic tale based on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. He already has a "Christmas Overture" which he wrote many years ago: https://youtu.be/AfTkx9oH2Tg

Alf Clausen just got fired from the Simpsons after 25 years.

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/simpsons-composer-alf-clausen-fired-1202543183/

The reason? Cost-cutting measures. That's right, keep firing these highly skilled and trained veterans so you can bring in some 20 year old Zimmer knockoff with his synth pads.

I foolishly made a comment about the difference between using live musicians vs. fake ones. Lots of dislikes and people telling me that technology is so good that you can't even tell the difference any more. I guess audiences deserve whatever crap they're going to get. They obviously don't appreciate real artists like Clausen.

In slightly happier news, Toshiyuki Watanabe gets to show off a bit for the upcoming Mazinger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xNOH5QfHQk

Oh, for...

:mad::mad::mad::mad:

Clausen could provide them with "a different kind of music" if asked - what they're really asking for is cheaper music. What this boils down to is that they want to slash the music budget and they're afraid that telling a musician of Clausen's integrity "Hey, you can still score the show if you want, but you'll be doing it with a 90% pay cut, no live musicians and we want your scores to sound like Hans Zimmer!" will result in Clausen knocking out their teeth.

When Zimmer got the movie ("sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug" remarked Clausen, at the time) things looked bad, but the writing really was on the wall when Zimmer also scored the 2012 short "The Longest Daycare" and did so with a fake orchestra - from that moment, Clausen has been working with the sword of Damoclese hanging over his head. The idea of one composer being the music director of a show, and recording new music for that show with a live orchestra for every single episode, was already looking unfashionable by the time The Simpsons came to air, but in 2017 it's nothing short of an anachronism.

Clausen is 76 now. There's no work for him outside of The Simpsons. He'll probably be relieved and will retire in comfort.

And, to be brutally honest, the best scores The Simpsons ever received weren't by Clausen - they were by Arthur B Rubinstein, Patrick Williams, and Richard Gibbs, and they were all in Season 1. Clausen has spent nearly thirty years free-wheeling - doing what works, winning awards, but essentially writing the same music for nearly 600 episodes. There are hundreds of hours of finished Clausen music cues already in the can - his scores aren't thematically complex, leitmotivic symphonic extravaganzas so they could've used what's already recorded as library music and nobody would've noticed. And yet they gathered thirty players in a studio every single week, paid studio staff and copyists and engineers and editors.

This happened for the same reason there's still a poster in a frame up on my street advertising "Much Ado About Nothing" on VHS - it was put there twenty-five years ago and for whatever reason, nobody's torn it down yet - nobody needed the space it occupied, nobody noticed that it was decades old, and over time it became just part of the background. Next year, that street is being demolished and rebuilt, so the poster will go. I am planning to visit the day before and steal it, for old time's sake.

The Simpsons is twenty years past its sell-by date anyway, but when you get rid of the only thing that still works with your show and sack the only person who's been with the show almost since the start and still works at the same level they did at the beginning, you know you're screwed. The Simpsons has been going downhill since 1997. Today, it falls off the cliff. Maybe it won't be such a bad thing. Maybe the writing is on the wall for the series as a whole and they'll put it out of its misery at last. This reeks of "contract fulfillment" - they'll slash budgets and cut corners at every available opportunity in order to keep the show going until their contracts expire, then they'll chuck it in. They don't care any more, so they're all getting off the ship, pointing it towards the middle of the Atlantic, setting auto-pilot and counting on it not hitting anything or sinking on the way.

All that said, still a horrible example of modern times.

I don't understand you. You're sad that The Simpsons has decided to stop using new music and orchestra for new episodes.. but are also bashing Alf Clausen for doing nothing interesting in the medium - always the same music? Well. I mean. I can't deny you that, you are right. It sounded always the same, but it was still somewhat good to hear in the episodes. But yeah.. this is merely a sign that The Simpsons is now OFICIALLY dead, as if they weren't already before. This just marks an end of an era. The sad part is that somehow it'll still sell millions.

I gotta say though. I kinda really enjoyed The Simpsons' Movie score, but that might have been probably due to Zimmer's "ghost writers" writing most of the good stuff. Personally I thought it was so good. I mean, not a symphonic masterpiece but a score that sounds good, ALMOST traditional. And a lot of good melodies. Definitely it had to be ghost writers because it sounded so much orchestral than anything Zimmer has composed in years.

In slightly happier news, Toshiyuki Watanabe gets to show off a bit for the upcoming Mazinger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xNOH5QfHQk


I will say this, the Sound-Inn brass works... for Sahashi-esque funky scores. For Hollywood-esque scores it just makes me sad this wasn't recorded in Budapest. Its even cheap as hell over there and this project has seemingly budget up the ass, so why not? Of course I can cloak it in "Abbey Road sound" but the "bite" of the trumpets can not be replaced.

That said, the music itself is on par with Majestic Prince, perhaps an even better score, depends how long the movie is. Wonderful how much they honor the music. Doesn't matter who wrote it and how good/bad it is, you will never have an old esteemed Japanese composer be fired over the phone, not even hypothetically happening because the JCAA, especially Senju and Katsuhisa Hattori would flip their shit.

Whenever the Japanese are rebooting something, the thing you can always count on is that the music will be the same (in most cases the same composer even) with a chance of being genuinely better, or the double-edged sword being that its sometimes too close to the original. The most infamous case of course was the use of Ifukube's original Godzilla RECORDING for Shin.

^Has Watanabe ever worked with a foreign orchestra before? I assume in this case he's just more comfortable staying in Japanese soil like Hisaishi.

Then I would be sad they couldn't book a hall at Toho or wherever he recorded his NHK work ;)
Also, Sailor Moon????!!!!


And because this thread worked its magic of relevancy, Ken-P also tweeted about "Simpsongate" with the same sentiments. Seems to make quite the news.

@Tango: All that said, still a horrible example of modern bad times. Fixed it ;)


Intermission
By pure chance I discovered where Amano got his inspiration from for Atragon, in particular for one of my favorite action pieces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piz7ONmZu34

^Has Watanabe ever worked with a foreign orchestra before? I assume in this case he's just more comfortable staying in Japanese soil like Hisaishi.
Yes and no. He doesn't go overseas for his scores but he has performed at overseas events in the past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL_ZeBU-Hsc

I don't understand you. You're sad that The Simpsons has decided to stop using new music and orchestra for new episodes.. but are also bashing Alf Clausen for doing nothing interesting in the medium - always the same music? Well. I mean. I can't deny you that, you are right. It sounded always the same, but it was still somewhat good to hear in the episodes. But yeah.. this is merely a sign that The Simpsons is now OFICIALLY dead, as if they weren't already before. This just marks an end of an era.

I don't understand YOU! You accuse me of bashing Clausen and then go on to agree with everything I said. ;)

No bashing, in any case - but it's true that his scores weren't ground-breaking and there is very little if anything to distinguish 1990 Clausen from 2017 Clausen. He did precisely what they asked him to do, to the exact same standard, from the very beginning of his tenure to the very end. His music was pitch perfect for the show - but it never changed and never did anything exceptional; it did mediocre things exceptionally. Not that I blame the guy - scoring a series that 25 years ago had a subplot about a father who finds himself unable to care for his family and, feeling inadequate and desolate, attempts suicide - and now it tells stories about celebrities and sentient washcloths. My point was that it was a (happy) miracle that they kept him on the staff for THIS long when it would've been very, very simple to just say "Look, pal, we've already got a shit-tonne of music recorded, we really don't need to be spending this money any more."

If your job costs your employer money every time you do it, the work you did yesterday still exists, and it is known that today you will product substantially the same work as you did yesterday, not building upon it but repeating the same tasks with the same results... every single day you get to do that job, you should count yourself lucky. It's like hiring a guy to resurface a road, and he does a great job and the road wins a few "World's Greatest Asphalt" awards, so you hire him to resurface the same road again and again every single day - and you have to pay for the materials and the guy's team of assistants. At the end of the day, precisely the same amount of road is built, but you're still paying. Thirty years later, a new guy starts working as an accountant and says "Hold on, why the f*** are we still paying this prick?!"

So, it pains me, for sure - but The Simpsons is a show that died twenty years ago but still walks around oblivious to the fact that it's decomposing. Clausen is old and The Simpsons has undoubtedly been a great earner for him over the decades. I doubt that he'll go hungry. I also doubt that his sleep will be disturbed by thoughts that he still had so much to say on the subject of The Simpsons. It was nice that he had an orchestra and it was nice that he was able to score the show in that style for all of these years, but in the end it was never great music and the one thing nobody can ever say about Clausen on The Simpsons is that he never had time to prove himself or show off his creativity. In the hundreds of hours of score he leaves us, we have some very fine television scoring, but the prospect of not getting any more... well, I can live with it.


I gotta say though. I kinda really enjoyed The Simpsons' Movie score, but that might have been probably due to Zimmer's "ghost writers" writing most of the good stuff.

So did I; always in the back of my mind while listening, though, was "Alf Clausen should've done this" - he's a very good composer and he could've done truly wonderful things with a movie-sized score. By the time the movie was announced, Clausen had seventeen years with The Simpsons; winning them awards left, right, and centre - the least they could've done would be to give him the movie. And, to say "Hey, you can't score the movie, but do another ten years wasting away on the TV show!" is just plain bad manners.

Zimmer's (et al) score is a good score - probably my favourite Zimmer - and it's fantastic in the movie, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth for that reason.

Can't disagree with you on any on that. Both Alf Clausen and The Simpsons Movie. Can understand why you have the bad taste in your mouth.

This is all that was in the game files. Just the 7 tracks that were in the preview video. The file names indicate there's at least 3 tracks that were left out (M01,M02,M06).

https://mega.nz/#!9cVFSTbR!zB5av0tuaCiWqvMBH1jlodKVLZPLg6L9pcFWhF-4wW4

...And this is why I warn against getting enthusiastic about scores we haven't heard yet. ;)

Thank you for ripipng though! :)

The main theme and battle theme are solid, non-looping tracks. I'll take that over nothing.


Edit: Alf Clausen now saying that all 35 of his musicians were let go and that he was fired via email. 27 years and they couldn't even be bothered to tell him in person. Even a phone call was too much.

I think Tango is more refering to the quality than the quantity ;)

I'll take this more as an appetizer and signal that he's still interested in working in media scoring. I also wonder if he just went into the studio for Soen no Kantai...


Clausen

Nobody from the executives over there seems to have RESPECT for skill and craft anymore.

There is now a rebuttal from The Simpsons producers claiming that "orchestral music" will stay and that Clausen still has a role to perform on the show.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-41122499

None of this makes any sense.

Um, I think he means in the sense that he will go on to remain part of the show, because really, his music has been in the show for these past 27 years or something. Either that, or that they're still gonna use Alf Clausen's millions of already recorded cues.

It must be that... Surely they wouldn't be dick enough to say to Clausen "fuck off, but still come back every now and again to write some library cues"... :/

Then again, they were dick enough to sack him by email after thirty years... so who knows?

Shuntaro Kobayashi
CHINA NATIONAL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Pure Suite: Music from White Album 2 & Utawarerumono



Download (https://mega.nz/#!krp1HRLD!Ha2-pDbyOaoJPcEurn21oiODQ5ISorS_lbxlFVY4aHE)

Sample (http://picosong.com/wstDY/)



Maybe Black Butler Suite next...

Breathtaking!!

Actually, I think the score is about equal in terms of quality and quantity - very, very poor. It's twenty minutes in total, with every track except the first looping twice, so we actually have just over ten minutes of music here.

The music itself is a mixture of limp cast-offs from his older scores and fragmented pieces that go nowhere. It doesn't even get close to Soul Of Gold, let alone anything else from his golden era. This is music written by someone who's retired, but who likes to go into the studio for short sessions every now and again to remember the good old days. This is NOT music by someone who's about to burst back onto the scene with some fantastic score, or music by someone whose best work is ahead of him - at least in the scoring arena. For all we know his opera (which I suspect is an opera in the same sense that Yugo Kanno's "Border" is a symphony) could turn out to be the greatest thing ever... but as far as writing music for film and television, Sahashi is making it quite clear - he's done. I am now pretty well convinced (to a point just below being unwaveringly certain) that Sahashi will not score FMP, and if he does, it will be a mixture of very poor music and reduxes of existing cues.

Vinphonic - that Kobayashi album is tolerable, but bloody hell it sounds terrible. Wherever they recorded this thing they need to never, EVER go back... :O

I don't think it's bad at all. Obviously the looping is awful, but the music itself is very typical Sahashi. It doesn't do anything new, but it's far from being a downgrade from his usual music. And given the source material being a small game app, I doubt he had much incentive to go over the top. Even Oshima's work on apps, nice as they are, are still very average compared to her usual output. I will be very disappointed if Sahashi doesn't show up for FMP.

Sahashi could definitely write a very good opera if he wanted to. Simoun was a great example of how he would go about it. But Simoun was arguably the best thing he's ever done, rivaled only by the SEED symphonies. Can he still compose with that same level of passion after spending such a long time in retirement?

I can only rely on the fact that in 99% of cases, the original composer, or someone close to him, returns whenever an "old" anime franchise gets a sequel/rebooted.
I also felt from the getgo that this project is nothing that inspires something or will get amazing music. Right from the start it threw me off with the all-too-familiar ostinati that are so "unlike" Sahashi. The project looks very "lifeless" from what I've seen and feels more like a commission, so that's what we got.

FMP is a different story, its right up Sahashi's ally. He loves camp, from mecha to plastic suit brawls, to anime silliness to cheesy stageplays. That's the projects he used to write excellent music for. If he falls short even in that department again, then his media days are truely over. His serious side is another matter of course but I would say he loves to write for projects that are chessy on the outside but got serious depth to them. And Soen no Kantai is neither.

There's also Sword of Themis so perhaps we better judge the probability of Sahashi retiring from media scoring for good after hearing that.

That said, for me its understandable if it happens, for various reasons. At least his legacy will live on. With Date A Live Go Sakabe makes the strongest candidate for succession so far, especially his Organ writting. We have dozens of people imitating his style in the anime business and on a sitenote, some JAGMO members are quite the fans of Gundam SEED so the possibility of having his music honored in the concert hall is becoming very likely.


I also believe his opera will not be on the "heavy side", considering its for Anne. So no Gunslinger Girl, but most likely a cross of Simoun's pastoral pieces and Kurumi. If it only has one melody as lovely as Yamashita's Theme song then I will be satisfied.

[]

Why do I get the feeling I (sadly) missed a fantastic smackhammer about the downfall of Sahashi's career, the downfall of all anime music and the general enthropy of the universe ;)

Am I *really* that predictable? ;)

Do you really have to ask :D
Afterall, it's been almost ten years...


But one of us has to maintain the tradition and as I have some thoughts that go beyond Sahashi on this topic, I will deliver a wall of text.

First, I say Sahashi only really left a legacy in a span of ten years. The music he made before and after, while very good, just doesn't compare. Many composers only have a few years of glory before they fade again in the background. Others have a consistent rise to the top, and others land a few milestones at the start but never live up to them again.


While you kinda got me on the train of "this decade has not as many masterpieces as the last one" and "maybe we are in trouble", I'm still remaining positive overall. Recently I compressed and saved my TB-big library I've accumulated for nearly two decades now and that by the lords' mercy never got corrupted or lost. I've made new categories, evaluated every single soundtrack and ripped my last CDs that were still missing to go full digital.

For interest it now looks like this:

(http://www.directupload.net/file/d/4836/hk5q5gii_jpg.htm)

When it comes to anime I listened to pretty much every orchestral score and singled out the new "big stars". I think I've got a general idea where the industry is headed.

There's certain valid reasons why many people (including myelf) who enjoyed orchestral anime scores since the 90s should be worried: The Anime business itself is transforming this decade and nobody has the right destination figured out yet. Not to mention lots of the old players are leaving or going to leave the field and the young ones still haven't fully established their footprints and roots. That's why I believe we are currently experiencing a "transition phase". Lots of uncertainty and worry but not anything like a concrede train to bottom. But, from my observation, Anime still has many opportunities for composers to write concert works and classic film scores or just get insanely creative and have some fun. Composers are still not restricted by any outside force and it looks like its going to remain that way for at least a decade.

The next biggest players (that actually won't suck) in my eyes on the anime scene are Akito Matsuda, Masato Coda, Keiji Inai, Yoshiaki Fujisawa and Tatsuya Kato, whether we like it or not. Matsuda in particular is barely 30 but already wrote concert works and classic film scores (scored to picture) for anime. He has dozens of film scores in the works. Imagine what he's going to be in ten years, or even twenty, if he keeps going at this pace. If you're not a born genius it takes a really great amount of lifetime and dedication to the craft until you become "great". I believe he will keep growing, if he actually gets more budget and not fake brass again.

The next one is Masato Coda who is still among the young ones and currently delivers with Knights and Magic, parts of it anyway. He's growing and getting better. Imagine if he can cultivate his skills further on a show that is not this utter trash. His work so far is good, especially his choral playfulness for Konosuba 2 and Chain Chronicle.

Keiji Inai is actually the oldest next player but nonetheless is very much capable of writing classic Hollywood scores if he gets a few more years on the field. Right now his music already sounds really good in parts with many moments where I feel that movie magic happening in the future.

Kato is also very young but at least knows what he's doing, even though he loves beats and quirky rock elements, recent scores have shown he is interested in moving into other territories. At least he knows his repertoire and can get decent work out. I also predict he will get better over time and strike gold someday. I don't hate him at all.

Fujisawa as well has great potential, but is cursed by production mistakes. Still, he loves to write classical and Hollywood music and will someday get enough budget to shine. In his case its simply a question of budget.


There's also lots of good skilled composers on the anime scene that are occasional regulars, from Koichiro Kameyama to Kei Haneoka, who btw scores this show next season: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OlR3dAe4WM

And I really mean it when I say anime is becoming more like classic cinema in presentation, visuals, promotion and music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfmsfcvkWDA
I name Genesis and Re:Zero again as examples where scoring to picture is used to maximum effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFdyldbdZXA
Scoring to picture is a rising trend and many directors love it... I state again, Virgin Soul sets a precedent, both at what the production values of "big shows" are going to be in the future as well as the way in which they are scored.
We will see much more shows like it, The Ancient Magus Bride and Violet Evergarden being similar upcoming shows.


Ike definitely has grown since he scored to picture after he teamed up with Cygames: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epERFSl4cV4
I bet if it becomes a more prevalent trend, many other composers that "were just around" could turn out to be born to write like that.


I would even go one step further, Anime of today is in fact, far more experimental and creative than ever before... if you don't expect a certain orchestral sound that is sadly becoming a part of "past relics". But we should not sound the trumpets of doom just because a certain style of writing orchestral music is no longer practiced, especially if its that incredibly hard to pull off. Asakawa and Higuchi are prodigies for a reason. And remember Oshima did abandon that style of writing by herself. Just compare the "sound" of the Silver Age to the Golden Age, and even then scores that payed homages to the Golden Ages were turning up from time to time. I believe we will see a simialr development.

That said, experimenting with an orchestra in any way you see fit is still possible and has not changed at all.
From Yo Tsuji, to Souhei Kano, to Michiru Iida. You have lots of creative and talented artists that can follow in Iwasaki's steps.
There's also more Jazz and Funk in anime than ever before, from ACCA to Lupin III (perhaps the greatest reboot ever) to Blood Blockade Battlefront 2. In fact Thunderbolt is entirely scored with freestyle Jazz and 60s Rock, all while giant robots beat the shit out of each other, limbs get torn off and children incinerated. Show me another medium where that is possible today.


And, on a sidenote, apart from the orchestra, I've been getting into some Japanese Renaissance/Baroque Pop again that is just one of the many underground scenes in Japan where choral and classical music is being revived. The same scene artists like HITOMI, Akiko Shikata and ALI project are from... http://picosong.com/wsdJZ

This scene can give us occasional gems, like this new recording of Elfen Lied's LILIUM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m59zZaZPqFo

We still see from time to time a composer emerging from that that scene.


I could also mention that many new anime pop songs still have classical writing techniques in them, and if pop still has them, I'm a bit less worried: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuG7sUdfkFM
It's not the norm by any stretch but also no abnomaly.


So far I've left out the "legacy" guard that actually doesn't pull out.

Enough has been said about Tanaka and Oshima still being regulars, Iwasaki and Matsuo scoring music and we still have true film composers like Toshiyuki Watanabe, Kan Sawada and Naoki Sato scoring for anime occasionally.

Mitsuda and Ike are also increasingly scoring anime projects while getting better at their craft.

Not all gloom and doom over here.



There's lots of other points I could elaborate on, but the positives far outweigh the negatives.


The only thing that is really holding everything back to make me actually enthusiastic again is the recording and performance problem. Most anime scores still sound like shit and if any promising composer like Sakimoto gets a new project it turns out to be synth. Even Haneoka's UQ holder and Conisch's new project feature no real horns. In almost every new case where the music is good, it has either fake brass, fake winds or fake strings. Too infuriating.
Seeing the rise of companies and studios with "actual" funding, as well as crowdfunding, could help to eradicate that problem in the future but its still happening far too often and the atrocious recording environment doesn't help.

Right now it's also impossible to assemble another Tadlow that specializes in rerecording anime scores that got the budget shaft. I would take smecky studios over every tiny tincan studio in Tokyo.

A great recent example is Pop in Q, that score would kill if it actually had a music budget: http://picosong.com/wsd6P/


Bottom line, nothing overly enthusiastic from my site, just a notion that things are not as bad as they seem. At least I believe the next anime season won't actually suck this time ;)

Speaking of Re:Zero, it's the one anime OST of the recent era that I listen to regularly. Is Suehiro's other work as good?

