The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
On my walks of late, I’ve been working my way slowly through the Complete Recordings of Howard Shore’s magnificent scores to The Lord of the Rings. I continue to be amazed at the musical edifice Shore created for these films. Here is one of the finest musical moments: “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”, specifically the music for the arrival of Rohan and their charge into battle.
For some reason, versions of this with good sound to go along with good performances have been hard to find on YouTube, but I’ve finally tracked one down. The choir at college always ended their concerts with this (before doing a standard encore or two), and it’s one of a few pieces of music that transports me back to those years in my heart each and every time I hear it. Here is Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal.
Sorry, folks, but yesterday was one of those “Wow, do I got a lot goin’ on!” days. Not a bad day at all, just not a day that left a whole lot of time for posting here.
Anyhow…Ennio Morricone is not one of my favorite film composers, for various reasons (the main one being that I find a lot of his music emotionally distant), but he’s been extremely prolific over the years, and thus I do like some of his work. Here is a selection from his score to the 1979 Jaws rip-off flick, Orca.
Happy Friday!
A bit of film music today, from the movie Aliens.
I’ve written before that I’m not a big fan of the Alien franchise. The first one I generally find dreary, slow, and not terribly effective upon repeat viewings. I’ve read a lot of defenses of the film