What I find fascinating is that a few years ago Suheiro sounded just like another Yugo Kanno (Can't unhear Throneroom/End Title): http://picosong.com/wsrcn

And here's what he sounds like now post Re:Zero: http://picosong.com/wsrcc



Kenichiro Suehiro
Noble Detective
Studio Orchestra



Download (https://mega.nz/#!4ngTXbSR!HQyciKWHMnagDzNk6HJHKAeZUuxpb80YELvncScl_r0)



Suehiro is a composer I don't see just as an "anime composer". He has the potential to really soar in the near future. He has a new anime project next season: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb_AKZfO7BE, as well as two other anime projects in the future in addition to dozens of dramas. His career really takes off right now. Let's see what becomes of him.

GSJ's Koei Tecmo concert will be available for purchase on their streaming app starting in a few days. The audio quality is usually garbage but we'll see...

I really hope it is decent quality because the final track of the concert is "Symphonic Poem Nobunaga's Ambition" arranged by Souhei Kano.

RE: live musicians vs. fake ones....people telling me that technology is so good that you can't even tell the difference any more
While I agree it's getting more difficult with certain instruments, I can always tell a "fake" string section. If you isolate a loud passage it sounds like steady static, whereas real strings still have some richness and depth. Sadly, replacing real strings is popular because you can eliminate a whole group of players, and presumably it's usually done to cut costs. I don't mind electronics when it's used honestly, but am not fond of those many cases where it's simply trying to pretend it's something else. And I can often hear the difference---for now.

Asakawa and Higuchi are prodigies for a reason.I still can't get over just how Asakawa is able to wield an orchestra with such control and exuberance. I initially thought he was only capable of producing that early Golden Age Hollywood sound a la Korngold and Steiner, then he throws a curveball and goes full-on Rozsa in Jungle Emperor Leo:

http://picosong.com/wsGcH/

It really is a shame that outside of those sappy romcoms and the collaboration with Sahashi on Wataru, he only had three real scores (FSS, Candidate, and Kimba) to his name where his range was put on display, and even then it feels like we've seen only a fraction of his true talent. Now that he's gone, who else is going to use those NHK sound stages?

Honestly, I can't imagine any living composer being able to fill his shoes. Most of these new talents are only around the same level as Yuugo Kanno.

Some cues from Children of the Whales (music by Hiroaki Tsutsumi) were recorded with a 60-piece orchestra in Berlin: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1411400238955330

I'm glad to see overseas recording becoming more common, but so far it's mostly composers that I don't really care about. I suppose the good news is that Evan Call works for the same company as Yokoyama and Tsutsumi, so perhaps he will get an overseas recording next (Violet Evergarden?).

And so the next big budget mecha/sci-fi anime falls into the hands of Sawano once more:

https://twitter.com/DARLI_FRA/status/905456963575660544

@nextday: Yeah sure, 2 minutes of interesting music and the rest is droning synth mood with simple guitar and drum arpeggios and incredibly obnoxious unison writing that only has its volume to cover its ineptitude that would make Kenji Kawai angry why its so simplistic and repetitive, you know, like Made in Abyss... and every other Yokoyama and Tsutsumi score.

Sawano at least has a strong identity. I know what he's about and I get why Trigger likes to work with him. That studio is basically a roulette game with Oshima and Sawano bullets.

Hopefully their other upcoming projects, Promare and Gridman, don't get claimed by Sawano as well. Seems like there's a decent chance that Iwasaki will be attached to Promare.

I don't think Promare will be coming out for a while. Trigger is a small studio and working one two serious shows at the same time is already pushing the limits of their production capacities.

I wouldn't be surprised if Promare's composer was Suehiro since he composed for Luluco, the last Imaishi project.

It feels strange not having any Iwasaki soundtrack releases so far this year.

Promare is from the director and writer of Gurren Lagann and was announced around the same time as the 10th anniversary. It also has a similar design:



If they're trying to recreate the same vibe as Gurren Lagann, then Iwasaki is a must-have. His schedule is free right now, so I'm going to hope for the best.

Another possible candidate could be Yuki Hayashi, who has already worked with Trigger (Kiznaiver) and "replaced", in a manner of speaking, Iwasaki in another franchise that he used to be involved with (Soul Eater). Not to mention, the enormous gap of projects between the two is pretty noticeable nowadays...

Go Shiina is also an option (and a better one at that) for these kinds of shows.

I tend to not sound very pessimistic (and I hope to god I'll be proved wrong in the future when they announce it), but I don't think the likes of Trigger would want someone as daringly eclectic and constant experimenting with their musical repertoire as Iwasaki is today. Sure, they want style, and Iwasaki truly excels while keeping that musical integrity that makes him so unique and interesting, but the numbers today are all about loud Sawano and drum banging Hayashi...

Promare is from the director and writer of Gurren Lagann and was announced around the same time as the 10th anniversary. It also has a similar design

If they're trying to recreate the same vibe as Gurren Lagann, then Iwasaki is a must-have. His schedule is free right now, so I'm going to hope for the best.Well, that director is Imaishi, and the last Gurren Lagann-esque project he directed was Kill La Kill, which had Sawano. Generally, it seems that he's satisfied with whoever Aniplex is supplying for him. Back in 2007 they promoted Iwasaki, in 2013 they promoted Sawano, and when Promare comes out, it will be whichever young composer they feel could sell a lot of discs, which is why it will most certainly be someone like Hayashi or Suehiro or whoever is being contracted with them. Imaishi is not someone who is very picky with his music. I don't think Iwasaki is going to return, or at the very least if he does it won't be Imaishi who asks for him.


I don't think the likes of Trigger would want someone as daringly eclectic and constant experimenting with their musical repertoire as Iwasaki is today. Sure, they want style, and Iwasaki truly excels while keeping that musical integrity that makes him so unique and interesting, but the numbers today are all about loud Sawano and drum banging Hayashi... Yeah, they aren't exactly picky. Even for Little Witch Academia, the music was recorded near the end of the production stage.

I've always been surprised by how strangely unpopular Iwasaki is despite being so prolific. And since he has a reputation for being an eccentric hardass who creates music that is rather hard to use and then rages at producers online when things don't go his way, I don't see him being someone that Aniplex would continue pushing. Already he's been demoted to Lantis. Right now he's already starting to jump into video games, and has been working mainly on sequels to shows he already worked on in the past couple of years. I wonder how much longer he plans to stay in the anime industry?

I don't think Promare will be coming out for a while. Trigger is a small studio and working one two serious shows at the same time is already pushing the limits of their production capacities.

I wouldn't be surprised if Promare's composer was Suehiro since he composed for Luluco, the last Imaishi project.

It feels strange not having any Iwasaki soundtrack releases so far this year.

Yeah me too. I am checking his twitter profile very often for some news. We ara all waiting now for his Lord of Vermilion IV ost and Mahouka Movie one.

@nextday: Yeah sure, 2 minutes of interesting music and the rest is droning synth mood with simple guitar and drum arpeggios and incredibly obnoxious unison writing that only has its volume to cover its ineptitude that would make Kenji Kawai angry why its so simplistic and repetitive, you know, like Made in Abyss... and every other Yokoyama and Tsutsumi score.
I did a bit more digging and he apparently had some help from orchestrator Youki Yamamoto, who also conducted the score. I don't think it will make any difference though. Music was performed by the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg. Apparently Yamamoto also conducted and orchestrated two other upcoming TV anime scores: one by Masaru Yokoyama and one by Hisaki Kato. Both were performed by the Brussels Philharmonic.


I don't see him being someone that Aniplex would continue pushing. Already he's been demoted to Lantis.
He's freelance. There's no such thing as being "demoted" - he works for whoever pays his bills. Even then, his most recent show was produced by Aniplex... so I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion.

He's freelance. There's no such thing as being "demoted" - he works for whoever pays his bills. Even then, his most recent show was produced by Aniplex... so I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. I say "demoted" in the sense that Lantis is not as prestigious of a company as Aniplex. If you're referring to Stray Dogs, that was Lantis. However, for some reason I thought Mahouka was from Lantis, and that was from Aniplex, so I stand corrected. Iwasaki did use to have his site on Aniplex's server, so he does at least have some kind of long-term contract with them.

My point still stands, I don't see him as having a good chance of scoring Promare.

Nah, I was talking about Qualidea Code which aired last July. I don't count 2nd seasons (Bungo) and movies (Mahouka) because it's pretty rare for a composer not to be brought back for a sequel.

Some new Orville music this time by McNeeley with some Broughton theme at the end. https://soundcloud.com/user-314502860/the-orville-episode-4-soundtrack-cue

OK, now I'm a little less worried...

1. The structure of the show gives the music time to breathe - I was worried all we'd be getting were Family Guy-esque stingers... but now it appears that there's space for full-on four-minute cues with themes that develop, ebb, and flow. I wonder if the First Contact quote (and the numerous others) is telling us something, or whether it's a simple case of McNeely's tendency to steal?
2. It doesn't sound like a parody cue, it sounds dead straight and serious and like it's underscoring something genuinely interesting and wondrous - giving me further hope that this show is going to be more than Family Guy In Space - it's going to be a serious sci-fi show with a very irreverent sense of humour - but it's going to know when it's time to laugh, and when it's time to tackle the deep stuff. Out with the 21st century grit and depression and doom and gloom, in with some larger-than-life 70s/80s theatrics.

The Orville has more potential than I think I've seen in any television sci-fi of the last twenty years.

I hope MacFarlane doesn't squander it...

So far every review is criticising that the show is more a serious drama than a comedy with "grand orchestral music" in the background. I have a good feeling about this :)

Also, on a postive note, a few months ago Holkenborg's score for Justice League was thrown out and Danny Elfman was called in... doesn't make sense to get him on board to replace Junk if you just force him to write pretty much the same crap but with prettier decorations.

OK, now I'm a little less worried...

1. The structure of the show gives the music time to breathe - I was worried all we'd be getting were Family Guy-esque stingers... but now it appears that there's space for full-on four-minute cues with themes that develop, ebb, and flow. I wonder if the First Contact quote (and the numerous others) is telling us something, or whether it's a simple case of McNeely's tendency to steal?
2. It doesn't sound like a parody cue, it sounds dead straight and serious and like it's underscoring something genuinely interesting and wondrous - giving me further hope that this show is going to be more than Family Guy In Space - it's going to be a serious sci-fi show with a very irreverent sense of humour - but it's going to know when it's time to laugh, and when it's time to tackle the deep stuff. Out with the 21st century grit and depression and doom and gloom, in with some larger-than-life 70s/80s theatrics.

The Orville has more potential than I think I've seen in any television sci-fi of the last twenty years.

I hope MacFarlane doesn't squander it...

I saw this ever since it was announced and the first trailer. I knew the score would be something serious and movie-like and calling of the old stuff because McFarlane is an aunthentic fan of classic scores and always, always, when he has the money and opportunity, does marvelous things like this. McFarlane is a huge avid orchestral lover like us. I honestly can't wait to see the show but I think it'll tank. Or be good at premiere and fall down at the rest of the season just like everything Fox does.. :/ It's not like McFarlane's haters aren't already on it since it was announced.

But what I love the most is the good callback to the music of antique sci-fi operas, the callback to Star Trek by Goldsmith, Silvestri.. really amazing. I *do* hope there's a soundtrack release! I do think they're callbacks/homages more than actual plagiarizing. Obviously McFarlane wanted this Orville to sound like the old sci-fi movies.

So far every review is criticising that the show is more a serious drama than a comedy with "grand orchestral music" in the background. I have a good feeling about this :)
The advertising has apparently been very misleading. Look at the list of episode directors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orville#Episodes

There isn't a single comedy director. They're all drama directors and most of them have previously directed episodes of Star Trek.


Edit: Kano's Nobunaga suite is listed as 22 minutes long. Please GSJ, don't be poor quality...

So, unfortunately GSJ has terrible quality recordings as usual. Here's the opening theme of Taishi for those curious: http://picosong.com/wsMG9/

They couldn't even stretch to stereo?! Wow... What year is it, again?

Thank you very much, though... I'd still be very interested to hear this. I'd listen to Souhei Kano on an Edison cylinder if I had to...

All of the GSJ concerts sound like that. It's like they decided that that recording equipment wasn't necessary and just recorded everything using their smartphone (though even THAT would sound better).

If it was free, I'd rip all of it. Unfortunately, it isn't. Kano's 22-minute suite costs 2000 yen. It's available until the 12th.

Edit: here's the other track I have, from the GSJ Tanaka concert - http://picosong.com/wsMMw/

2000 yen, for twenty minutes of badly recorded music? Crikey...

I guess I'd be willing to stump up the money if you could show me an English-friendly please I could buy it?

TT

It's not English-friendly, or user-friendly, at all. It's only available on iOS/Android (no PC version) and it's all in Japanese. For this concert it required me to spoof my GPS to check-in near a certain location in Japan. On top of that, the video has DRM so you can't simply download and play it - it only loads within the app. The working method that I've found is to load the app through an Android emulator (Bluestacks) and record the audio using Audacity.

Getting into xiami seems so quaint now...


Btw any chance we can get our hands at Akifumi Tada's Zunda? It either has a small orchestral ensemble or really good samples judging by the mixing video.

This new score by Robin Hoffmann sounds promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEOwQdjOqO0

The directors say the film is still a while away. Next year at least.

Sahashi scores yet another project this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WWuxdVzTzg

I don't see his name anywhere.

Official website confirmed :)

http://tenkousei-netflix.jp/

Fascinating!

Certainly. This sounds straight out of his early Tokusatsu/Anime years and thank god the show seems to be campy as hell. It airs as a finished product and the recording was probably earlier this year. Netflix shows usually get soundtrack releases. Don't know who has the rights in this case though.

EDIT: Never really checked FMP:IV website before but Sahashi's name also appears. Quite the resurgence then after nearly six years of absence. And no penny-pitcher projects either. In addition a new Hitman Reborn project as well as a new Sacred Seven project could still happen in the coming months. There's also the chance he is attached to the new Saint Seiya projects, either the one netflix produces or the female warrior project. I just hope he can set a good note with Sword of Themis and make Soen no Kantai merely a spark and appetizer for the big fire.

Never really checked FMP:IV website before but Sahashi's name also appears.

Officially? He's listed as composer?

So, two possibilities:

1. He's coming back and I'm utterly wrong...
2. There will be no original score for the show - they will re-use Sahashi's music from the previous seasons.

Since the show looks like it's got a bit of money behind it, I'm going to tentatively suggest perhaps "1" is the most likely???

If it transpires that this is indeed Sahashi's comeback (I might be an eternal pessmist but I want to believe more than anybody) the fascinating questions begin: WHY? Why did he decide suddenly that he didn't want to do any of this stuff any more, and then suddenly decide that he did again? How can you go from no substantial scores in years to two, three, four, five multiple scores potentially all drowning in budget, in the space of a few months? Has Sahashi been turning down work for all these years, and with the offers still coming in, simply stopped turning them down?

I hope something in all these new scores re-ignites something in him and he says to himself, "Hold on, this stuff is fun..." - having Sahashi back on a regular basis writing crap would, in many ways, be worse than the guy simply retiring. The handful of things he's done in the last decade have all been marked by budgetary limitations (not Sahashi's fault) and a sense of utterly lazyness (very much Sahashi's fault) - like he was voluntarily not making the effort any more. Was he being asked to tone it down? Did he find the work involved in writing music to his usual standard to be too time-consuming and made a conscious effort to "streamline" or did he simply got pessimistic and think "Well, nobody really cares about this stuff, so why am I busting my balls writing all these big scores?"

I thought him working on Kyoryuger was the start of the big comeback - and it was a functional score, but listening to it you can almost see Sahashi sitting at his desk thinking "Fucking Sentai, what the hell am I doing with my life?" - couple that with his blog posts saying how surprised he was to be asked to work on it because he considered himself "too old" to work on a programme for youngsters... and I really thought that was that.

Let's hope something good comes of the numerous leads that have appeared.

Look what I found. Didn't see this being uploaded here.

https://jenie.co/album-yoko-kanno-yoko-kanno-onna-joshu-naotora-ongaku-tora-no-maki-niitora-mp3/

Oh, and btw have you guys heard of Takashi Harada? He composed the ost for Tree of Palme.
Ondes martenot + orchestra! https://mega.nz/#!fw4lUD5A!21n_Uq6lTssjnFILoYGbMIqqsfuhWW2NsCdbcqZt32o

Also, on a postive note, a few months ago Holkenborg's score for Justice League was thrown out and Danny Elfman was called in... doesn't make sense to get him on board to replace Junk if you just force him to write pretty much the same crap but with prettier decorations.Might just be scheduling conflicts. Elfman's work in the past 15 years has been nothing to write home about, and I was shocked to find out that horrific music in the horrifically awful "Dark Universe" trailer was his handiwork. Such a shame considering he wrote three of my favorite soundtracks of all time, but that Elfman retired a long time ago.

Still, HE was the one who gave Batman his signature sound. Maybe that will be enough to get a rise from him. But given the current state of both Elfman and Hollywood, I doubt it would be any better if he was replaced with either Junkie or Giacchino or even Bates.

EDIT: Oh, so Holkenborg was indeed fired. But at the same time, it was also because Hack Snyder was replaced Joss Whedon, who worked with Elfman on Age of Ultron. Expect something of that quality, I guess.

Btw any chance we can get our hands at Akifumi Tada's Zunda? It either has a small orchestral ensemble or really good samples judging by the mixing video.

I hope so too but I dunno how often people share stuff from events like where it sold at.

Officially? He's listed as composer?
His name is on the website (it's been there for a while) but it's just something related to the original series. Season 4 still doesn't have a composer.


Btw any chance we can get our hands at Akifumi Tada's Zunda? It either has a small orchestral ensemble or really good samples judging by the mixing video.
Apparently he had no budget so he just decided to do everything himself. Booklet credits:

Composed, Arranged, Recorded, Mixed, Flute, Recorder, Horn, Trumpet, Trombone, Percussions, Guitars, Electric Bass, Violin, Viola, Vocaloid UTAU Programming and All Synth Programming: Akifumi Tada

His name is on the website (it's been there for a while) but it's just something related to the original series. Season 4 still doesn't have a composer.

Ah, so wishful thinking again.


Apparently he had no budget so he just decided to do everything himself. Booklet credits:
Composed, Arranged, Recorded, Mixed, Flute, Recorder, Horn, Trumpet, Trombone, Percussions, Guitars, Electric Bass, Violin, Viola, Vocaloid UTAU Programming and All Synth Programming: Akifumi Tada

HAHAHA, wow... Now I *really* want to hear this score... :D

His name is on the website (it's been there for a while) but it's just something related to the original series. Season 4 still doesn't have a composer.

Oh, this is what happens if translation software doesn't work. Wishful thinking indeed.
Still, I bet everything that he returns, the PV has his music, the new specials have his music and the new radio drama has his music ... and he is returning to the recording studio conductor's chair this year... if suddenly Go Sakabe is announced I will be bewildered at least.



Composed, Arranged, Recorded, Mixed, Flute, Recorder, Horn, Trumpet, Trombone, Percussions, Guitars, Electric Bass, Violin, Viola, Vocaloid UTAU Programming and All Synth Programming: Akifumi Tada

No Cello, no Bass, no Tuba, no Oboe, no Clarinet, no Basson... if he could have done em all I would have actively put him in Guinness :D



EDIT: Remember the time when I talked about how the New Japan BGM Philharmonic Orchestra and JAGMO would be more than willing to perform for Anime and Game projects in the future if all goes well. Turns out it happened sooner than I expected:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F48LLeLAAs8 (recorded with the NJBP)

They are also releasing their first CD recording soon.

No Cello, no Bass, no Tuba, no Oboe, no Clarinet, no Basson... if he could have done em all I would have actively put him in Guinness :D

He did Skip Beat! and Juden-chan All by himself, maybe Tokyo Underground but I dunno about that one.
I think it's nuts the result you can get by doing everything by yourself.

*sigh*

Why does one of the best composers in Japan barely score anything, and on the scores he *does* write end up filling the role of every member of the orchestra himself, just to get some semblance of a live ensemble, while they'll give Hiroyuki Sawano score after score after score and dozens and dozens of string players so it sounds "more epic" when they're all playing the same note in unison? :(

^You know why. Just be glad there is only one Sawano and one Yokoyama in Japan and not a large company dedicated to mass producing them like here in the west.

@Tango: To be fair, Zunda is an indy project AND he's even more of a nutcase than Kow Otani.

Sawano scores high profile shows that give a generous music budget to every composer regardless of talent so we have the funny situation that everyone from Sawano's projects expects from a composer to work with an orchestal ensemble and yet the composer in question evidentely has no idea what he's doing (or he's just trolling, afterall he can notate and play drums and piano). There's also some moments in his scores where I almost become convinced he does all this as a delibertae choice. But then I remember from the videos its probably just the orchestrator/ghostwriter who makes this mess listenable. And it sometimes is quite the enjoyable mess. But everyone in production and recording goes along with it because that's just the way things work (and the paycheck does not differentiate between Kanno and Sawano).

@Zipper: As crazy as it sounds I would actually single out Sawano and declare he pretty much does his own unique thing. Also whats up with the pure orchestral piece in the recent Seven Deadly Sins trailer, another collaboration?

The equivalent to RC would actually be Yokoyama, Tsutsumi, Hayashi and Ryo Kawasaki and even then i've heard a decent orchestral piece from all of them and Kawasaki is classically trained and can write quite good funk and jazz which makes it all the more frustrating they are not trying harder. But take Tatsuya Kato as an example of a reverse trend. He started out sounding like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5eDVHjLGY8) and now he actually tries to put in more and more decent pieces (http://picosong.com/wwFk9/) and sounds way more conventional with every new score he writes.



EDIT: Checked out UQ Holder and Haneoka does some nice string writing but the heavy focus on strings and piano usually means no budget for winds and brass but the PV at least featured a real trumpet and some winds so I hope they could replace that incredibly outdated Horn sample with the real thing.

^You know why.

That was a rhetorical question. ;)


To be fair, Zunda is an indy project AND he's even more of a nutcase than Kow Otani. Sawano scores high profile shows that give a generous music budget to every composer regardless of talent.

My point was someone genuinely good is on projects with no budget to the extent where he has to fulfil literally every role in the entire music department, from composer, arranger, copyist, performer, producer, recording engineer and more, doing the jobs of twenty or thirty different people, but someone terrible is having money and budget and work literally shoved down his throat.

Tatsuya Kato remains frustrating in the extreme. The guy could be magnificent, but like Keiji Inai we are only getting to hear passing fragments of potential ("If only...") rather than scores that are genuinely up there.

Nice to hear that he's not a one-trick-pony, though! I wish someone would take a chance and give him a prestige score.

@Tango: To be fair, Zunda is an indy project AND he's even more of a nutcase than Kow Otani.
@Zipper: As crazy as it sounds I would actually single out Sawano and declare he pretty much does his own unique thing. Also whats up with the pure orchestral piece in the recent Seven Deadly Sins trailer, another collaboration?

How are they nutcases? And he's with Takafumi Wada so maybe that's why.

Just a bit of hyperbolic speech ;)

I do believe however they are a bit on the crazy side. Especially Tada, because you have to be a special kind of genius to record (and be good at) EVERY INSTRUMENT EVER and sacrifice months of your life for projects on the weird side of the anime medium you can only really appreciate if you are ballsdeep into it (judging by his twitter he most certainly is). I checked the booklets of his other scores and holy hell! Aside from Basson and Bass he has played them all!!!!

The madman!

Well, I've watched the first episode of The Orville. It's very telling - how badly the rot has set in over the years - that it took me a while to "adjust" to hearing that kind of music in a show that felt very modern. In the first five or ten minutes of the episode, the score felt unusual and almost uncomfortable at times. But once I'd re-aligned my brain to the idea of a completely earnest and serious score that *ALSO* fell straight out of a 1980s timewarp, well, wow... what a ride.

Bruce Broughton... sounds as though no time has passed, he's just said "Ah, right, a sci-fi score, I can do that" and off he went; it's scored like a movie, and the show itself is paced like a movie at times, as well. There are lengthy beauty shots. There is a homage to the Enterprise Flyby in Star Trek The Motion Picture. If I were to make one, small criticism... he overplays the main theme in the score. It turns out to be a very versatile theme, but there were a couple of times where I was watching and thinking "I bet we're going to hear that god-damn theme again..." and suddenly, DAAH DAAH, DA DA DA DAAH! I think a big theme like that needs to be held back, so it doesn't outstay its welcome. If you're getting a big triumphant burst of it every thirty seconds, scoring scenes where nothing's happening but some guy walking down a corridor and looking out the window, it's going to have less of an impact if you hear it later as a genuine pay-off. John Williams is the master of that - crafting long themes and then only feeding you fragments of them, building up internal tension, and then finally letting go with the whole thing, hell for leather. I feel almost like Broughton allowed a tiny bit of "WOW I'M WRITING A SCORE WITH THEMES AGAIN AFTER TWENTY SODDING YEARS!" exuberance to seep through.

This is a minor, minor complaint in the greater scheme of things; in 2017, America has given us an INSTANT CLASSIC symphonic science fiction score, not a pastiche, not a "funny" score, for TELEVISION no less, on a live action show. Gentlemen, if this can happen, anything can happen.

I almost - ALMOST - fell for the reviews. It's a rip-off of Star Trek. MacFarlane is an idiot. It's not funny. Etc, etc, etc. But I really, REALLY enjoyed it. It seems as if the tone is exactly as I wanted - it's not a comedy, it's not a comedy drama, it's a drama with humour; a serious show which deals with serious issues with gravitas but the people in it are real people. Humans do banter. Some of the characters in The Orville know each other, some don't, but it's the first time I've ever seen a starship crew portrayed as basically very competent but at the same time they're just there because it's their day job. They want to know what they can get away with while they're on duty, they want to know how their new boss is going to be compared to their old boss, and they get pissed off if they end up working overtime. That's not comedy... it's real life. Ed and his ex-wife bicker... exactly like a divorced couple forced by circumstances to work together. They try to drag inappropriate people into their fight... exactly like a divorced couple.

The show feels very familiar and brand new at the same time. It's not a spoof. It's not a rip-off. It's a show that takes place in a future which turned out sort-of the way it did in Star Trek. The pilot episode of anything is always difficult; it's got to establish a world, establish some characters, give them all a bit of development so you can see where they're heading, give you something to get excited about, create and resolve some conflict, start and finish a story, AND let you know it's holding back so you'll want to watch the next episode. Somehow, this manages to achieve that in a pretty elegant way. The writing is modern, but the production is deliciously old-fashioned.

I really, really like it. :D

Thanks for the review, tango. I'll be sure to check out the first episode, if only for the music. :)


Just a bit of hyperbolic speech ;)

I do believe however they are a bit on the crazy side. Especially Tada, because you have to be a special kind of genius to record (and be good at) EVERY INSTRUMENT EVER and sacrifice months of your life for projects on the weird side of the anime medium you can only really appreciate if you are ballsdeep into it (judging by his twitter he most certainly is). I checked the booklets of his other scores and holy hell! Aside from Basson and Bass he has played them all!!!!

The madman!
The world of Touhou also has one of those kind of geniuses. Sakana Nakasako of Ringing Volcano plays almost every instrument (he owns over 100 instruments).

If you look at one of his recent albums:
Sakana Nakasako: Various Recorders / Various Cornamuses / Whistle / Flute / Oboe / Clarinet / Bassoon / Various Saxophones / Ocarina / Acoustic Guitar / Classical Guitar / 12-string Guitar / Electric Guitar / Baritone Ukulele / Balalaika / Acoustic Bass Guitar / Electric Bass / Glockenspiel / Xylophone / Glass Harp / Taishogoto / Harp / Coded Zither / Dulcimer / Piano / Keyboard Harmonica / Andes / Accordion / Keyboard / Celesta / Toy Piano / Drums / Caj�n / Snare Drum / Cymbal / Bass Drum / Shaker / Triangle / Tambourine / Udu / Suzu / Finger Cymbal / Spring Drum / Bell / Spoons / Flexatone / Goose Flute / Bongo

In this one he plays everything except for strings and flute: https://soundcloud.com/nakazako/jarimichi

I think you have to be a bit crazy to dedicate yourself to something as niche as Touhou music. I guess anime is the same way for some people.

Orville: For me (as an avid lover of SciFi concepts) the ship designs are too generic and some comedic moments felt flat, other than that, I enjoyed it as well. MacFarlane is no Patrick Steward but he does okay. Some pretty cool concepts and homages and the score is wonderfully old-fashioned seafaring and operatic music. Still, I have to compare it to Galaxy Quest (film and score) which is still my gold standard in tone of mixing comedy with drama and it just misses some spark to compete with it. Not the greatest show or score ever made but compared to what is the standard these days, this is fantastic music for a good show that is full of optimism. Now if David Newman would please return for the new Galaxy Quest :D


@nextday: In this case I mean craziness in the most wonderful way. For all of the global exposure, Anime (and I count Touhou as a part of it) is still an incredibly exclusive and small industry that is primarly driven by incredibly passionate people where like five producers out there can actually aquire the funding for a real orchestra, which is why so many scores are recorded in tincan studios, the industry simply doesn't have the money (yet) on the whole to give all those passionate and talented composers budgets.

In truth, from all the shows that air each season, 70% are only really meant and produced for an audience of like 500 people that will buy the Blu-Rays to make a return of investment. But look what those circumstances produced in the last 20 years regardless: Great score after great score.

I still see it as an industy of mostly passionate people and if Netflix and other companies like Cygames can give some actually funding to these people, that could produce truely marvelous results in the coming years. So far their Japanese branch aquires talented directors, artists and composers (if they can actually pull and push Sahashi back on the scene, all bets are off). I hope this also means more and more original anime (like Izetta, Princess Principal and Flip Flappers) made by new studios on the rise that are distributed on streaming services and finally do away with the outdated broadcasting model, and give all those studios, all those creative, skilled and talented artists not an endless assembly line of Light-novel trash they have to put in all their passion to make it work and give it gravitas (Re:Zero as a prime example) but put their passion into something they actually want to make or adapt of their own volition (Studio 3hz and Kyoani come to mind).

I hope.

So far their Japanese branch aquires talented directors, artists and composers (if they can actually pull and push Sahashi back on the scene, all bets are off). I hope this also means more and more original anime (like Izetta, Princess Principal and Flip Flappers) made by new studios on the rise that are distributed on streaming services and finally do away with the outdated broadcasting model, and give all those studios, all those creative, skilled and talented artists not an endless assembly line of Light-novel trash they have to put in all their passion to make it work and give it gravitas (Re:Zero as a prime example) but put their passion into something they actually want to make or adapt of their own volition (Studio 3hz and Kyoani come to mind).
Fun fact: The director of Re:Zero started out at KyoAni as an assistant to Yutaka Yamamoto (director of Fractale). I don't think it's a coincidence.

Disclaimer: This rant is not directed at anyone here.

I see over at FSM, where I had been hoping to read some meaningful discussion about the score, the anti-MacFarlane Mafia are out as usual and behaving like self-righteous children. I get that not everyone likes the guy, but I do not understand why there seems to be this competition going on - who can come up with the most condescending, dismissive denouncement of Seth MacFarlane? Why is this? Because one of his shows took the piss out of something you like, or believe should be sacred and beyond satire? You've never seen it but you're jumping on the bandwagon and it's currently "fashionable" to attack his stuff? You're so far up your own arse that you simply can't bring yourself to laugh at a fart joke? You stop listening the moment something offends you and you then ignore the whole? Either way...

The Orville has been badly, badly marketed. It's been advertised as a send-up of sci-fi shows. It is not that. It's a straight sci-fi show that makes no secret of its desire to live in the same "space" as Star Trek, and has a specific brand of humour. Let's not forget that Star Trek had humour, and it varied from utterly cringe-worthy (Worf dresses up as a cowboy on the Holodeck, and Troi puts on an atrocious "wild-west" accent) to fairly successful (Quark leads a mission to rescue his mother from the Dominion) - and that episode was almost entirely a comedy from start to finish - it had visual humour, wordplay, black comedy, gallows humour, and even straight slapstick. Star Trek wasn't a comedy, and every single event in that (very funny) episode derived completely naturally from the scenario and the characters. It was funny because they were funny.

The Orville is not a comedy. A comedy is written to make you laugh. It has gags, and it puts humour ahead of story. This is a sci-fi drama with a sense of humour; you may laugh along the way, but it's about the story. Sometimes in the course of living through the story, the characters say stuff that might make you laugh. Sometimes they're *trying* to be funny, but they fail - for instance, Mercer's awkward conversation with Bortus - the joke isn't Mercer's line about frequently going to the toilet - it's that Bortus is unremittingly serious and deadpan whilst Mercer is trying - in vain - to make small talk and in doing so digs a deeper and deeper hole. I've seen people criticise the "two or three times a night" joke as poor, and I have to ask in all seriousness, do those people understand humour on a level more sophisticated than The Three Stooges? Mercer looks uncomfortable and quickly changes the subject - because he realises that his attempt to connect with Bortus with a joke didn't work and he now looks stupid. The scene was character development, exposition, with some coincidental humour. It was not a comedy skit. It's a trademark of MacFarlane's humour - you can like it or not like it, but you have to understand the intention.

The Orville is not a spoof. It doesn't make fun of Star Trek.

No, the ship designs aren't going to win any originality prizes - but do they need to? This is a show with a very clear message - we like things the way they used to be done, and we're doing it that way.

I definitely see the Galaxy Quest connection, but Galaxy Quest was a comedy. The show-within-a-show was deliberately poking fun - affectionate fun - but fun nonetheless - at the genre. The movie was about something inherently ridiculous. There's nothing in The Orville that I don't think could reasonably happen in the real world. If the world heads in that direction, we're going to have spaceships flying around, and we're going to have stoners, drunks, bickering couples, workmates being friends, smartasses, people who think they're funny but they're not, joyless and overly serious people, and show-offs. We're going to have people working on spaceships who'd rather be in a bar or a strip-club than at work.

I really like the scene where Aronov yells at Mercer and Grayson for cracking jokes and not taking the quantum field seriously.

Sawano scores high profile shows that give a generous music budget to every composer regardless of talent so we have the funny situation that everyone from Sawano's projects expects from a composer to work with an orchestal ensemble and yet the composer in question evidentely has no idea what he's doing (or he's just trolling, afterall he can notate and play drums and piano). There's also some moments in his scores where I almost become convinced he does all this as a delibertae choice. But then I remember from the videos its probably just the orchestrator/ghostwriter who makes this mess listenable. And it sometimes is quite the enjoyable mess. But everyone in production and recording goes along with it because that's just the way things work (and the paycheck does not differentiate between Kanno and Sawano).

As crazy as it sounds I would actually single out Sawano and declare he pretty much does his own unique thing. Also whats up with the pure orchestral piece in the recent Seven Deadly Sins trailer, another collaboration?

The equivalent to RC would actually be Yokoyama, Tsutsumi, Hayashi and Ryo Kawasaki and even then i've heard a decent orchestral piece from all of them and Kawasaki is classically trained and can write quite good funk and jazz which makes it all the more frustrating they are not trying harder. But take Tatsuya Kato as an example of a reverse trend. He started out sounding like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5eDVHjLGY8) and now he actually tries to put in more and more decent pieces (http://picosong.com/wwFk9/) and sounds way more conventional with every new score he writes.Sawano is no doubt more talented than the schlock he's been putting out since Guilty Crown, but that doesn't excuse his laziness. He doesn't fare well compared to Zimmer. Sawano gave us Gigantic Formula and Gundam Unicorn, both very competent scores. But Zimmer gave us Backdraft, Lion King, Prince of Egypt, and a handful of others, all of which floor Sawano at his best. And unlike Zimmer, Sawano makes no attempt to give any of his works a different identity. Yes, Zimmer's recent scores have been essentially dipping more into sound design than actual music, but you will never confuse the sound of Inception with that of Interstellar. Zimmer may be a sound designer, but Sawano is just a J-pop artist.

Tatsuya Katou is the Bear McCreary of Japan. Both are classically trained and technically very competent, but their music is bland and tepid, filled to the brim with modern Hollywood cliches, and no distinct individual identity. McCreary worships Herrmann and Kato worships Iwasaki, but both attempts at emulating their idols fall flat by comparison. And yet they both keep getting very decent shows to work on that any other competent composer would love to have, only to squander it all with rubbish and the occasional one or two good cues. They are much better than Yokoyama and Bates, but nothing more than watered down versions of their predecessors.

Hayashi is Japanese John Powell, far more skilled than Sawano and Zimmer, but still follows the same RC musical philosophy.


As for Orville, it's about what I expected. Not so much a comedy or a serious standalone sci-fi work, it's just a way for MacFarlene to cosplay as Captain Kirk and have his own Star Trek show. I guess if you like him, you'll like the show. But it leaves me cold.

I actually wonder what the deal with MacFarlane is. I mean the man can freaking sing, is a friend of John Williams and performed together with him. Why is it that at a film score board, the one thing that isn't brought up in "discussion" is his musical credentials and the scores he puts into his projects. The whole Orville thread is the reason I pretty much gave up on FSM... pages after pages of MACFARLANE and only a couple of sentences about the actual score, with no insight whatsoever other than some fuckwits calling him racist.

No comparison to Lost in Space and an examination of Broughtons Main Themes, no rejoicing he returned (with old age) to show everyone in Hollywood how its done. It's all just self-indulged special snowflakes fighting over attention. If that is the general nature of film score enthusiasts today, no wonder classical film music is dying. If Tadlow struggles to sell even a 1000 CDs for Ben-Hur, it's practically a niche within a niche interest now.


I understand your frustration Tango, but how about you post it over there where it will actually sting ;)

And no, there are comedy skits in the show, like the video screen scene for example... just a comedic moment but a moment that felt flat. And Galaxy Quest had a point... the ultimate scene of the film is the one where the actors reveal their identities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VGajDTNKFU

That tone the movie strikes is the perfect symbiosis of drama and comedy for me. The action scene that follows is a legit good action scene with Newman firing up the guns.



@Zipper: I actually thought about it very much but all those comparison we like to do (that I really like to do) probably won't do us any good in the end. We can compare on a superficial level all we want but if we really examine Sawano, then it becomes clear he is not Zimmer. In fact, he has nothing to do with him in anyway if I really think about it. He doesn't sound like early Zimmer, he doesn't sound like 2000s Zimmer and he doesn't sound like the sound design monster he became this decade. Sawano uses electronics and rock elements but that's where the similarities end.

Even on a Meta level the comparison does not work. Sawano hasn't ruined anything, he works with directors that direct projects that aim for the Teenage Crowd (Tetsuro Araki of Death Note and HotD fame, Hiroyuki Imaishi of Gurren Lagann fame and Ei Aoki of Fate/Zero fame) and he hits that spot perfectly. But beyond working with directors that made some of the greatest TV anime shows in my opinion, he has hardly any influence outside of that one Xenoblade spin-off game. Yes, he scored Gundam, but Gundam became a series where young and upcoming composers can get a chance to show what they are made off very early on.

Likewise Kato is not comparable to Bear McCreary. McCreary prefers percussion overall and loves Taikos and dark moody broody tone with ethnic instruments (which makes him just like all other Hollywood composers). Kato loves Fl�gelhorn and a lofty tone mixed with some adventurous sprit. In action he always puts the accents on rythm and not melody. But sometimes he scores action with a bit more ebb and flow and he also did a good orchestral arrangement of Debussy and Ravel. I can't compare them but if I had to rate them I would put Kato above McCreary in terms of personal enjoyment.

I would also say Zimmer (or his army of ghostwriters to be exact) is far more skilled than Hayashi (at the moment). Zimmer has arranged classical works numerous times in his work, from Gladiator to Lone Ranger. You can give him a lot of shit for the things he does but having poor taste in music is not one of them.

^Whenever I make these "Japanese composers and their western equivalent" it's always based on their approach to music and reputations rather than the actual sound of their music. In terms of popularity Sawano is easily the most popular composer in Japan right now after Joe Hisaishi- his name was even put on the list of potential people who would be performing at the 2020 Olympics along with the likes of Hisasihi and dozens of popular Japanese rock and pop bands and idol groups. It's a direct Williams vs. Zimmer situation. Even then, I have to disagree with you on Sawano sounding nothing like Zimmer- his style is directly based on the late 2000s Inception/Dark Knight palette:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvL-VbPUJjM

In recent years he's focused more on his J-Pop/Rock side with his vocalists (nZk). But even in Linkin Park territory, the core his music still heavily draws from Zimmer. Uplifting and blaring strings and horns playing all at once, banging percussion and buzzing electronics with screeching electric guitars, and a rather pop-like simplicity to the composition.

Kato can love whatever horns he wants, but that doesn't stop his music from being 80% background percussion loops like McCreary. But once again, I was not directly referring to the sound of their music. The proteges of Elmer Bernstein and Katsuhisa Hattori and this is the best they can come up with?

Zimmer is quite talented. I don't know if any other untrained composer could have came up with something like Backdraft as their debut with a full orchestra.

Orville left me cold as well in the same way that a lot of A Million Ways to Die in the West left me cold. Musically it was refreshing to hear woodwinds flourish for once in a TV show. I may give it a second chance after the pilot because pilots are generally crap but I'm not holding my breath.

Sawano has handily wiped the floor w Zimmer his entire career lmao. The former is capable of actually writing music that sounds like it has a pulse.Hoe you manage to make a movie where Superman punches bloked thru buildings sound like the world's most obnoxiously amped funeral dirge, I have no idea, but Zimmer's boring ass always finds a way.

It's no more a comedy than The Force Awakens. It's pretty much the standard that an action/adventure/sci-fi has to hit comedic beats to keep things relatable to general audiences.

The score was great. A little heavy on the main theme, but that's to be expected in the first episode.

Do the senior citizens at FSM remember Star Trek TNG's first season? Probably not.

I am so bored waiting for Eva 4.0, and/or decent new music from Sagisu, that I took matters into my own hands. Only, I thought, if I was channeling Sagisu, I only had one option:

https://soundcloud.com/modalrealist/decisive-battle

Disclaimer: This rant is not directed at anyone here.

I see over at FSM, where I had been hoping to read some meaningful discussion about the score, the anti-MacFarlane Mafia are out as usual and behaving like self-righteous children. I get that not everyone likes the guy, but I do not understand why there seems to be this competition going on - who can come up with the most condescending, dismissive denouncement of Seth MacFarlane? Why is this? Because one of his shows took the piss out of something you like, or believe should be sacred and beyond satire? You've never seen it but you're jumping on the bandwagon and it's currently "fashionable" to attack his stuff? You're so far up your own arse that you simply can't bring yourself to laugh at a fart joke? You stop listening the moment something offends you and you then ignore the whole? Either way...

The Orville has been badly, badly marketed. It's been advertised as a send-up of sci-fi shows. It is not that. It's a straight sci-fi show that makes no secret of its desire to live in the same "space" as Star Trek, and has a specific brand of humour. Let's not forget that Star Trek had humour, and it varied from utterly cringe-worthy (Worf dresses up as a cowboy on the Holodeck, and Troi puts on an atrocious "wild-west" accent) to fairly successful (Quark leads a mission to rescue his mother from the Dominion) - and that episode was almost entirely a comedy from start to finish - it had visual humour, wordplay, black comedy, gallows humour, and even straight slapstick. Star Trek wasn't a comedy, and every single event in that (very funny) episode derived completely naturally from the scenario and the characters. It was funny because they were funny.

The Orville is not a comedy. A comedy is written to make you laugh. It has gags, and it puts humour ahead of story. This is a sci-fi drama with a sense of humour; you may laugh along the way, but it's about the story. Sometimes in the course of living through the story, the characters say stuff that might make you laugh. Sometimes they're *trying* to be funny, but they fail - for instance, Mercer's awkward conversation with Bortus - the joke isn't Mercer's line about frequently going to the toilet - it's that Bortus is unremittingly serious and deadpan whilst Mercer is trying - in vain - to make small talk and in doing so digs a deeper and deeper hole. I've seen people criticise the "two or three times a night" joke as poor, and I have to ask in all seriousness, do those people understand humour on a level more sophisticated than The Three Stooges? Mercer looks uncomfortable and quickly changes the subject - because he realises that his attempt to connect with Bortus with a joke didn't work and he now looks stupid. The scene was character development, exposition, with some coincidental humour. It was not a comedy skit. It's a trademark of MacFarlane's humour - you can like it or not like it, but you have to understand the intention.

The Orville is not a spoof. It doesn't make fun of Star Trek.

No, the ship designs aren't going to win any originality prizes - but do they need to? This is a show with a very clear message - we like things the way they used to be done, and we're doing it that way.

I definitely see the Galaxy Quest connection, but Galaxy Quest was a comedy. The show-within-a-show was deliberately poking fun - affectionate fun - but fun nonetheless - at the genre. The movie was about something inherently ridiculous. There's nothing in The Orville that I don't think could reasonably happen in the real world. If the world heads in that direction, we're going to have spaceships flying around, and we're going to have stoners, drunks, bickering couples, workmates being friends, smartasses, people who think they're funny but they're not, joyless and overly serious people, and show-offs. We're going to have people working on spaceships who'd rather be in a bar or a strip-club than at work.

I really like the scene where Aronov yells at Mercer and Grayson for cracking jokes and not taking the quantum field seriously.



It's a good show, it will find its audience.

BTW Intrada is doing a remastered release of Robot Jox. I don't know much about how it will turn out but hopefully they got access to some different tapes than previous releases.

Sawano has handily wiped the floor w Zimmer his entire career lmao.Please, feel free to share Sawano's Lion King here if you can.

Sawano has become that rock band next door that you commission the same song for you each time because it sells discs. Not because it has anything to do with the show itself. He is no different from the repetitive OP's and ED's you would see in anime. He is the personification of MTV in music form.

And to all these composers who are so eager to use vocals in their works in the vein of the pioneers of it (Kanno, Kawai, and Iwasaki), they must understand that the vocals are not the center of the music. They are treated like an instrument. This is something Sawano and Kato and pretty much everyone else who wants to do their own experiments has yet to understand.

And no, there are comedy skits in the show, like the video screen scene for example... just a comedic moment but a moment that felt flat.

Funny, that scene made me laugh out loud because I did the exact same thing, under similar circumstances, with my boss. We were in a Skype call (he's in Switzerland, I'm in London) and he was in the middle of telling me off for missing a deadline. He had the camera positioned so I could see three quarters of his face in the bottom right of the screen, a great deal of beige wall, a potted plant, and somebody else's desk. I asked him to move the camera because he looked weird. For me, the scene was character development (Mercer is bugged by small and trivial details) - yes, it was also a sly dig at the sci-fi trope of the imposing villain appearing on the viewscreen, centrally framed by some dark and ominous looking set design, but it managed to work - for me, at least. Dragging the Krill captain into their ex-couple's spat... was more about Mercer and Grayson's continued antipathy towards each-other - throughout the episode they used their former closeness to score points off each other, and pissed-off couples have a tendency to try to bring "unbiased" parties (friends who patently don't want to be there, bosses, workmates, occasionally fellow diners in restaurants, etc) to mediate or see it *their* way. It was also, by their own admission, an act of timewasting. Everybody has their style; Picard plays word-games with Tomalak, argues deliberately petty legal documents with the Sheliak, Kirk taunts Khan to provoke a reaction, Chekhov pretends the communicator isn't working so he can ignore orders, and Sisko puts up a hologram filter on his projected image so he appears to be a Kobheerian captain. Ed Mercer, on his maiden voyage and obviously not the greatest captain in the world, starts an argument with his ex-wife.

I don't know if I'm being subconsciously too kind to the show because its detractors have been so viciously over-critical - but I really like it and it seems to be *exactly* what I was hoping for. I'll be awaiting further episodes, as well as scores, with great interest... and if THIS doesn't get a huge CD release (20-25 minutes of score per episode x 13 episodes = a 4 CD set comfortably) there will be something badly wrong with the world. I'd buy it tomorrow, sight unseen, based on the first episode alone.

Finally, let's not forget that The Next Generation ploughed painfully through a season-and-a-half of relative clunkers before arguably reaching its potential in The Measure Of A Man... If The Orville is allowed to live (hopeful - despite almost universally crappy reviews, people seem to like the show) it will develop and change over time. To start off as strong as it did... when other shows that are now measured as "classics" had bad pilots and/or incredibly shaky first seasons... is encouraging to say the least. It's not perfect, but who ever thought it would be? I just hope it gets to run. For it to be an ongoing concern it its fifth season, five years from now, would be a very good thing.


Zimmer vs Sawano

My credentials as a passionate anti-Zimmer are well known, and Zimmer clearly wins the battle against Sawano. He has more range, better dramatic sensibility, a better sense of melody, and greater creativity. His company and the style it has forged have completely destroyed the orchestral score in Hollywood (Orville is the exception that proves the rule) but the guy is clearly a talented musician and the respect with which he treats the workers in his music factory is completely laudable.

That took a lot of effort to say, I can tell you...

lol

Please, feel free to share Sawano's Lion King here if you can.

How about Sawano's "At Worlds End"... point is, the Zimmer that did At Worlds End, Backdraft and Prince of Egypt is not comparable to Sawano, early and 2000s Zimmer is just leagues above him. Ok, maybe recent Zimmer is somewhat comparable but even then Zimmer sounds far more coherent, that track from Blue Exorcist is just a wall of noise, even though I don't enjoy late Zimmer he never did something so juvenile (at the time). Sawano drops a gigantous wall of noise with a stong "pulse" and the producers/directors of the show hire him for exactly that reason. Personally I think Araki would have been better served with Hirano as all of Sawano's work never topped the action scenes with Hirano's Low of Solipsism.

Ei Akoi is a competent modern action director but even the only time he struck gold (Fate/Zero) he did choose to go with an RC style score, albeit with Leitmotif and some pure orchestral pieces. Granted, it's one of Kajiura's best efforts (I'm warming up to her Princess score this season, she does know to write for strings afterall) but a Battle Royale of Ancient Heroes would have been prime material for a glorious score from the likes of Amano or Kanno. Nonetheless, his choices for composers make it clear that if you like classic film music, don't even bother with his projects.

Point is Sawano scores primarly dumb action for Teenagers, or at least what appears to be dumb action for Teenagers. And the target demographic doesn't necessarly listen to classical music when they're twelve, so if you want to sell your show to that crowd, from a business perspective, even though I absolutely hate it, it's understandable why he keeps getting the big work.



I am so bored waiting for Eva 4.0, and/or decent new music from Sagisu, that I took matters into my own hands. Only, I thought, if I was channeling Sagisu, I only had one option:

https://soundcloud.com/modalrealist/decisive-battle

Haha... you forgot the armada of E-Guitars, drum-kits and some saw patch underneath, then its modern EVA. Also, you need to do about a dozen variations of these before Eva 4.0 releases ;)

Ei Akoi is a competent modern action director but even the only time he struck gold (Fate/Zero) he did choose to go with an RC style score, albeit with Leitmotif and some pure orchestral pieces.Fate Zero did really take my by surprise at some points. Other than the choir, Kajiura moved away from her usual cliches in that one. The pieces using an orchestra are rather simple, but surprisingly effective. I don't think I've ever seen Sawano write anything that even comes close to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtGnzNvPS4E

Even with the percussion, the piece still has a clear melody and uses actual counterpoint in some parts- something rarely ever seen in a Kajiura piece and almost non-existent in Sawano's entire oeuvre. This is a piece I would consider being comparable to Zimmer's Backdraft.

Hirano's music is incredibly sophisticated, and I don't know if someone of Aoki's caliber would be able to use it properly. Tetsuro Araki used it with the subtlety of a sledgehammer in Death Note. Those two are like the Zack Snyder and Michael Bay of the anime industry.

Good think then the complete score gets released next week, with some unreleased tracks I missed on the bonus soundtrack.
I hope one day Hellsing gets a complete release as well, now Hayato Matsuo would have been perfect for F/Z if I think about it, as he absolutely loves to write dark, bombastic and tragic music.
Kajiura has some moments that shine in it but its still not as good as Xenosaga III which is still her best orchestral work. It still has far too much of her usual traps. However, it's perhaps the closest we got from her in terms of actual Leitmotif writing. Of course the score functions but its true the moments with Iskander have the most effort put into it.

In regards to Princess, I just don't understand how she keeps resorting to that broody synthy electronic sounds, when the Jazzy and classical tone of the other part of the score works against it. To me, that screams laziness. But then why not be content with writing 50 minutes of score and forget the other 50 minutes we get on the soundtrack that just cost time and are essentially filler? Kajiura is not Tanaka and Sahashi who could write 120 minutes on their worst day and it still would be interesting to listen to. Kajiura is not on that level. If I trim Fate/Zero down to 50 minutes I actually get a decent score. I wish she could have put more effort into the notes that count.

Yasunori Iwasaki is back with a colorful sci-fi anime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTzzXyRcGFw

It's nice to see that one of the less known Imagine veterans is still finding work.

Does anyone have his Change! Shin Getter Robo (http://picosong.com/wwy6F/) in FLAC?

EDIT: Nevermind, found it.

@nextday: I expect at least one BttF reference on the level of Manabi Straight. But I have concerns, almost all the anime he worked on this decade didn't get a release, most recently Momokyun Sword. Let's hope for the best.

Does anyone have his Change! Shin Getter Robo (http://picosong.com/wwy6F/) in FLAC?

aost should have it. They always have this weird stuff.

A preview of the "Star Trek: Discovery" theme.

Preview STAR TREK DISCOVERY's main title theme from composer Jeff Russo - Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b474uGkLJH8)

*vomits*

Okay, it isn't that bad, but it's every modern Hollywood callback theme in a nutshell a-la-Giacchino. A small chunk of the original main theme simplified into a motif, followed by an orchestra that does absolutely nothing.

Jeff Russo is a rock musician who has no business writing for an orchestra, much less for an iconic series like Star Trek. Luckily for him, you don't need to have any credentials to work as a film composer these days.

As soon as I heard the lazy 3 note string spiccato segment, I knew this was going to blow. The transition between 1:10-1:11 is Giacchino proportions of forced and terrible... ugh, time to go back and listen to that Orville theme again...

Well, let's start with the good.

1. There *is* a theme - Enterprise, anybody?
2. The Courage fanfare is there.
3. There is an orchestra -and words spoken during the session ("We'll start with the main title") imply that they're recording the score, not just the main title theme.

The bad...

1. It's a terrible, terrible theme.
2. It emulates Giacchino - badly.
3. Jeff Russo isn't a composer - and it shows.
4. It's full of that da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da shit that poor composers use when they can't think of anything else.
4.5. If you take out the Courage fanfare there is absolutely nothing interesting at all.
5. Please see 1.
6. Please see 5.
7. Please see 6.

My expectations were set to low that this crap is actually better than I was expecting - but only in the sense that I was expecting to be eaten by a pack of hungry and rabid dogs, and it turns out I'm only going to get shot by a firing squad.

Discovery = Star Trek 2009 on TV. There's endless conversation about "Don't worry, it's set in the original timeline!" - I don't care... From a production perspective, it's going to be far closer to the recent movies than to prior Trek series or movies pre 2002.

Oh, well... we've got The Orville.

[EDIT: Has anyone spotted the news that at least one of Debney's scores will include part for Blaster Beam, and will be played by Craig Huxley himself? WOW.)

[EDIT: Has anyone spotted the news that at least one of Debney's scores will include part for Blaster Beam, and will be played by Craig Huxley himself? WOW.)

The original BRAAAM! But also good (and sad) to know that some of the musicians that played on the old Star Trek movies are still alive. I hope MacFarlane could hire them all to give them one last good memory.

Jeff Russo is a rock musician who has no business writing for an orchestra, much less for an iconic series like Star Trek. Luckily for him, you don't need to have any credentials to work as a film composer these days.

I actually liked what Russo did for Fargo, but this is a major disappointment. There's even barely a theme there, and the transition is clumsily handled.

I just hope it isn't used in a "LOL, Star Trek!" way. Genuine integration of beam in score for dramatic effect, YES. Taking the piss, no. Based on what we've seen of the show so far, I trust it will be the former. There were parts of Broughton's score where he was absolutely making direct references to Star Trek (in the beauty-passes, and the "Is this it???" scene which was undoubtedly modelled after TMP) but I haven't picked any ironic or cynical musical choices. I hope the serious but funny show continues and doesn't morph into the stupid show.

Also... I don't mean to be a naysayer all the time... but is anybody else slightly concerned by the composer roster of The Orville? Broughton only scored the pilot and we've heard that already. Then we have Debney and McNeely, who I don't doubt for a moment will write something magnificent, but who are both notorious thieves - Debney not quite as bad as McNeely but still. The McNeely cue we've heard so far is GORGEOUS but it's a pouporii on a level with Kanno. It's Goldsmith, with a little bit of Williams harmony and Silvestri melody. But most significantly and most strangely, it's highly reminiscent of the "Goldsmith" movement (the third) of Andrew Pearce's Cinema Symphony. Broughton isn't known for plagiarism, but even he hangs a little close to the temp track at times... I worry what we're going to get from two composers who live and die by the temp track. (All that notwithstanding, I am SO GODDAMNED HAPPY to hear these kind of sounds in a modern score - and not just in passing nods to the past before going into some drab dubstep ostinato, but in full-throated, earnest statements. There are harmonies in the Episode 4 cue MacFarlane put on Soundcloud straight out of Williams' E.T, and others that go back even further - 2:15 is gorgeous...

I am not seeing Andrew Cottee mentioned anywhere officially any more, nor was he mentioned in scoring session reports - unless the sessions were only for the first few episodes and there are more sessions to come. I hope he's not out. He would be EXCELLENT at writing this kind of music.

The new Trek theme sounds like a high end sample library.

I worry what we're going to get from two composers who live and die by the temp track.I'm not passionate about Broughton/Debney/McNeely, but are you suggesting that they are not very good without a temp track to guide them?

The Super Mario Odyssey theme was orchestrated with real instruments in the Nintendo Direct!

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 seems like will have that sort of music, too.

---------- Post added at 04:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:48 PM ----------


I'm not passionate about Broughton/Debney/McNeely, but are you suggesting that they are not very good without a temp track to guide them?

I respect his opinion, but to me personally those composers are the best, specially Neely, I love his work. So gorgeous.. I assume he means that they just arrange live whatever they write first and don't make much changes or improvisations.

Broughton wrote Tombstone, a score that should be in everyone's repertoire. Silverado, Lost in Space and True Women are also an essential listen I would say. But as for the rest... well, it's all very good but not playing in the highest league of Hollywood composers.

McNeely and Debney do impressions of said A league and often rely on temp tracks (a piece of music that has been chosen for a scene during production (usually by a sound director) and is not affiliated with the original composer who mimics it without getting a lawyer's call) but really, that's mostly all they do. However, McNeely wrote Shadows of the Empire, the only other Star Wars score that I consider canon with John Williams Saga. And Debney gave us LAIR, the most purest distilled Hollywood bombast imaginable. Both had their highlights and I have high respect for them but to be honest the bulk of their work is just walking in the shadow of giants (A Million Ways to Die in the West is just an impression of Tombstone, not the real thing). That said, I take an impression of Goldsmith over anything that passes as film music these days. ST: Discovery being the most recent unpleasant example.



@Nintendo direct: The "cinematic" music of Xenoblade 2 sounds very good. The second piece in particular. Octopath Traveler sounds very nice as well, is it Revo again? Mario Odyssey has a full orchestra but its not the sound of Galaxy or Kingdom Rabbids and more in line with Super Mario 3D World. Not that I'm complaining.

Well, fine, Joel McNeely might be a hack but I love his work with Tinkerbell and others. As for Mario, point is, that it's got live instruments, and that makes me happy. Doesn't need to be full on Galaxy again. Just more aunthentic sound, makes me happy.

A hack he's certainly not! Just too on the nose with his inspiration ;)

Nintendo is actually very reliable to use live instrument for (almost) all their products nowadays. Even the rock tracks from Xenoblade feature a real orchestra.

Also a small anectode about Nintendo: Did you know they have all their iconic sound effect notated with correct pitch and on stupendously high-quality sheets, stored in their golden valve?
Kirkhope had to mimic various iconic themes and soundeffects by ear for Kingdom Rabbits and as soon as Nintendo did a quality-check, they send Kirkhope the correct notation of all their music and sound effects with basically the message "try again pls" :D

I still think till this day, that we would've gotten the better and more tolerable "Star Wars" score by McNeely in Rouge One... if we don't count points expecting that much for originality that is, and just craving more for a better and less insulting rendition to Williams legacy.

who is doing lost ark? this is exactly the type of big orchestral music this thread is about.the main theme (i guess?) has a strong silvestri 90s vibe.

If you talk about the (Asian, duh!) MMO I just jumped on a trailer and right now I hear JNH's Flying from Peter Pan. Oh, this will be fun. But unfortunately, too late, too tired, too bed...

According to this source (http://www.paultalkingtonmusic.com/the-lost-ark/), the music was composed by Yong Kim. Allan Wilson as conductor of a 104 piece orchestra, the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra. I'm hearing as I type this and... wowsers (https://youtu.be/irWuQ_gowkk).

Those three pieces on their page are neat. Nice brass chorale. ZERA 2.0?
I hope they release a soundtrack in the coming months/years.


On another note ANN put up a new interview of promising new TV anime director Amica Kubo, who made it her business to get Yasunori Iwasaki for her project. It should be noted that she plays the violin herself and studied orchestration. She needs to make it big!

Also another confirmation on the role of anime director:

"In Japanese anime, the director's seat is a position with a lot of authority. In America, they're more like a producer, but in Japan, the director is the most important role.

With this project, I had to check basically everything: the characters’ appearances, their clothing choices, accessories, colors, background art, and so on. I came up with the basic form of this series. They're not characters I originally came up with, but it is fun to develop them. I get a different kind of enjoyment from doing this compared to commercials. I've learned a lot from the veterans working on this project. It's very fun to make anime with such a skilled group of people."

The Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Hirofumi Kurita
Arranged by Noriyuki Iwadare

Download: https://mega.nz/#!QU8GULpI!V08e6lU9PhkCX2aDE4PB-ts4bdzYysDlvNfAn8SkHt0

Edit - updated with English localized tags

Oh wow, that was absolutely gorgeous. I'm halfway through and having a hell of a time. Thanks for the upload.

I'm not passionate about Broughton/Debney/McNeely, but are you suggesting that they are not very good without a temp track to guide them?

No, not at all - only that the latter two rarely, if ever, write a score that isn't substantially based on the temp track - which makes me wonder a) how good they really are, and b) how substantial their Orville scores will turn out to be.

It's sad that, as far as Hollywood goes, the composers I'd really have loved to hear get into an Orville score - Poledouris, Goldsmith, and Horner - aren't around any more.

There are other names that I'm sure we'd have all agreed were a shoe-in to work on this project, and they're curiously absent Silvestri (worked with MacFarlane on Cosmos), and most criminally Ron Jones (worked with MacFarlane on Family Guy and others, wrote the book on how Star Trek should sound in the late 80s) - WHERE ARE THEY??? What about Don Davis, or some of the other Star Trek alumni - Paul Baillargeon, Jay Chattaway, David Bell, John Frizzell, Mark McKenzine, or even the CRIMINALLY underrated (thanks to his "safe" scores written according to Rick Berman's restrictions) granddaddy of Trek music, Dennis McCarthy? Can you imagine if any of those guys came back and got to write essentially a Trek score under positive ENCOURAGEMENT to go big with themes and shameless 80s scifi showmanship? Why not REALLY go left-field and try to get Williams for an episode, or John Scott, or Arthur B Rubinstein? Or even go completely nuts and look east - imagine a Yamashita score for The Orville!

It seems churlish to complain...

Broughton isn't known for allowing the temp track to "bleed through" into the finished score but Debney and McNeely firmly are - they both write superb music but leave absolutely no confusion as to the source of their inspirations.

Vinphonic cited Lair as an example of Debney's fine work - and it is, but it's also (a substantial part of) obvious re-working of the temp track - as Vinphonic said, riding that fine line that will get you sued if you cross it.

Lair is the Star Wars prequels minus the Star Wars theme, with smatterings of Conan thrown in for colour.

We have never heard a Debney nor a McNeely score that isn't obviously substantially based on someone else's style, individual score, or specific piece of music.

They are the ultimate chameleon composers - stunningly skilled mimics, but their primary skills lie in adaptation - highly sophisticated adaptation, absolutely - and in changing things just well enough to avoid a lawsuit.

Their presence as sole announced composers on The Orville (Andrew Cottee's name appears and disappears off IMDB's Orville page several times a day now - is he working on the f***** thing or not?!) perhaps represents a missed opportunity... and I'm surprised at that, because Seth MacFarlane is the last person in the world I would've expected to miss THIS opportunity. I wonder if he plans to bring in these composers in subsequent seasons?

A nice thought, but I have this nasty feeling that The Orville will be shot in the face after its first season - and that if it does survive for a second, it will be under a more restricted budget. *ANY* orchestra on a TV series is a luxury in 2017, let alone a 75 piece orchestra - that's simply miraculous. If there are budget cuts, I can see MacFarlane fighting to keep the orchestra until his final breath - perhaps it will go down to Family Guy size. Who knows?

You are forgetting this is still a TV production, which has a less bigger budget than your average Hollywood movie. I'm sure McFarlane thought of those but for reasons, be it budget, friendly.. maybe he didn't want to get super serious with The Orville and just wanted mimic "nostalgic" music that sounds like scores from back then.

The Orville won't live for long, we gotta face it. First, it's a Fox show. Those are always doomed. Second.. this is.. very niche. Third, it's a.. McFarlane work, and somehow it's hip now to hate on whatever the guy works, and fourth, marketing has been shit making it look like shit. So.. yeah. I don't expect this show to last more than a season or two, sadly. But we might enjoy the probable soundtrack releases. The composers may be parrots, but still, you know it damn well, it's really nice to hear this kind of music in 2017, it lacks so much..

Thanks for Ace Attorney, nextday.

Have some cute orchestral music from the currently cutest little chamber orchestra, straight out of World Masterpiece Theater: DAWN (http://picosong.com/wweMe/)

Have some cute orchestral music from the currently cutest little chamber orchestra, straight out of World Masterpiece Theater: DAWN (http://picosong.com/wweMe/)
NJBP's orchestrator Nijuhachi Haneda has worked as an assistant to Yuzo Koshiro and he recently orchestrated the music for Pictlogica Final Fantasy (performed by New Japan BGM Philharmonic).

You are forgetting this is still a TV production, which has a less bigger budget than your average Hollywood movie. I'm sure McFarlane thought of those but for reasons, be it budget, friendly.. maybe he didn't want to get super serious with The Orville and just wanted mimic "nostalgic" music that sounds like scores from back then.

The Orville won't live for long, we gotta face it. First, it's a Fox show. Those are always doomed. Second.. this is.. very niche. Third, it's a.. McFarlane work, and somehow it's hip now to hate on whatever the guy works, and fourth, marketing has been shit making it look like shit. So.. yeah. I don't expect this show to last more than a season or two, sadly. But we might enjoy the probable soundtrack releases. The composers may be parrots, but still, you know it damn well, it's really nice to hear this kind of music in 2017, it lacks so much..

Nah, acutely aware of it... :)

Most of the guys I mentioned are almost completely or predominantly TV guys and barely get any work these days - they're not going to be asking for mega fees. The pure extravagances seen in the music department (three composers on board, all of them regulary working in film and not tiny indie movies, but big blockbusters) lead me to believe that music budget is particularly generous. On money-saving days, the Trek orchestra regularly dropped down to 30-40 players and only hit 60 on special occasions - but the Orville orchestra is a full-strength symphony of 75. There is obviously cash to spare. You pay your composer per episode, so whether you have one composer doing every episode or 13 different composers doing an episode each, your composer cost is going to be roughly the same. There might be a slight increase in overhead, but compared to the music cost that is already being incurred it's probably not even significant.


marketing has been shit making it look like shit

Yeah... It's been marketed as fart jokes and weed on the Starship Enterprise, under the command of Captain Ted. Every scene in the trailer is carefully edited (even to the extent of adding comedy sound effects that aren't present in that actual show) to make this show seem like a dumb stoner comedy up there with "Dude, Where's My Car?" - downplaying (read - completely removing) the serious sci-fi and pushing the gags to the forefront. Fox didn't know how to sell this, so they sold it like Family Guy. FAIL.


Second.. this is.. very niche.

True again... Who is this for? Family Guy fans? Star Trek fans? Both? Neither? The subset of people who like both and want to see a show that combines elements from these two disparate genres?


But we might enjoy the probable soundtrack releases.

This HAS to happen... I honestly can't see a release not happening, thankfully - this may be one of those unusual circumstances where The Orville's music might appeal to a wider demographic than the show itself. (How many people have we seen saying stuff like "Seth MacFarlane is a c*** and this show looks like shit warmed up, but Bruce Broughton, Joel McNeely, and John Debney writing sci-fi scores for a 75 piece orchestra? SIGN ME UP!")

Can't wait for the score, and the show is interesting. I smell early cancellation though.

Most of the guys I mentioned are almost completely or predominantly TV guys and barely get any work these days - they're not going to be asking for mega fees. The pure extravagances seen in the music department (three composers on board, all of them regulary working in film and not tiny indie movies, but big blockbusters) lead me to believe that music budget is particularly generous. On money-saving days, the Trek orchestra regularly dropped down to 30-40 players and only hit 60 on special occasions - but the Orville orchestra is a full-strength symphony of 75. There is obviously cash to spare. You pay your composer per episode, so whether you have one composer doing every episode or 13 different composers doing an episode each, your composer cost is going to be roughly the same. There might be a slight increase in overhead, but compared to the music cost that is already being incurred it's probably not even significant.

You know, you got a point there, can't deny it. 75 piece orchestra, like a Hollywood feature.. definitely, I don't think budget might have been an issue, these guys could of been brought down to score if Seth had tried a bit.


Yeah... It's been marketed as fart jokes and weed on the Starship Enterprise, under the command of Captain Ted. Every scene in the trailer is carefully edited (even to the extent of adding comedy sound effects that aren't present in that actual show) to make this show seem like a dumb stoner comedy up there with "Dude, Where's My Car?" - downplaying (read - completely removing) the serious sci-fi and pushing the gags to the forefront. Fox didn't know how to sell this, so they sold it like Family Guy. FAIL. True again... Who is this for? Family Guy fans? Star Trek fans? Both? Neither? The subset of people who like both and want to see a show that combines elements from these two disparate genres?

Yeah, it's sad that the show is doomed to fail just because of terrible marketing - and people hating on Seth as it is.. nowadays any comparison with Family Guy it's like comparing to the worst show ever. Regardless I think Seth will do an enjoyable show.



This HAS to happen... I honestly can't see a release not happening, thankfully - this may be one of those unusual circumstances where The Orville's music might appeal to a wider demographic than the show itself. (How many people have we seen saying stuff like "Seth MacFarlane is a c*** and this show looks like shit warmed up, but Bruce Broughton, Joel McNeely, and John Debney writing sci-fi scores for a 75 piece orchestra? SIGN ME UP!")

Because, let's face it, Tango. Even if the composers selected for the show are "phoned in".. or tend to mimic the great composers of yonders.. even if they aren't full original.. even if the fact that they won't go beyond and make something new dissapoints you, let's be honest. You're gonna like the score, mainly because, god, the kind of music for Orville is so nostalgic, and is the good film score music that lacks so much in 2017. The mimicking and lack of originality might make you feel bitter, but you'll listen to the score at least once or twice and enjoy it for the sheer nostalgia alone. :)

Anyone would think you were trying to say "Nothing makes you happy, you miserable bastard!" but in a much nicer way. ;)

You're not wrong, really. ;)

I think it's because this is one of those once-in-a-lifetime circumstances where you get the right kind of show, the right kind of director, the right kind of attitude towards music, and a seemingly limitless budget... I want this stuff to end up being no less than some of the greatest film music ever written.

I don't think they need to reinvent the wheel, or do something crazy different... I'm *very* happy with 80s throwback scoring if it's as honest and un-cynical as Broughton's pilot - it just seems a shame that we've got all these elements that are so right, and all the stars aligned to make this possible, and all the truly wonderful things that could happen under these circumstances... probably won't happen, at least to the extent they deserve to. If something like The Orville came around every five minutes, this would be a non issue because I'd say "Oh, well, nice score - can't wait to see what they do on the next show!" - but you could count on one hand the number of scores of the last twenty years that sound like this.

But you're absolutely right - I *am* going to love this, and I'm an instant guaranteed customer of any release, and I think I'm going to spin it more than once or twice... but my pessimistic mind would be thinking all the while "this could've been so much more" - and, for all we know, it's going to be another twenty years before someone takes a chance like this again. Broughton is 72. Debney is 61. McNeely is 58. By the time something like this happens again (if it ever does) there won't even be anyone around who can do it to *this* standard...

I wanted The Orville to be what Star Wars was in 1977. A high-profile project that took a big risk and did a big symphonic score just like they never do any more, and it captured the imagination of the public and made orchestral music cool again. As it turns out, the show is getting very mixed reviews, and pretty much the only time anybody is commenting on the music is to say that it sounds like it's ripping off Star Trek or it sounds weird in a modern show.

Big, big shame...

That reminds me, the first episode of The Orville has already premiered and I haven't checked it out. I'm gonna change that.

Speaking of Backdraft from the last page, does anyone know where this brass piece came from in Iron Chef? I'm assuming it's from Amano, but I don't know which work.

https://youtu.be/UHz4sW5nfJ4?t=2m13s

@Tango: I would say a similar tragedy did occour with the disasterous launch of LAIR. If the game had been phenomenal, Debney would have had a career as a video game composer, scoring dozens of scores with the LSO. At least we would have had a sequel. The game's disasterous state at launch ruined the entire company (Factor 5) who was just about to release Rogue Squadron Wii with H�lsbeck's orchestral score recorded with a full symphony orchestra that will now never see the light of day. If it had been a hit and went multiplatform more people could have been exposed to the "Classic Hollywood sound".

We now have essentially an impossible scenario, the music not only has to be one of the greatest film scores ever written, it must also be attached to an insanely high-polished product that is loved and goes viral as soon as the first trailer airs... good luck with that.



@Zipper: My first guess would be one of the Nobunaga games.

Yes, quite right... I remember the hype at the time of Lair. We weren't just thinking Debney would move over to video games - it was going to be nothing short of the beginning of a brand new genre where all the under-appreciated Hollywood composers suddenly found themselves in demand again. Lair died a death, and game music has got progressively worse - and, scary thought of the day, reached its peak with Michael Giacchino!

@Zipper - Yep, Nobunaga and both Kanno pieces - the brassy fanfare is "The Worthy Tiger" from Bushoufuunroku, the second more actiony piece is "Destructive Army" from Haouden. :) Here are both in FLAC format: https://mega.nz/#!8DpHyYjS!CgjAozBi-36ocOa0igjCDPyGRWb0o4BQ-h-JQ0OykrQ

Yep, it is Nobunaga. I have it listed as Bushoufuunroku - 18_-_the_worthy_tiger_-_last_volume.mp3

Edit: You beat me to it by like 30 seconds. :D

---------- Post added at 09:28 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:00 AM ----------

Kind of related, has anyone managed to find the third Naotora OST? The clips sound great, but there does seem to be some narration going on in a few of the tracks.

It was posted here in this thread a couple of weeks now - it's scraping the bottom of the barrel, but there are a few good cues. :)

Thread 57893

Thanks! Somehow I glanced right over it.

It's been a while since I last posted here, mostly owing to me being a bit sick round the end of August and my own personal anxiety towards writing this particular post (there wasn't really an issue, beyond just being nervous as to how I was going to say what I wanted to say). Well, I don't know if I've solved entirely, but I decided to bite the bullet and at least present my very first soundtrack upload.

Before I get into the soundtrack in question, I just wanted to express my appreciation and gratitude towards this particular forum thread, and to everyone who posts here. It's been over a year since I started frequenting this thread, even if I don't post terribly often, but it's a thread that I've really come to enjoy and admire.

I like seeing people talk about their preferences in orchestral music and composers, explaining why they enjoy certain soundtracks and not others, talking about the state of the industry and modern orchestral music as an art form.

I really like how civil people round here tend to be when discussing (what I feel is) the most subjective of all art forms, even in the face of really controversial statements and the occasional bout of ruminating over the ways things look to be going.

But most of all, I just love how this thread has gone on for so long, and yet has still stuck around as this small community of very passionate, well-spoken people who not only care a whole lot about what they're talking about, but preserve and present music that might have otherwise faded into distant memory.

To everyone who has contributed to this thread, even people I've never seen or conversed with (and to those who have long since left this forum or indeed this world), I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. You've helped me to check out soundtracks and composers I might have otherwise ignored, you've helped me appreciate points of view regarding music that I might not have previously considered, and you've helped me out on days when I felt down or desolate about all manner of things.

This is my first time uploading music to the internet, so there's a good chance that I'll make a mistake with the upload or some other aspect. If a particularly egrigous one does come up, please let me know and I'll see what I can do to address it. Due to not having much experience ripping songs, this album is currently available as either ALAC or the highest quality MP3 I could get. If I can figure out how to rip the album as FLAC, I'll do so and add that to this post, and the thread I made elsewhere.

In the meantime, here's the soundtrack in question. For you.



Last of the Summer Wine: Original Music from the TV Show (1997)

Composed, arranged and conducted by Ronnie Hazlehurst

Track 7 (Liebestraum) is based on a trio of piano works composed by Frank Liszt.

Track 17 (Scarborough Fair) is a traditional ballad.

Track 18 (Pratty Flowers) is a traditional folk song, originally adapted from an earlier, corrupted ballad by Joe Perkin.

(Included in the download are the album's liner notes, with an overview of each song written by the show's producer/director (Alan J. W. Bell), comments by Bell and the show's creator/writer (Roy Clarke), and a list of members from the orchestra. I couldn't find a good enough scan of the album artwork, nor was I able to get a good scan of the copy. I offer my apologies in advance.)

ALAC:

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/7na926cl9ncq6/Last_Of_The_Summer_Wine_AALC
https://mega.nz/#F!IToA2IZD!6UbbDjpE7xktXtHOTU_lQw

MP3:

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/2ggzid88ssdxh/Last_of_the_Summer_Wine_MP3
https://mega.nz/#F!dPIE1DSL!vM7v-SSvPX-u_ZSpGWWd6w



Ronnie Hazlehurst was an English composer, arranger and conductor who became known for the countless theme tunes he created for BBC programmes, particularly sitcoms. Among the many shows he worked on, such as:

Are You Being Served?
Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister
To The Manor Born
The Two Ronnies
Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
Only Fools and Horses (arrangement)

His most enduring and recognized work is for Last of the Summer Wine. Not just for how long the show itself ran on for (1973-2010: 37 years!), but also for having a fully fledged soundtrack. Most sitcoms tend to have a theme tune and a few transitional cues, letting the dialogue and comedy take precedent over everything else. Last of the Summer Wine, however, was an exception - every episode would have a specifically recorded score, complete with recurring character themes, arrangements of classic songs associated with the area, and an overall musical quality that was unheard of in TV sitcoms of the day (and is still unheard of, so many years later).

Some of the show's strongest moments came entirely through the beautifully written and performed soundtrack provided by Hazlehurst and his orchestra. The gorgeous, yet incredibly sombre piece that Compo (played by Bill Owen) plays on trumpet at the end of 'Last Post and Pigeon' still haunts me, even years later. The choral version of the show's theme tune used to accentuate Compo's death in 'Just A Small Funeral', with nothing more than a few shots of the town and the surrounding countryside, really helped give the character an emotional send-off. Even quieter moments or when the characters just talked about bizarre ideas were given a special something thanks to the music playing in the background.

In 1993/4, a fan group known as the 'Summer Wine Appreciation Society' got into contact with Ronnie Hazlehurst, with a list of background music that they wished to see get some kind of official release. Hazlehurst liked the idea, and after a couple of years of researching and recording, a selection of the show's music was released on CD and tape in 1997: 'Last of the Summer Wine: Original Music from the TV Series'.

This soundtrack mostly consists of themes that would be used as the basis for the show's background music (for example, a general arrangement of Nora Batty's theme 'Nora, My Nora' is featured here, but not a version that was composed for a specific episode), along with a few themes that were only featured once throughout the show's run. A few of the themes are also arrangements of songs by other people (which songs were not composed by Hazlehurst are noted above).

As far as I know, this is the only CD/tape release for any of Hazlehurst's music besides his theme tunes, and is actually quite rare (even online websites don't have it, or it tends to be very expensive). It was only by complete luck that I stumbled across a copy in my local library a couple of years back, and it's only through reading this forum on a regular basis that I was inspired to share the music to you guys, and the rest of the internet.

Though Hazlehurst did not live to see the show to the very end, dying in 2007 (three years before its final season), the impact that he left on the show should never be forgotten. If I can ensure that to some extent with this upload, or at least expose people to his music, I'll be content with that. Thank you all for everything, and I hope you enjoy the music. Have a great day.

@Zipper - Yep, Nobunaga and both Kanno pieces - the brassy fanfare is "The Worthy Tiger" from Bushoufuunroku, the second more actiony piece is "Destructive Army" from Haouden. :)Many thanks! I don't usually associate that deep brass sound with Kanno so this was a bit of a surprise.

It's funny how those Japanese variety TV shows sometimes use big orchestral music from anime and games. Aside from Kanno, I've heard pieces by Hamaguchi and Amano before too.

I used to watch Last of the Summer Wine - a little, not a lot - and always enjoyed the soft-spoken but very effective underscore. Many thanks for sharing this rare gem! (I also echo everything you said about this thread itself; I don't post in it very often but I'm always excited to see new posts and new discussions.)

You didn't do too poorly for a first-time sharer. ;) All I'd suggest for next time is uploading all the files within one compressed ZIP, RAR, etc., since it's easier to DL one file instead of 21! But if I go to Mega and choose "Download as Zip" I can do that anyway, so don't worry about it.

FrDougal9000, thank you so much for this; Hazlehurst's scores are magnificent, and with the way the world is now, listening to this album is so cathartic. :)

AnnoYou mean Sagisu, or is there a composer Anno I don't know of?

You mean Sagisu, or is there a composer Anno I don't know of?
Err, yeah. Typo. Meant Sagisu/Amano.

For a first share you did lovely. Thanks FrDougal9000 for including not only both MP3 and Lossless but two host choices and good explanations. Since you described it so nicely I didn't even miss a cover photo.

@Last of the Summer Wine: Screw 100 piece orchestras and big gestures, sometimes a small chamber orchestra will do the trick if the music is full of heart.

Needless to say that your warm words are very appreciated.


Yes, Minister/Yes, Prime Minister Certainly one of Britain's finest works of art.

After listening to Naotora OST 3 I can conlude that all three OSTs constitute an all-around 5 star score. There are not many action cues, but as I mentioned previously, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial is a 5 star score and doesn't have many either. What it lacks in action, it makes up for in thematic consistency and emotion.

Track 5 (google translate translates this as "Opponent") has a very moden James Newton Howard feel to it.

Listening to the cello in track 6 I couldn't help but be reminded of Code Geass. Does anyone else hear it? (It's in the same key too...)

Track 7 reminds me of Toru Takemitsu's music for Ran (Hell's Picture Scroll.) Still distinctly Kanno, though.

Speaking of similarities, does anyone else hear Chrono Trigger/Cross in Re:Zero? The theme first heard here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrXYG_NjjoU&t=0m45s) has a similar syncopated shape. Then the counter theme at 1:00 is very similar to the counter theme in Time's Scar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J46RY4PU8a8&t=1m50s)

Then there's this theme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrXYG_NjjoU&t=5m58s) which shares the exact same first 4 notes of Millenial Fair from Chrono Trigger.

Episode 2 of The Orville was much better. Moving away from the need to explain everything they had a much more engaging episode and jokes that were a lot more interesting/funny. It gives me hope that it might actually be worth keeping up with.

@streich: I find the Suehiro/Mitsuda connection very likely. Mitsuda's early game scores are very influental, and he has lots of admirers in the JSW, from Yugo Kanno (Suehiro is his protegee) to Kow Otani.

I would also put Kanno's Naotora among her very best work.

I din't know much about Kow Otoni, but Mitsuda was certainly the most prominent composer on Chrono Trigger

I would go as far as to say Kanno's Naotora is her best work yet - not the flashiest, or the most action-oriented, but musically it's on another level. The recording is marginally disappointing - whilst it's light years ahead of your average domestic-recorded score... Warsaw is missed.

Orville Episode 2... I can barely tolerate it - for me episode two is a big step down. Interesting that the traditional gag-based comedy is even more absent now; we have a straight sci-fi show with situational laughs. I don't like Alara's new look or personality - in the pilot she was just the right mix of attractive, alien, fun, and VULNERABLE - now they've turned her into a super-hot kick-ass sexy alien chick who also ignores orders, kicks insubordinate officers off the bridge, yells at people, chews out disrespectful engineers, gives rousing speeches, and goes from zero to AWESOME in ten seconds flat. NO. DO NOT WANT. Also, this episode is more shamelessly derivative of Star Trek - not just vague homages, but direct attempts to bring up certain scenes. DO NOT WANT #2.

Bortus was great but underused. The Ed/Kelly back-and-forth was great - though why on earth would pot brownies be available from the food synthesizers??? The ending was probably the worst piece of TV I've ever seen in my entire life. Alara buys Ed and Kelly and the kid back by giving their captors a TIVO box full of trashy American reality TV then abandons the other tens of thousands of imprisoned species to rot for all eternity. Despite putting hundreds of people at risk to save two, and disobeying direct orders of an Admiral (there's two court-martials right there) precisely ten seconds later, Kitan is getting a medal for valour, courage, and resourcefulness and has everybody applauding her for how wonderful she is. She gives a throwaway line about hoping the Admiral lets her off, and Mercer gives an equally throwaway response - "We're good with office politics!" - THE END - did I imagine this?!

Additionally, Debney's score left me cold. It sounded like a slightly above-average Rick Berman-era TNG score with a bigger orchestra, statements of Broughton's theme, and incessant blasts from James Horner's II and II scores. Right from the first cue, playing over an establishing shot of a ship flying through space, it made me think "Oh, shit..." - and the Star Trek laywers *HAVE* to respond to this. Also, at times, Debney falls into the "holding pattern" trap - writing directionless placeholder music that feels like the aural equivalent of a plane going round in circles above an airport waiting to land. I liked the cue that played when Alara has her "moment" - even though it was just Battle In The Mutara Nebula, but that's about it. (And the Horner danger motif??? REALLY??????!!!!!!)

The blaster beam is there but hideously underused.

Also... Alara running down the corridor to see if the ship is OK = Kirk running down the corridor to see if Spock is OK. "They can bite me, because we're going anyway!" = "The word... is no. We are therefore going anyway." Etc, etc, etc.

I am now considering dropping the show.

I don't hate it (the score)... but I won't lie... I wanted more. Who's surprised? :D

Debney really loves Horner's Danger motif, doesn't he. We thought we would finally be free... but it just won't die!!! :D (It turned up in LAIR quite a lot as well)

I thought you would defend MacFarlene to the ends of the earth, Tango. =P

I haven't been interested enough to see the second episode, but from everything I've read online it's more or less the same "I want to be Star Trek with the occasional one or two Family Guy jokes" tone as the first. Maybe MacFarlene would have been better off pulling a Star Trek Family Guy special like the one he did for Star Wars years agp.

To me, the first episode rode the line very well, but this episode pisses all over the line.

The story is a composite of several episodes of Star Trek, every other scene is directly referencing Star Trek, 90% of the score is stolen from Star Trek and is written by someone who scored Star Trek and is known for stealing. It's beautifully made, and I do appreciate the humour... but whereas it was possible for me to take the pilot seriously, I simply cannot take this seriously.

My mum just watched the episode - she hates Star Trek and doesn't give a shit about film music... and even she said "This reminds me of that 80s movie about Kirk and some old guy fighting each other."

MacFarlane's "thing* is referencing the 80s. That's great, I love the 80s... but I don't know what this is... It's too serious to be a parody. It's too much of a parody to be serious. It's too much like Star Trek to stand on its own two feet. It's not enough like Star Trek to be Star Trek. It's just... I don't know, weird...

I haven't watched the second episode yet, so I can't comment on it. But from the first episode I noticed a plethora of issues:

* Too much telling, not enough showing. Instead of allowing each of the crew members to showcase their personalities and their quirks, Mcfarlane decides to introduce us to them in the most boring way. There's a reason why most "galactic ship ensemble" shows, such as Firefly, the various Star Trek shows, and Battlestar Galactica start in some form of in media res. They don't start at the beginning - they start at the middle, when the characters already know each other, so that we can see who these characters are in the context of the crisis that opens up the shows.

* Too many of the characters seem to fall into the same general trope. We have the Racist Robot Dude and the Mr. Not a Klingon, who are both very serious, take everything as it literally occurs. We have the Sassy Black Dude and the Eccentric Irish Man for comic relief...and the interaction between the Captain and his Ex-Wife is just very awkwardly presented.

*The show didn't really know what type of show it wants to be. Satire or drama? It's just oddly presented. There is a balance to what it wants to do, and the show doesn't seem capable of hanging on the tripwire.

*McFarlane is unconvincing as the charismatic captain. There is nothing in this character that suggests he can bring a crew together, or that he is someone with experience.

*The worldbuilding is off. What exactly will the Orville be doing? Why are they in conflicts with that evil bug race at the end? The show just assumes we will know about the setting, while doing nothing to both raise questions that should entice us to learn about the future, or fill in the gaps that will keep us from scratching our heads.

So, in short, the pilot was a fucking mess.

Though it pains me, I think a lot of this is dead on the money.

The Racist Robot Dude... I could take that, it's a bit of a trope but fair enough, you know, as long as it goes somewhere interesting I'm up for it... But in episode 2, we meet another alien species who hate "inferior" races (for ostensibly the same reasons; if you're technologically not advanced, you're nobody) - if they're using a tired-out plot device in episode 1 and re-treading the same ground IN THE VERY NEXT EPISODE my hopes aren't running high. Then again, let's look at the first series of The Next Generation... The pilot was about horny feathers getting off in space, episode 2 was a crappy remake of a TOS episode where everybody starts fucking each other and Wesley Crusher Saves The Ship, episode 3 was Code Of Honor ('nuff said), episode 4 was dodgy-looking Ferengi attack then try to make friends with a judgemental ancient answering machine that belonged to a long-dead empire, episode 5 was crazy psychic invisible guy catapults The Enterprise to the middle of nowhere and everybody starts hallucinating so they go home, episode 6 was electric shock monster tries to take over the ship while dogs and lizards chase each other and bicker over politics, episode 7 was creepy blonde nymphomaniacs try to execute Wesley for walking on the grass, episode 8 was Ferengi make Picard go nuts with giant marble, episode 9 was Q and Riker sitting in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G, episode 10 was Troi falls in love with dopey moron who decides to transfer to a plague ship and commit suicide rather than stay with her, episode 11 was the first in the seemingly endless series of relaxing Holodeck cosplay holiday turns into desperate fight to stay alive with the exciting finale of Picard looking stupid and saying "Aaaaard klaxon leeeeesss blag blan ar'nik ka'nik. Aaaaard krasulaaa. Rassss trassss trasulaaaah.", etc, etc, etc...

I don't know... We'll see, I guess. :)

Clearly Tango you and I have completely different expectations from this show. I have zero exposure to prior Star Trek series outside of the movies so any ripoffs or homages are lost on me.

I actually liked episode 2 a whole lot more than the pilot. I think the pilot would have worked better if it had been longer than 45 minutes (it felt rushed). I'm not really big on Trek though, so we probably have different expectations.

I'm not expecting anything amazing. I'm fine with just watching a simple, light-hearted sci-fi drama. It's a nice break from all the serious shows I watch.

If you haven't seen Star Trek, The Orville will just look like a funny sci-fi show - and I can easily see how episode 2 does it better than the pilot in that case - but if you know your Trek, you will get mad very quickly when you discover that there isn't a scene, line of dialogue, or note of music in the show that isn't, in some way, making a direct reference to a better movie or TV episode.

It's odd... it meets my expectations, 100% - but I really wanted it to do that by being a show in the grand Star Trek tradition, not by being a show that stands on Star Trek's shoulders almost continuously through its running time and would be about 90 seconds long if you took out everything that wasn't a reference.

The pilot... yeah, a two-parter would've helped a great deal. I was watching the episode again and I realised that it was half over before the STORY actually got started. There's so much exposition work to do in the first episode of everything - who is Mercer, who is Kelly, what world do we live in, what is The Orville, where are they going, who are the crew, what are they like, etc, etc - that by the time that's out the way you've got twenty minutes left to actually get into the meat. I really liked episode 1, but it could've done with being a two parter - or even just splitting it up so episode 1 is about all the exposition, preparations to leave dock, getting to know each other, and it ends with everybody together on the bridge flying off to their first adventure - which we get to see NEXT WEEK. As it is, we did all that, saw a new piece of technology, met a new enemy, met a Krill mole, had a chase and a big battle all under the umbrella of a conspiracy theory plot, and resolved everything - in barely 40 minutes of screen time. BUT... I liked it, it wasn't perfect but it set a good tone, and wasn't boring.

Then along comes episode 2, which feels like everybody's put in there two-penn'orth and changed things around, made their story and script with a stack of old Trek scripts, pair of scissors, and a pritt stick, and then commissioned a score that does exactly the same thing. It was funny and well made... but in the greatest tradition of two of the three recent Trek films being re-toolings of earlier movies and The Force Awakens being a re-tooling of A New Hope... it's an affront to story-telling and to those previous TV episodes and films - apparently there is a lack of genuine story-writing skill in Hollywood today, so everything has to be a photocopy of what went before with a "HOMAGE" sticker on it to excuse the lack of imagination.

I also worry about the lawyers. Somebody in Star Trek land *HAS* to be pissed off at The Orville, surely? Especially with The Orville coming out weeks before Star Trek Discovery begins - that has to be some deliberate timing...

Then do you think it's strange that many people who worked on previous Star Trek series are working on The Orville?

For example, Brannon Braga will be directing the next episode. He's also an executive producer on the show. His credentials include: co-producer on TNG, executive producer on Voyager and Enterprise, and co-writer of First Contact and Generations.

I would hope that they're hiring these Trek alumni out of a) respect, and b) wanting to have people on board who know how this type of show works - having prior experience on one show does not mean your next show has to plagiarise 90% of its elements. Did they say to all these guys - outstanding creative people who've been attached to Trek during its golden age - "Hey, we respect you so much we want you to copy this other thing you did twenty years ago."

Copying is easy - any idiot can copy something. But if you want to create a new thing in the same spirit as the old thing, it would make perfect sense to get these guys. I sensed it as Seth MacFarlane's way of saying "Star Trek Discovery may be called Star Trek, but it's not really Trek - this is, look, we even have some of the production team who worked on real Trek."

Why on earth get together this dream team, and then get them to make a new show that disrespects the thing that made them famous in the first place?

Likewise, if I were scoring this thing, I would be going OUT OF MY WAY to write music in the spirit of 80s sci-fi music but NOT to copy it. I might do as Broughton did - make the odd sly reference when the action demanded it, but when your composer does a big fat copy and paste from the franchise you're trying to live up to and constantly insist you're not plagiarising but RESPECTING, it smacks of someone not taking their job seriously. Broughton's pilot score was basically original, with a few passing nods to Trek moments - emphasis on PASSING and NODS; a tasteful acknowledgement of something - the photograph of Indiana Jones' dad on the desk in Crystal Skull; a brief, affectionate callback, a moment of reflection, then on with the show. Debney's score, by comparison, was a mixture of direct emulations of TNG-style scoring and straight, lengthy lifts from James Horner's Wrath and Search movie scores, played by a big orchestra.

Honestly, I want to punch MacFarlane in the nose for this; he's got so much right, and then he lets crap like this through. At what point did he say to Debney, as someone who loves and respects Trek, and film music the way it used to be written, "Hey, can you stop ripping off Wrath of Khan for five minutes and just write an original, symphonic, thematic sci-fi score?" No, off they went to the recording studio and not a word was spoken.

As I say, though, TNG had an almost-unbroken first season of absolute stinkers, so I'm not giving up YET... but I would be much, much happier if this didn't continue this way.

YES!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8chQwPHSUjk

YES!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8chQwPHSUjk
Well this proves one thing: GSJ recordings can sound good.

The news says that the full concert will be available for purchase on October 20th from the Playstation Store (about 2 hours total). The question: how are we going to obtain it?

It should be no problem to buy it from a Japanese PSN account via PSN cards.

EDIT: JAGMO also announced their second NHK Symphonic Gamers concert. At the very least that should find its way on youtube.

I'm also anticipating the Senzoku Gakuen Composer Festival. That should be out soon.

Well, hopefully someone else here has a PS4... because I don't.

I do ;) (but it depends how expensive it is, as much as I would love to hear this, I'm not paying 100 bucks for it)

EDIT: Just saw the pricings... its within reason. I catched something about a VR-less version which should be standard video format, hopefully. But VR support for orchestral concerts... just what you would expect from the Japanese.

Yeah, I was talking about the standard version: https://www.jp.playstation.com/games/premium-musical-notes-japan-studio-music-fes-ps4/

The page says that it will be free for PS Plus users from September 20 until October 19 (viewable until Nov 20). I'm pretty sure you can get a free 14 day trial (https://store.playstation.com/#!/ja-jp/reward_game/ps-plus-14%E6%97%A5%E9%96%93%E7%84%A1%E6%96%99%E4%BD%93%E9 %A8%93%EF%BC%88%E8%87%AA%E5%8B%95%E6%9B%B4%E6%96%B 0%EF%BC%88%E6%9C%89%E6%96%99%EF%BC%89%E3%81%82%E3% 82%8A%EF%BC%89/cid=IP9105-NPIA90009_01-PSPLUSFREE14AUTO) of PS Plus, so you might just be able to get it for free.

So, I have been listening to a decent amount of John Williams lately. Partly because I decided to one night watch The Force Awakens at 2 in the morning, but also partly because of all the complete soundtracks I keep running into. And I have been thinking on AI...and, am I wrong in thinking this is JW's most complex score.

The first point why I think this is the case is David's theme. In most of his scores, there is a central theme and he will deliver the entirety of that theme at one point or another. But David, despite being the perspective that we view the entire movie from, has his theme displayed to us in shards and fragments. We never get his theme uncut - in fact it is Monica's theme that falls into the category of both "foreshadowed in the beginning of the story" and "delivered at the climax". In some ways that makes sense, as David's search for his mother is the emotional core of the film.

But I also think that AI is unlike any other score JW has ever produced. It is just so damn ethereal. At times, it doesn't feel like music that is grounded in our world. The way the music is processed in our minds, it's so soft and whimsical, it's like echoes. The notes themselves are grounded, of course, they aren't using cheap tricks here. JW performs such an absurd balancing act with this score. Sometimes it is very blunt and in your face...and at the same time, when the music is pretty much screaming at you to "feel" a certain way, part of the music will be suggesting something more sinister or bittersweet. Just a hint, a taste, a tiny nail scratch on a chalk board if you will.

It's like electronic music at times, but if it was performed by an orchestra. AI has the same kind of appeal that the two TRON scores by Carlos and Daft Punk display. But the difference is in the delivery - the TRON scores are a beautiful melding of the organic and the electronic, whereas AI is the electronic displayed through an organic lens.

There is just so much going on in each cue, not just in terms of the music itself, but the narration. I don't think JW has ever quite hit this complex high. That doesn't necessarily mean this is his best score - I still feel his Star Wars music is his quintessential signature, and Schindler's List is his defining achievement - but I don't think any score will have as much going in a single minute as AI.

100% agreement.

And, I count myself as one of apparently a minority that really loves the film. :)

Well, maybe I should rephrase that... the film utterly destroys me. I mean, for weeks. I will not watch it with anyone. There is something in there, like Williams' score, that is so very right, in an almost ungraspable way.

With Williams work you can pic any of his iconic scores and easily and reasonably make the case why its his best. For me, in regards to thematic development and interplay, there is no film score that does this quite as well as Hook.
For soundscapes and tone poems disguised as film scores I have a hard time to choose between A.I., Born on the Fourth of July, Prisoner of Azkaban or Shindler's List as my favorite.
In terms of overall Bravado and orchestral lineage there is nothing in the film score world comparable to his Star Wars Saga and only Jerry's Nimh and James Horner's Casper can compete with the magical moments in Superman, E.T. and Empire of the Sun.

And thats not even mentioning his usual symphonic, orchestral standard from the 70s to the 90s, from Jaws to Raiders to Harry Potter.

This man is simply too good for this world and no living composer can match his achievments and technical mastery of the orchestra (right now) although Hisaishi comes very close. There's plenty of composers I enjoy listening to more, there's others that write better melodies and others with even more complexity. You could even reasonably make the case why others trump him, but as a complete package, John Williams is the ultimate Film composer for me and the greatest living composer since the second half of the 20th century. I would even go so far as to say: "After Prokofiev, there's John Williams." Of course in terms of recognition and personal judgement.

no living composer can match his achievments and technical mastery of the orchestra (right now) although Hisaishi comes very close.Well, I certainly hope we're not talking about just usage of an orchestra as part of that "technical mastery" because Hisashi doesn't come close to William's level. I would question if he is even capable of pulling the feats of Kanno('s team), Amano, Hirano, or a handful of others. He's very, very good, but I've always associated him more with great melodies and exceptional woodwind usage. In many cases, I even prefer some of his older more simplistic scores like Brother over his more recent, well orchestrated works like Ni no Kuni. Totoro is one of the most iconic scores in Japan, and half of it is synth.

I would counter your argument with Orbis, Deep Sea Creatures, Onna Nobunaga, End of the World, Ponyo, Mononoke Hime Symphonic Suite, Howls Symphonic Suite, Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai and Le Petit Poucet. Hisaishi is a master with the orchestra!

Ni no Kuni in particular is from start to finish, a concert work for a media product in very best Williams tradition. Both are heralds of classical music, regulary conduct in the concert hall and have massive tribute concerts left and right. Miyazaki/Hisaishi (if you count the symphonic albums) is comparable to Spielberg/Williams and the similarities don't stop there.

Not to mention Hisaishi is the only popular Japanese film composer in global "mainstream" media. Oshima, Kanno, Tanaka, Senju, Yamashita, Sato, Sahashi and others have quite the prestige but mostly restricted to the Japanese (anime) industry and are otherwise quite obscure (except to this fine fellowship).

I also cannot count Kanno and Amano because frankly when I discover that even their supposed "most original work" is traced in parts from Hollywood scores and classical works, I just can't count them in the same league as Williams, Goldsmith, Hisaishi, Tanaka and Oshima (and to a lesser extent Silvestri, Elfman, Yamashita and Sahashi), despite how good it sounds and how great the original parts are. But Conti and Horner can keep them company.

Well the Intrada Robot Jox is out. Samples were enough for me to buy it for my first CD copy. The highs really punch.

I would counter your argument with Orbis, Deep Sea Creatures, Onna Nobunaga, End of the World, Ponyo, Mononoke Hime Symphonic Suite, Howls Symphonic Suite, Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai and Le Petit Poucet. Hisaishi is a master with the orchestra!

Ni no Kuni in particular is from start to finish, a concert work for a media product in very best Williams tradition. Both are heralds of classical music, regulary conduct in the concert hall and have massive tribute concerts left and right. Miyazaki/Hisaishi (if you count the symphonic albums) is comparable to Spielberg/Williams and the similarities don't stop there.

Not to mention Hisaishi is the only popular Japanese film composer in global "mainstream" media. Oshima, Kanno, Tanaka, Senju, Yamashita, Sato, Sahashi and others have quite the prestige but mostly restricted to the Japanese (anime) industry and are otherwise quite obscure (except to this fine fellowship).

I also cannot count Kanno and Amano because frankly when I discover that even their supposed "most original work" is traced in parts from Hollywood scores and classical works, I just can't count them in the same league as Williams, Goldsmith, Hisaishi, Tanaka and Oshima (and to a lesser extent Silvestri, Elfman, Yamashita and Sahashi), despite how good it sounds and how great the original parts are. But Conti and Horner can keep them company.Of course, Hisaishi has written many works for orchestras and his prestigious reputation in Japan goes without saying. But to say that his skill level is comparable to Williams... I just don't see it. Of course, I don't think any living composer can beat Williams when it comes to the consistent quality of music that he has churned out for decades, all talk of actual musical skill aside. Hisaishi is obviously very skilled with an orchestra, but I don't see the same level of mastery as someone like Amano or Hirano. Amano may occasionally be a thief, but the man can get the orchestra to sound like anything he wants it to. He destroys other "skilled imitators" like Debney in every musical aspect. Hisaishi, on a technical level, has not yet reached the range and complexity of someone like Amano in his music. And even Amano isn't that much closer to Williams' levels of consistency.

For me, what makes Hisaishi really stand out is how his music has no roots in any particular Golden or Silver Age Hollywood composer like most of the others we talk about in this thread. Occasionally he pulls a homage to Nino Rota, but that style never really becomes the crux of his music. Hisaishi has no musical equivalent in the west, and I think that is a big reason why he is so popular internationally.

And although this may be a blasphemous comparison for most people here, I find Kajiura has the same kind of appeal to foreign anime fans as does Hisaishi. She also has a style of music that has no precedence here in the west. But, that doesn't mean she knows how to wield an orchestra. The fact that Hisaishi is able to do so yet still sound completely distinct from all other western composer really speaks for his talent- and that talent doesn't have to mean being Rimsky.

Both come from the same place of approaching film scores. Hisaishi actually drops an armada of references to classical works that demonstrate he is firmly rooted in the classical world. Wheter it is Prokofiev, Stravinsky or Wagner, he drops hints of his influences quite often. The whole "Orbis" is written as a Prelude to Beethoven's 9th Symphony. He even did go out of his way reinterpreting Dvorak's Symphonies. His music is firmly rooted in "western" classical works and minimalism. His genius is combing that with eastern "exotic" scales and melodies.


Williams' scores, likewise, constantly show this deep connection to the classical world. There's constant nods to Respighi, Hanson, Britten, Walton, Korngold, Stravinsky and basically the whole Pantheon.

Both Williams and Hisaishi share this trade that they evoke the legends of orchestral music like its second nature, not to copy, but to build their own music on this foundation, becoming Legends themselves.

Both even composed an "Imperial March" :D

I find it hard to put anyone else close to Williams.

Hisaishi can orchestrate equally as well as or better than anybody working in Japan; I wonder if flashiness and skill are being mixed up here. Hirano is more experimental, Amano brings more of the sound of the wind band to his symphonic music, and Kanno is pure acrobatics. (Composition style is, of course, an entirely different kettle of fish.)

His style is completely different from Williams' but they are both clearly working at a level that other composers can only dream of reaching.

Williams and Hisaishi both developed their styles from different places - but I wouldn't, in all honesty, be willing to commit to who is "better" - for me, it's largely the same as the Goldsmith versus Williams contest, and that's a contest I am unqualified to judge; my personal preference is Goldsmith, but I feel like Williams is the better composer on paper. In the end, comparing them or trying to pick out who's the most skilled does a disservice to both.

Williams is, of course, untouchable as the quintessential cinema composer - but it's worth considering that, whilst his language is UNSURPASSED in that genre, I think he stands more on the shoulders of the previous generation than Hisaishi does. Williams is a part of a larger tradition, and does it better than anyone currently in the public eye. (I don't want to say he does it better than anyone alive, because there are tens of thousands of composers out there and only a dozen of them will ever make it big.)

Hisaishi is part of a tradition too, but he's certainly more the trailblazer than Williams.

I also don't think it's fair to say Williams is the best living composer. There are composers out there who knock it out of the park; they're just not particularly well known.

Please, feel free to share Sawano's Lion King here if you can.

Zimmer's Lion King was never very good, nor was At World's End, or Backdraft, so that's not a game I'm interested in playing.

---------- Post added at 06:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:13 PM ----------

Also Kanno's orchestration style has never been about acrobatics, it's about emotion. I go back to listen to the nobunaga albums(I wrote reviews for em and all) amd I'm honestly struck every time how restrained and imtelligent her use of all the orchestral parts actually is, especially for q.composer in her position at the time. Ambitious but not too overt or bombastic, nor too sedate or drably Elfman-lite like a lot of vgm orchestrations from the early 90's, w clear use of thematic techniques and throughlines(use of snare and heroic, wartime-evocative melodies in nobunaga's case) and I wouldn't say her style has changed overly much since those early days. I never get the impression she uses an orchestra purely to shock or impress w technical acumen, but always turns to it for a reason. I don't hear flashy empty theatrics and technique designed to blow you away in Blond or Toma's Oracle or The Tiger Woman, just every part being used in just the right way to fill out the emotion the piece intends to bring out.

Both come from the same place of approaching film scores. Hisaishi actually drops an armada of references to classical works that demonstrate he is firmly rooted in the classical world.You misunderstand my point; obviously Hisaishi's work is rooted firmly in the classical world, but almost none of it comes from Hollywood. The same can be said of someone like Toru Takemitsu. That is his appeal as a composer, and your comment about his usage of eastern scales was the reason why I stated his music has no western equivalent in Hollywood.


Hisaishi can orchestrate equally as well as or better than anybody working in Japan; I wonder if flashiness and skill are being mixed up here.What I was trying to get at was that Hisaishi is not the type of composer who regularly squeezes the most out of an orchestra like Amano. His melodies are fairly straightforward, he doesn't layer dense harmonies or layer unusual combinations of instruments, he doesn't use much counterpoint, rarely does he go to the extreme high and low notes of the instruments he uses, and he doesn't have the range that gives every single project he works on its own identity (especially in his more recent works). I guess you could call that flashiness, but compared to Williams and Amano and many others in Japan, Hisaishi comes across as being rather mild or restrained in his music. It makes sense, considering his interest in minimalism.

Hisaishi is very, very good at what he does, but I don't find his technical skill with an orchestra to be near Williams level. I'm not trying to make an argument who is the better composer, because some people may prefer Hisaishi's more heartfelt approach over William's usual bombast and vice versa. If I was forced to consider a Hollywood equivalent Hisaishi, it would be John Barry. Great melodist, great orchestrator, and a very distinctive sound, but don't expect his usage of an orchestra to be anything approaching the level of John Williams. But even now, there are still quite a few people out there who consider John Barry to be the greatest film composer of the 20th century. The same level of reverence can be felt for Hisaishi, and justifiably so.

---------- Post added at 09:02 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:59 PM ----------


Zimmer's Lion King was never very good, nor was At World's End, or Backdraft, so that's not a game I'm interested in playing.What game? All I see is a baby who doesn't know how to articulate his preferences in an intelligent manner.

The game where you bait me to name something just so you can arbitrarily trash it w more meaningless dribble like "The MTV of music" like it couldn't possibly compare to some pos scores from 20 years ago, dipstick.

Ah, typical angry Sawano fanboy response. Instead of properly defending his music, the only mode of argument you know is trashing the opposition, and in this case you didn't even know how to go about it outside of a generic bag of buzzwords used by a 10 year old on his Xbox chat. Everyone has given you clear arguments about why Sawano is incomparable to Zimmer, and you have not addressed a single one of those points.

This isn't a game- that would imply that you have some way to "win". You clearly don't.

Also, I seriously hope you aren't implying that Lion King's score was bad because it was from 20 years ago. Is it because you weren't even born back then?

Lololo "properly defended" I'm sorry, who insulted who first?

Ftr I could not begin to care whether you like or hate Sawano(not that I think anybody has made any points more substantial than "Zimmer good, Sawano bad + adjectives" and of the points made, I would emphatically disagree w all had I the time or energy(ah yes, the thematic and dramatic depth of hitting the same two droning notes forgoddamnever.)), but holy hell, Sawano's detractors, yourself included, could go such a long way in NOT sounding like such arbitrary, snobby turds if y'all didn't find it seemingly impossible to make a point without immediately making some dumbass, foot-in-mouth remark about his talent or especially his fans.

The only way it can make sense for Sawano to be as popular as he is, despite writing music you don't like, is that it MUST be that he's only hired to placate an audience of teenage dunces who MUST hate classical music, MUST be, otherwise said teens will clearly be clamoring for musicians who placate you, The Universe's One Good Music Liker. The only reason Sawano(and kajiura and whoever else) would ever choose to write orchestral music in a style so deeply the opposite of what you like is that it MUST be that he simply has no idea what he's doing(in spite of all evidence to the contrary), and it MUST be a shadowy cabal of ghostwriters behind his polish and success. It's all just baseless, self-deluding confirmation bias all the way down, and y'all wanna act like his fans are the annoying ones. LOL Like him, hate him, just get the fuck over yourselves.

Finally, that we're just suddenly holding up The Lion King as some benchmark of Zimmer's career, when it's certainly not his contributions to that score that movie fans remember about The Lion King, strikes me as odd and not very convincing. It sure isn't "Under the Stars" Disney fans are hummin when they walk down the street, sorry.

What Williams excels at is orchestral colour. He uses a much wider palette than any composer alive. Yes, even wider than those experimental composers who make violinists play with an electric toothbrush instead of a bow. Williams does that in addition to everything we hear in classical music going back hundreds of years, while the experimentalists refuse to acknowledge that legato even exists.

Just listen to this track from Hook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCzuC4LUGYc

The first minute is a kind of Ravel-ian impressionist pistasche, but then at 1:12 it goes full Stravinsky for thirty seconds. Hidden in that "mess" of colours is a rising four-note motif that's heard later on in the score. What's so Williams about this moment that you don't hear from other composers is the clarity of disitinctive parts from each of the strings, winds, and brass. There must be thousands of notes in there. Williams didn't have to score that section as if he was writing a 100 year old Parisian ballet, but he did anyway.

Here's Horner doing something similar in The Pagemaster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkBj3Rg3Ixg

Not many composers alive approach this level of control over an orchestra. Kanno has many tracks that approach Williams in a way that McNeely or Mike Verta approach or mimic him. It's tricky to point out exactly what that entails, but aside from writing good themes and motifs, orchestral colour featuring distinctive, yet audible parts is a large part of it.

Starting to think we'll need some examples of this artsy-fartsy "Neoclassical/experimental" stuff this thread is always haranguing about. I don't have much point of reference for the type of modern orchestral works that y'all treat as verboten.

Nothing embodies middlebrow snobbery more than "Oscars, the perfect poll of popularity" LOL

Man, whatever intent you had to defend Sawano and his fans went straight down the toilet. Once again, you have not said a single word about his music, and you take all criticism of it as a personal insult, and then lash out at everyone involved without taking any of their points seriously, and of course, the usual "elitist snobs" buzzword insult comes back because you know no other arguments. You are the textbook definition of a fanboy, but even I doubt all Sawano fans are as dense as you are.

Who said anything about teenagers? Who said anything about classical music? No, the argument here is that Sawano writes music for an orchestra and he sucks at it. The vocals and J-Rock are just the icing on the cake. Hell, I love Iwasaki and all his weirdness, so I have no bias against any elements without an orchestra, even horrible Engrish. But unlike Iwasaki, Sawano doesn't do anything interesting with them. And when you compare Sawano to an actual J-Rock band like the Pillows, he falls flat on his face as well. Sawano sells, sure, but so do Yoko Kanno and Joe Hisaishi. Probably more than Sawano. Just because it sells doesn't mean it's bad, but in Sawano's case, it keeps selling despite how bad it is. MTV is the same way, and despite what you might think, not all teens watched MTV.

As for Lion King, if your quotient for how good something is is by how many people will hum it years after its release, then you have missed the point of film music completely. Even then, Zimmer's work on Lion King won him an Oscar- the perfect poll of popularity. And believe me, his work on Lion King alone outsells the entirety of Sawano's career, even after Sawano himself retires.

Finally, drop the attitude. "Artsy-fartsy"? Even Sawano would be embarrassed of you.

EDIT: The Oscars are an award based on what people find popular. It's about as mainstream as you can get. Has nothing to do with quality of the actual work (even though Lion King was a great score). Sorry to burst your delusional bubble. Didn't know your pathetic crusade against "middlebrow snobbery" included kids and their parents.

Man, whatever intent you had to defend Sawano and his fans went straight down the toilet. Once again, you have not said a single word about his music, and you take all criticism of it as a personal insult, and then lash out at everyone involved without taking any of their points seriously, and of course, the usual "elitist snobs" buzzword insult comes back because you know no other arguments. You are the textbook definition of a fanboy, but even I doubt all Sawano fans are as dense as you are.

Who said anything about teenagers? Who said anything about classical music? No, the argument here is that Sawano writes music for an orchestra and he sucks at it. The vocals and J-Rock are just the icing on the cake. Hell, I love Iwasaki and all his weirdness, so I have no bias against any elements without an orchestra, even horrible Engrish. But unlike Iwasaki, Sawano doesn't do anything interesting with them. And when you compare Sawano to an actual J-Rock band like the Pillows, he falls flat on his face as well. Sawano sells, sure, but so do Yoko Kanno and Joe Hisaishi. Probably more than Sawano. Just because it sells doesn't mean it's bad, but in Sawano's case, it keeps selling despite how bad it is. MTV is the same way, and despite what you might think, not all teens watched MTV.

As for Lion King, if your quotient for how good something is is by how many people will hum it years after its release, then you have missed the point of film music completely. Even then, Zimmer's work on Lion King won him an Oscar- the perfect poll of popularity. And believe me, his work on Lion King alone outsells the entirety of Sawano's career, even after Sawano himself retires.

Finally, drop the attitude. "Artsy-fartsy"? Even Sawano would be embarrassed of you.
Sorry, I just have to say, this post is beautiful. It captures the honest truth and does not attack anyone's opinions or hold any bias.

Nah both of your posts are worthless.

I am suddenly considering the possibility that the alleged Sawano fanboy here may be a falseflagger. I've seen some angry Sawano fans before but none quite this absurd.

Wow, this spawned a whole conversation, huh? lol

Look my dudes, nobody has had anything interesting to say about Sawano in yeeeeeaaars, least of all his detractors. I just find it funny how some people feel this compulsive need to seek out and dig even deeper for even more arbitrary reasons to loudly declare him a musically-illiterate monkey or whatever, and like to poke fun at it. :) We get it. Nothing has changed.

I can agree that nobody says anything interesting about Sawano and many point out things we don't like, (because those are our opinions when he gets brought up) but arguing just furthers the conversation. With only 1 side to the argument, the conversation would not go as far.


Nah both of your posts are worthless.

Personally, I don't mind whether you like his music or not. My opinion differs, which does not make my post worthless. The main reason I do not like Sawano is because there are projects I believe could have been given to better hands, and a lot of his music sounds too similar for me. Your negativity towards me or anyone else is unnecessary.

I'm also noticing a pattern with who is in this conversation every time it gets heated.
I would say both sides just stop arguing. It's not like either person is going to suddenly be convinced or agree to the other side, so what does it accomplish? I have no more interest in typing any more on this subject.

Today the staff of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes remake will be announced. Hoping for some good news.

What the hell is even happening :D

From Williams to Sawano... in a couple of hours... now I need two cups of coffee...

Honestly, could we please stop bringing his name up around here. I will try as well ;)



@Streich: I agree 100%. He reinvented and pioneered a new type of "cinematic concert music" that I hope gets acknowledged in the musical history books.

Do you refer to Williams' explicitly-intended-for-the-concert-hall music, or that Williams' film music is frequently if not always of concert-hall standard? That was "done" because the people who substantially "invented" film music as a natural development of Wagnerian grand opera, were all transplants from the classical world - they weren't writing film music, they were writing music for film. Don't get me wrong, I *LOVE* Williams, but I don't know if I would call him a pioneer in the sense that you do. He didn't substantially invent anything - he re-invigorated a technique of film scoring that was already seen as obsolete, by doing it SO AMAZINGLY WELL and demonstrating how valuable it was to film.

If you refer to Williams' impact on concert music, he definitely made a case for filmic concert music, but that took a while - at the beginning of his concert career he was writing the kind of squeaky gate, academic ego-masturbation crap that was demanded at the time. He went where the audience was, and worked there at an unprecedented level of quality. :)

What the hell is even happening :D

From Williams to Sawano... in a couple of hours... now I need two cups of coffee...

Honestly, could we please stop bringing his name up around here. I will try as well ;)



@Streich: I agree 100%. He reinvented and pioneered a new type of "cinematic concert music" that I hope gets acknowledged in the musical history books.

Excellent idea, you should all stop talking about Sawano, forever.

Y'know, I've never thought of Hisaishi and Williams as sounding all that similar(or Williams and Kanno for that matter. The habit among anime fans to name any composer out of Japan that can affect a big orchestral sound as "the Japanese John Williams" is a very silly one I'm glad to see has mostly lasped over the last decade.) Both composers contain multitudes, but I always conflate Williams w a bright, melodic, uplifting mood, least in the works I feel are most representative. Hisaishi tends to favor more minor scale chord progressions that give his work a deeper, richer, more contemplative tone, even when still heavily melodic. They always struck me as very different musicians in spite of their copious similarities and would never confuse one's work for the other.

I lean a little toward Hisaishi, honestly. Williams' skill is unimpeachable, but he's never been a personal fave.

^^^ This. (Not the first paragraph, but definitely the second and third. I categorically DO NOT AGREE with any assertion that a particular topic should be off limits for discussion. Even if that topic frequently generates opinions which some find distasteful.)

They sound nothing like each other, but to a depressingly large portion of casual listeners, Williams = orchestra and therefore anybody else who uses an orchestra = Williams.

I can see the comparison, though, if we're talking about universal appeal, quality, and public perception - Williams and Hisaishi share styles which appeal to many people, both approach their work with a sense of quality and workmanship that is largely unmatched, and both are as close to "household names" as it's possible to be as a composer. Every Western person recognises Superman, every Japanese person recognises Totoro, and there is probably a fair bit of international overlap too.


I lean a little toward Hisaishi, honestly. Williams' skill is unimpeachable, but he's never been a personal fave.

I find myself in the same quagmire with Williams and Goldsmith.

[Edit: Not sure where the triple post came from but it disappeared again - sorry folks.]

The Sawano thing was more intended as a joke (since I also bring him up quite often), since he always turns up at the most inappropiate time around here ;)



They weren't writing film music, they were writing music for film

Quote of the decade, plaster it all over Hollywood until it burns.



He didn't substantially invent anything

I don't even mean it in meta terms or his achievement of reviving the orchestral score in Hollywood (which made all those 80s Goldsmith masterpieces possible mind you), I mean it in the way he composes music that is simultaniously concert music and 100% film score.

Listen to Charles Gerhardt's symphonic Star Wars albums, specifically the Asteroid Field. I mean it when I say he earned his place in the symphonic repertoire in my eyes. I stated before Williams is not the composer I enjoy the most, or who wrote my favorite melodies (ok, some of them) but he is in my eyes of equal status as the legendary concert masters and is worthy of study. It's easy to say he just stands on the shoulders of giants, but didn't the old masters as well at some point in history?

That said, I might just be biased because Williams got me into the Film scoring world (now media scoring world I guess). Maybe I'm evaluating him too high (but I think its a reasonable assessment), he's the composer that has been in my mind the longest, not to mention he was my inspiration to study music. Maybe I idolize him too much, like I idolize Tanaka because he converted me to the wonderful Japanese orchestral world (still think GD2 is one of the most creative and colorful musical works written in years).

Still, for all intends and purposes, John Williams is "America's composer" as well as "Hollywood's composer". Korngold, Rozsa and others wrote music that is still distinctivily "European" but just as Copland pioneered the "Americana" sound, John Williams pioneered/or at least reinvented "the Hollywood sound".

Excellent idea, you should all stop talking about Sawano, forever.Says the fanboy who felt the urge to revive a discussion from 8 days ago. We're just giving you what you wanted. =)

I can't say that Williams invented the Hollywood sound, which was already pioneered by people such as Steiner and Korngold, but he certainly helped to bring it back to the public eye in the 70s after film music entered its own mini synth and electronica era. In that sense many people see him rightfully as THE Hollywood composer. But as far as influence goes, I don't think Hollywood as a whole has ever really completely moved away from Herrmann's philosophy (not his composition and orchestration), and that need for quick impactful dramatic cue sound effects disguised as music is the reason people like Bates and Djawadi keep getting hired.

I find myself in the same quagmire with Williams and Goldsmith.

Wouldn't really call it a quagmire. I'm definitively, by a wide margin, more of a Hisaishi fan than a Williams one.

Williams v Goldsmith might be a little closer. Eh, I'd give it to Goldsmith.

It's a quagmire for me. ;)

I feel like at this stage, Hisaishi is the better tunesmith of the two - not in any way to denigrate what Williams does (and does ten times better than everybody else put together) but Hisaishi has a directness and an earnestness of melody which I really, really connect with.

I *really* liked where he appeared to be going around the time of Shinkai Project... he was finally uniting his minimalist background with his more recent orchestral abilities and that presented fascinating possibilities for the future - but then suddenly he was taking no more big film score projects and concentrated instead on the concert hall, with a few tiny little trifle scores in between. I hope that his recent almost-silence in scoring is quickly over. (Please, nobody bring up Ni No Kuni - that was all written and recorded probably more than two years ago now.)

There's Ni no Kuni 2 coming down the pipeline ��

That's what I meant. ;)

How do you go from classical music to this?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXEm5aaWHgI

All I wanted was a traditional space opera score but I guess that's too much to ask for these days.

How do you go from classical music to this?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXEm5aaWHgI

All I wanted was a traditional space opera score but I guess that's too much to ask for these days.

Dude, it's trailer music. Expecting a symphonic poem for a bit of advertising is a bit absurd.

Dude, it's trailer music. Expecting a symphonic poem for a bit of advertising is a bit absurd.
Anime trailer music tends to be representative of the actual soundtrack. They usually have the show's composer write some demo tracks for it.

Edit: not to mention they could have just used classical music, which costs nothing.

Anime trailer music tends to be representative of the actual soundtrack. They usually have the show's composer write some demo tracks for it.

Edit: not to mention they could have just used classical music, which costs nothing.

I am pretty sure they would still need to license the specific classical recording. The orchestras need to be paid!

I am pretty sure they would still need to license the specific classical recording. The orchestras need to be paid!
The series is being produced by one of Japan's big four film studios. I'm sure they have lots of music (and money) at their disposal.

The series is being produced by one of Japan's big four film studios. I'm sure they have lots of music (and money) at their disposal.

I am not disputing they DON'T have money. I am saying classical music is not free.

I am not disputing they DON'T have money. I am saying classical music is not free.
I said it costs nothing, which is just another way of saying it's inexpensive. I know it's not free.

Forget about the music, this will be Berserk 2016 level of terrible (in various ways... Im' guessing the music is Ryo Kawasaki or Masaru Yokoyama, in which case I won't hold my breath for anything good from the music either).


EDIT: Until I figure out how to record the damn concert from the PS4 app (not Japan exclusive anymore), have some footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRnNL6xvIhY&t=4482s

That Beethoven moment though...

They sound nothing like each other, but to a depressingly large portion of casual listeners, Williams = orchestra and therefore anybody else who uses an orchestra = Williams.
That's what's so funny about Kanno's situation. Many might say her orchestral music sounds like Williams without even realizing what portions are actually Williams-inspired. They are right but for the wrong reasons (as you said, to most people, all colourful orchestral music sounds like Williams which sounds like Holst which sounds like Wager etc.) No, seriously, Kanno has outright quoted Williams a number of times. Other times it's a stylistic similarity. Maybe that's why I like her music so much. If Debney keeps quoting Horner, I might end up liking his music as well (I'm a simple man...)

As for Goldsmith, it's difficult for me to rank him above Horner in terms of personal preference, though I definitely would consider him more original. My biggest gripe with Goldsmith is the excessive reverb in the recordings. While it might work for percussive heavy scores like The 13th Warrior, The Mummy, The Wind and the Lion, etc. it didn't fit with Star Trek, and I find myself enjoying Dennis McCarthy's Generations more than First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis. Legend ties 13th Warrior for being my favourite of Goldsmith's, but the reverb and "goblin effects" are what make me rank Willow as being the superior fantasy score. I also prefer Wrath of Khan over The Motion Picture and Aliens over Alien. Maybe I just like the frenetic, scherzo-like action cues more.

I will admit The Omen and Final Conflict are two of the greatest film scores ever, rivaling Williams in terms of choral writing - something Horner never really got the hang of beyond wordless boys/womens choruses. Horner's edge was in his string writing. You can hear the Goldsmith style string writing in early Horner scores like Wrath of Khan and Cocoon, but this later matured into a unique style that peaked with Braveheart and lasted until his death.

I've known people watching Gladiator and complaining about "that damned John Williams" - never, ever underestimate the ability of the general population to be completely ignorant about a given subject but nonetheless repeatedly state opinions about it.

Did Horner *ever* pull a convincing choral moment? If he did, I don't remember it.

Goldsmith, if memory serves, got Morton to do the heavy (choral) lifting on The Omen because he considered himself "rusty" at writing for choir - if only more composers today had that sense of humility and the willingness to say "OK, I'm not good at something, so I'll ask for help" we might not be in the mess we're on today. (Then again, when composers aren't good at anything what can you do?)

I like Kanno because... despite EVERYTHING, taken on its own merits, it is all completely convincing, and it's genuinely interesting and exciting to listen to. No number of unanswered questions can change this - it's fantastic music. Some time ago I went through the "holier-than-thou, I must hate Kanno because of X, Y, and Z" stage (a similarly misguided process, I believe, to people who think they're endorsing Nazism when they listen to Wagner) and eventually gave it up because, God dammit, it's all so good.

For some reason (probably my own pro-Goldsmith bias) Goldsmith's (frequently jarring) use of synth doesn't bother me at all. There's never been a Goldsmith score I listened to and thought "I'd like this a whole lot more if you took out all the synthesizers" - something about it enables me to completely let go of my hatred of synth. It usually comes from the thought "What's wrong with the orchestra? If it was good enough for Rimsky Korsakov, Scriabin, Wagner, etc, etc, why do you need all these bloody keyboards???" and with Goldsmith I've never got the impression that he doesn't know his way around a live orchestra and puts in synthesizers to compensate. It always felt like a genuine desire to expand the orchestra, to make it do things that it couldn't do before - sometimes it worked really well, sometimes it failed miserably, but I love it all because Goldsmith was coming at it from the right place, creatively.

Is Goldsmith's work with synthesizers that different from Wagner's creating new instruments to get the sound he wanted?

In regards to synth with orchestra, I feel Poledouris achieved better results in Robocop, which I prefer over something like Total Recall.
But the one that I feel achieves this the best is (surprise) Tanaka, sure he doesn't use a whole variety of synth, but what he uses ALWAYS feels natural. No other composer I know can make synth choirs and bells so enjoyable to listen to.
If I would really love the 80s (synth and everything) then Sahashi would be my first pick. But with him his music is most often a trip to the past for me (with all the smashing 80s Guitars and 80s Piano) where as Tanaka feels timeless.

In regards to Star Trek, I don't love the whole of First Contact but THAT THEME puts it right in my top three (With TMP and WoK).

I've known people watching Gladiator and complaining about "that damned John Williams" - never, ever underestimate the ability of the general population to be completely ignorant about a given subject but nonetheless repeatedly state opinions about it.

Who are these people, because whenever I engaged in conversation in the various fandoms, people are always correct in WHO they are talking to...and even normal people don't go and call all orchestral music a Williams. Safe to say, I have never seen this absurdity (and if God is good, I never will). And why would anyone refer to Williams in such a damning light? Pretty much everyone I ever heard talk about orchestral music in movies LOVE John Williams. He is the quintessential movie composer because he has composed some of the most important films in many people's lives (and because he is That Good ladies and gentlemen).


Did Horner *ever* pull a convincing choral moment? If he did, I don't remember it.

If you dare to diss Charge on Fort Wagner, you and I are going to need to have a very long conversation Mr. Tango.


Goldsmith, if memory serves, got Morton to do the heavy (choral) lifting on The Omen because he considered himself "rusty" at writing for choir - if only more composers today had that sense of humility and the willingness to say "OK, I'm not good at something, so I'll ask for help" we might not be in the mess we're on today. (Then again, when composers aren't good at anything what can you do?)

Well, good thing we have plenty composers who are good then!

Like, this actually made me start to think what the core differences are between composers from the Silver Age and the Digital Age (or maybe the Millenial Age would be a better term? I dunno, we can debate on that later). This ocurred to me after listening to The Monkey King 1 and 2 for the millionth time (seriously you guys these soundtracks are SO FUCKING FUN GO GO GO), but the Silver Composers write very long cues. I think the executives and directors back then were more willing to have the music tell a story as well. You don't see many cues from younger composers that are longer than 5 minutes, but you saw that all the time from Silver Age composers.

Silver Composers were using music to tell a story, and Digital Composers are using/being told to use story to sell a scene. This is really prevelant in alot of TV scores. I notice it a crap ton while I watched season 7 of Game of Thrones, where the music pretty much started up and ended like it was in some game. It would build up at the beginning of a specific segment, and then end when the directors wanted it over. Like, you can't TELL a story in a minute (and don't tell me that John Williams could pull that shit, because there would be a huge difference between a JW that could be given the freedom to write a 10 minute cue and one that was told to cram it all into three minutes).

Look at video games, because as much as we love them, they do have alot of set backs for composers. You need to always be having it loop, and that has to affect the writing mindset in a crap ton of different ways. For movies and tv shows, you are allowed to have an ending. You are composing to beats (lines of dialogue, action moment, etc) whereas video game is just a very general "fill the scene!" There is nothing concrete about video game music, and I think that's why we don't see long musical storytelling going on. Because how can you tell a story when each chapter needs to have the first sentence and the last be exactly the same?


For some reason (probably my own pro-Goldsmith bias) Goldsmith's (frequently jarring) use of synth doesn't bother me at all. There's never been a Goldsmith score I listened to and thought "I'd like this a whole lot more if you took out all the synthesizers" - something about it enables me to completely let go of my hatred of synth. It usually comes from the thought "What's wrong with the orchestra? If it was good enough for Rimsky Korsakov, Scriabin, Wagner, etc, etc, why do you need all these bloody keyboards???" and with Goldsmith I've never got the impression that he doesn't know his way around a live orchestra and puts in synthesizers to compensate. It always felt like a genuine desire to expand the orchestra, to make it do things that it couldn't do before - sometimes it worked really well, sometimes it failed miserably, but I love it all because Goldsmith was coming at it from the right place, creatively.

Is Goldsmith's work with synthesizers that different from Wagner's creating new instruments to get the sound he wanted?

Well, I don't give a shit about synth, because hey, synth is just a different sound. I just care if the synth is bad and boring, and in most cases modern film scores use the most boring synth imaginable. I love The Bourne Identity and I think John Powell is one of the stronger modern composers around, but we would all be better off if Powell never had to score Bourne.

Hisaishi just did a Chinese war movie called Our Time Will Come.

I haven't heard that from people who give a shit, I'm talking about casual moviegoers who think they know everything because they know the name John Williams - if they hear music in a film, and it sounds like an orchestra playing, it was John Williams.

I have also heard from people (who claim to know everything about film and film music) that John Williams is the world's most notorious plagiarist because, and I quote, "every theme he ever wrote is exactly the same" and that his kind of outdated "opera" belongs in the past and thank God we don't have to listen to it any more; YES, REALLY. This same... individual... gobbles up every single fart, whistle, and squeak from Hans Zimmer like it's the elixir of life.


If you dare to diss Charge on Fort Wagner, you and I are going to need to have a very long conversation Mr. Tango.

My question, which sounded like a dickhead question, was actually a genuine one - I have a lot of Horner "stored" in my memory, but none of it is choral.

"Charge On Fort Wagner" is a less-interesting version of O Fortuna from Carmina Burana. I do not find it a particularly noteworthy example of choral writing, since the use of the top-heavy boys choir is going after a more ethereal kind of sound.

I'll rephrase my question; has Horner ever written substantially for an SATB choir?


Silver Composers were using music to tell a story, and Digital Composers are using/being told to use story to sell a scene.

Depressing, and largely true.

We have this bizarre situation where there is more music than ever in films, but it is so anonymous and timid that there's no point to it being there in the first place. Composers (and by extension, directors) used to appreciate that the decision to score a scene with "no music" could not only be the best option for that scene, but could increase the impact of the scenes that are scored. Music used to be a character in a story, and now it's being used as an aural colour grade. If you colour-grade one scene, you pretty much have to colour-grade the whole lot.

My question, which sounded like a dickhead question, was actually a genuine one - I have a lot of Horner "stored" in my memory, but none of it is choral.

It didn't sound like a question, but you know me dude. I'm the smartiest of the smart asses.

But seriously, Fort Wagner is one of my most favorite battle cues of all time. I don't see anything wrong with it. The chorus is great, the buildup is great, it enthralls you from beginning to end.

...and wtf is an SATB choir?

Redundant, move along:

Doublehex: The point is spot on but the blame lies elsewhere. Don't put it all on directors and producers. Sure, most of them are uneducated in classical literature, art and music these days but that applies to most composers as well. Technology made it incredibly easy to work on and score for Hollywood movies without any skill or knowledge of Bach and Korngold.

The second crux of the matter why we are not getting timeless classics anymore is that almost anyone in the business got in to be "the next Williams, the next Goldsmith, the next Kubrick, and recently the next Tarrantino or the next Zimmer". These people are in it for money and fame and nothing else. They don't have anything to share with the world, they don't have perspective on anything and they have NO INDIVIDUALITY. Why do you thing everything pre-millenial gets remade over and over again. Why do almost all Hollywood composers these days sound alike and are sounding like children playing with flashy toys. By and large the new wave of Directors and composers in Hollywood today don't know anything about cinema, drama and music, otherwise we would have a whole other world of quality in films and music. They sure as hell don't visit the opera like Spielberg, Lucas, Kubrick, Kurosawa and pretty much all world-famous directors. Film music is opera music. Its why Spielberg and Williams are a match made in heaven because Spielberg is musically literate.

The reason we're fucked is that composers, directors and producers today are by and large musically illiterate. Media composers today are NOT TRAINED to write long-form symphonic music. That discipline requires a decade of study at least until you become competent at it. It's the hardest discipline in orchestral writing and the reason why only people at the age of 30 with enough training (usually within a musical institution) and experience and confidence in delivering a convincing story can pull it off decently. It' a discipline John Williams is a MASTER at.


But you're absolutely right that films (and games) today are not as effective or well made as the Silver Age because the music doesn't tell a story anymore.

A good example of this is the Birth of Dracula, certainly one of fictions most fascinating characters.

Here's how the 90s did interpret Dracula's Birth (pre-digital film making age):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfaOU1EbpoI

And here's how Dracula is Born, interpreted by modern Hollywood (digital film-making age):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFO5Np4ySLI

Note this are just examples of the overall quality of Hollywood, I know some films are still well made today. But their quantity is diminshing. In those examples, if you pay attention to cinematography, to scene composition, drama and music, there's just no contest. If you take all the dialogue out, what role does the music play? Well in the new one, it can go straight to the ninth circle of hell, together with that sloppy editing and horrible dialogue that even Charles Dance can't save. In fact the new adaption was so bad it made all those crappy chinese historical action flicks seem like the heralds of grace and beauty.


One last thing, for laughs, here's how Dracula is born according to Japanese Anime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db6UWyj9Y5M&t=42s

Notice the striking similarities to the 90s adaption, from symbolism to coloring. And the music is full on opera. What happens if you remove the dialogue and sound, does the scene still work?

Bloody yes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH1ZE9KThzQ




Video Games: Not every game has to have loops. In fact loops don't have to suck and be musically boring at all. Last time I checked Kid Icarus, Zelda, SotC and Valkyria Revolution have loops, and they don't manage to make me so bored that I have to turn the music off.

SATB = Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass / Four-part voicings

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b2pyEvp8ls

Doublehex: The point is spot on but the blame lies elsewhere. Don't put it all on directors and producers. Sure, most of them are uneducated in classical literature, art and music these days but that applies to most composers as well. Technology made it incredibly easy to work on and score for Hollywood movies without any skill or knowledge of Bach and Korngold.

That is a good thing. We need more composers to work in the industry, to get a wider range of ideas. But you don't just get in by dicking around on the keybaord. Most of the composers workign today still graduated from music colleges. Many of them DO have a knowlegde of Back and Korngold.


These people are in it for money and fame and nothing else.

Everyone is in it for the money. Nobody wants to be a starving artist.


They don't have anything to share with the world, they don't have perspective on anything and they have NO INDIVIDUALITY.

They all have something to share. Even two composers that have a very similar method of writing are going to have some differences between them. They have individuality, they just write boring ass music.


Why do you thing everything pre-millenial gets remade over and over again.

Because nostalgia is fucking bank. There are PLENTY of movies and shows right now that are not made off of nostalgia. Game of Thrones is the biggest TV show in existence, and it's success has nothing to do with nostalgia.


Why do almost all Hollywood composers these days sound alike and are sounding like children playing with flashy toys.

None of them sound like children playing with flashy toys. It sounds manufactured and forced.


By and large the new wave of Directors and composers in Hollywood today don't know anything about cinema, drama and music, otherwise we would have a whole other world of quality in films and music. They sure as hell don't visit the opera like Spielberg, Lucas, Kubrick, Kurosawa and pretty much all world-famous directors. Film music is opera music. Its why Spielberg and Williams are a match made in heaven because Spielberg is musically literate.

The new wave of movie directors are still very much versed in what came before them. What do you think inspired them to take the incredibly risky task of becoming movie directors? You have a better chance of running into a pot of gold than to become successful in Hollywood. I have never gone to a single opera in my life - am I musically illiterate?


The reason we're fucked is that composers, directors and producers today are by and large musically illiterate. Media composers today are NOT TRAINED to write long-form symphonic music. That discipline requires a decade of study at least until you become competent at it. It's the hardest discipline in orchestral writing and the reason why only people at the age of 30 with enough training (usually within a musical institution) and experience and confidence in delivering a convincing story can pull it off decently. It' a discipline John Williams is a MASTER at.

First off, we are not fucked. We still are getting good music, so long as your perception of good is not limited to just "imitating classical". Second, media composers ARE trained to write long form music, they are often told not to. That's what pays the bills - you are hired to write music the way the director and producers want. It is a very capitalistic philosophy. You think Williams and Goldsmith went into Hollywood with the expectation of making great music? Their first motivation was getting paid. Let's not make them out to be noble artists that were starving for their art form.


But you're absolutely right that films (and games) today are not as effective or well made as the Silver Age because the music doesn't tell a story anymore.

I never said movies were bad today. I still see dozens of films on a yearly basis that I love and adore.


A good example of this is the Birth of Dracula, certainly one of fictions most fascinating characters.

Here's how the 90s did interpret Dracula's Birth (pre-digital film making age):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfaOU1EbpoI

And here's how Dracula is Born, interpreted by modern Hollywood (digital film-making age):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFO5Np4ySLI


So you are comparing two different films, directed in two very different eras, and featuring two vastly different scenes, to make a point? They are not even compatable. The only similarity is that they both show how Vlad Tepes became Dracula, but that is it. It is like saying how Dragonriders of Pern did dragons better than A Song of Ice and Fire just because they both have dragons, despite the fact that both fantasy series have a widely different tone, message, style, prose and setting.

Redundant, move along:



Most of the composers workign today still graduated from music colleges. Many of them DO have a knowlegde of Back and Korngold.

According to Seth MacFarlane's own words that is definetely not the case!


I'm not saying all new films are worthless. I also made it clear that good movies that are competently directed, shot, edited and scored still happen. But its pretty much a rare occurence these days.

I have a different perspective on what effective, engaging, long-lasting and beautiful film music is and I'm not hearing it from anyone in Hollywood that isn't over 50.
Sure, some talents like Kevin Kaska are classically trained but whens his next big event film?...

And ever since the digital age began, something must have run off the deep end because I see better acting, music, cinematography, writing and cultural value in pre-millenial films than today. And I discovered most of them after I've grown up with the 2000s lineup. I have zero nostalgia for movies before the 2000s and I still think they are vastly superior.

Sorry but for me, Game of Thrones isn't good, decent at best. But the last seasons have been abyssmal, needless to say the music shows Djawadi's incompetence at writing an orchestral fantasy score.

All those big shots today, Brian Tyler and others, judged by the whole Hollywood pantheon, have honestly no business bragging and educating anyone. I find them all boring and simplistic beyond belief.
I know its easy to dismiss this as snobish, or grumpy, or old man yells at clouds (I'm not even 30 yet!) but I feel Hollywood today is not on the level it was 20 years ago and we are not getting timeless masterpieces and music again until something gravely changes.

Musical illiteracy: I would define it as when you don't listen to opera and classical works, can't notate, can't play an instrument, you don't know the symphonic repertoire and you don't know classic film scores from Korngold to Williams. The music lover and film score fan shouldn't be bothered with this at all but I expect it from someone calling himself a film composer that wants to be taken seriously and YOU CAN hear it in his music if someone is literate or not, plays an instrument or not and has the chops for it or not. The fundamentals of music are not subjective. And its not meant in a condecending way, quite the opposite, your appreciation and love for music will deepen the more you study it and listen to the "supposed" greatest orchestral works of all time and what makes them earn that title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P08rkJ5Ugf0

For example Broughton and Williams cannot write a "bad" score today, because their level of skill and craft is so high up there, musical mistakes or shortcomings simply don't occur to them anymore.

I also know for a fact that many literate composers love to include little nods and hints what inspired them or what they love listening to now and get all giggly if someone discovers it. For some its a game that adds a whole new level of enjoyment to listening to someones work if you know he has the chops and loves to put in little hints. Would I love GD2 Main Theme so much if I didn't know Tanaka put in deliberate reference to Goodwin about a sequence of aerial acrobatic combat referencing a film about aerial acrobatic combat? I somehow doubt it.

Getting into this stuff deepens your enjoyment of music. At least it did for me.


Second, media composers ARE trained to write long form music, they are often told not to. That's what pays the bills - you are hired to write music the way the director and producers want. It is a very capitalistic philosophy. You think Williams and Goldsmith went into Hollywood with the expectation of making great music? Their first motivation was getting paid. Let's not make them out to be noble artists that were starving for their art form.


My mind will be put at ease if you could show me the sources for that. I make my, no doubt pessimistic outlook, from interviews, behind-the-scenes infos and media snippets (like MacFarlane addressing the state of film music in Hollywood) and from people working in the industry, talking about the industry.

And how about making good art AND getting paid because that was how it worked for decades.


So you are comparing two different films, directed in two very different eras, and featuring two vastly different scenes, to make a point?

Yes! I'm comparing them precisely because its the same subject but told by different generations of directors, which I choose as an example to make my point.

Shall I compare the new Robocop with the old one, the new Conan with the old one, the new Ben-Hur with the 50s adaption until it becomes clear that most directors today SUCK at film making.
Irrespective what one thinks and feels about a film, I care how well its put together, and all those iconic films that will outlive 99% of the 2010s lineup are brilliantly directed, shot, edited and scored...

Forget about the music, this will be Berserk 2016 level of terrible (in various ways... Im' guessing the music is Ryo Kawasaki or Masaru Yokoyama, in which case I won't hold my breath for anything good from the music either).The staff working on it are primarily the people responsible for the Black Butler adaptation, so it may be Mitsuda. Regardless, it's clear that they're cashing in on the fujoshi market because something like LotGH would not sell at all today in its original form.

On an unrelated note, I saw the Escaflowne movie's opening a week ago and it still leaves such a strong impression on me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daiZS3aq2G0

The cinematography and the freedom of Kanno's music as it flows uninterrupted with the visuals- I don't think there is a single active director right now in Hollywood or the anime industry who would have the balls to pull off a scene like this. The Escaflowne movie itself may be a terrible narrative mess as a whole, but you can sense the ambition in every shot in the film. I don't sense any of this passion from these recent reboot projects like LotGH and FLCL. Hollywood and the anime industry are just following the same trends now, so I really can't champion one over the other.

Now, now, that would be too pessimistic. For all my prophecies of doom, Williams still scored another Star Wars... which is apparently a mess behind the scenes so I won't hold my breath for anything close to Empire.
Tarantino has a strong visual style and even has a legend like Morricone scoring music for him. Christopher Nolan has a style (which I don't enjoy as much as I've grown older) but he's interesting enough, and Spielberg still makes movies. There's also a handful of new directors where I see promise, problem is its only a tiny percentage and the environment is holding them back.

Anime likewise still has many talented directors and artists that could pull off a scene like this. There's numerous anime with a strong visual style and competence and reference to classic Hollywood. It's true that we have less dominant and classic talented people directing anime projects but the sad fact about the anime industry is that its so damn small that if a talented artist and director dies, a whole approach, style and feel vanishes with him. There was a sad realization that the people behind Satoshi Kon wanted to finish his last film in honor BUT they couldn't find any director to replace him with, and they searched for almost a decade. Only Satoshi Kon, one of a kind and there will never be someone like him again, could direct the projects he's made. Likewise if Hayao Miyazaki dies, his style and animation techniques will vanish as well. It adds a whole other level of appreciation for the industry knowing that it lives, changes and dies by its artists. The fact we only got so many orchestral masterpieces because of a dozen artists in various departments makes it both beautiful and bittersweet, but i guess that is the stuff great tragedies are made of.

^yeah, that was an exaggeration on my part. I meant to type "not many active directors". When I made that sentence I was referring to this current generation of directors like Joss Whedon or Michale Bay or all those other young guys being put in charge of the Disney franchise movies, not from the Film Brats era of Spielberg. The same can be said of the anime industry, most of the people who worked on Escaflowne are still active in the anime industry, but they have gotten old and less ambitious in their works, so the influence of the newer wave of anime directors and artists overtakes them. Shinkai's Your Name more or less established the trend that anime is headed towards after Miyazaki's era, followed by countless unnecessary reboots in the vein of Hollywood.

Miyazaki himself really is quite the anomaly in the anime industry. To be able to make so many high-budget films with almost zero interference from producers is almost unheard of nowadays.

Edit: Have fun, gentlemen. ;)

not to mention they could have just used classical music, which costs nothing.It looks like someone had the same idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MTWgLp6ERY

It looks like someone had the same idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MTWgLp6ERY
You know, I actually can't think of many anime trailers that have used classical music. This one did it pretty well back in 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWTbO7s60wA

If a show is early in production with no recorded music, using classical music for the trailer is infinitely better than generic synth demos. Well, for space operas and certain "serious" dramas at least.

To be fair, the Manfred Symphony was an integral part of the story, but I don't think they recorded it specifically for the anime, like they did for Princess Tutu.


Regardless, it's clear that they're cashing in on the fujoshi market because something like LotGH would not sell at all today in its original form.

I thought about it and I can't find myself to agree. Yamato (especially 2202), Thunderbolt, Rakugo Shinjuu, Shirayuki, Onihei, Gundam The Origin and even the new Cardcaptor Sakura are just like old times!
Especially the remakes have gorgeous designs and music that stays true to the original spirit. Even Tomino's Gundam in G is as old-school as you can get (aside from the music) and even that gets five movies in the coming years.
Kabaneri may be senseless trash but it sure is gorgeous looking senseless trash with designs by Mikimoto Haruhiko, so the "retro" aesthetic is NOT DEAD (as long as the artists live).


So I would say the problem with LotGH is that it fell into the wrong hands. A clueless producer that wants to bank on a certain fanbase and doesn't give a shit about class.

For all intends and purposes they could have drawn the ships in 2D, or at least make the 3D on the level of Majestic Prince. But all the spectacle is pointless because the series lives through its dialogue and characters...

At least they gave it to a director whose done episodes of Yamato 2199 and Arc The Lad, but his main credentials are Kuroko no Basket and Dragonar Academy :/
The screenwriter at least worked on Texhnolyze, Koi Kaze and Baccano! but not exactly epic SciFi.

It only makes sense they would hire a composer in the same vain.

I smell Berserk 2016 happening all over again.


Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc-UPPk5ZPQ&t=12s

Know why this won't suck?! because its directed by Morio Asaka, who not only directed the original series BUT also worked on the original LotGH (the irony) in addition to Monster, Gunslinger Girl and Chihayafuru.

That pattern continues with pretty much all the shows I named. Shirayuki's director Masahiro Ando has a preference for Oshima and worked on many high prestigeous projects. Gundam The Origin's and Thunderbolt's directors worked on original Gundam series. Only Rakugo Shinjuu's director is kinda green in the director's chair but he's been around since Princess Nine, and now he's one I look out for.

In the anime industry its not uncommon that a director works or has worked in all departments of production, from producing to even scoring. Like I said, it's so small they can't afford different unit directors and have to oversee pretty much all things themeselves, which Amika Kubo recently pointed out.

If hypothetically they couldn't get a composer then she would also have to do the music herself, which she very much has the credentials for. I guess that's one aspect I like about anime.

I might be wrong and LotGH will completely turn my opinion around regarding its director but if the music and direction in the trailer is what we end up with, I'm not convinced they truely care about this IP beyond the usual PR talk.






Masahiro Andoh / Keiichi Oku
Arc The Lad: Symphonic Suite
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra



Download [FLAC] (https://mega.nz/#!1n4CEIjT!sSwA3K3cKo91q5fcQkBt9h_3YXuCY-b-MVdjbrTomEg)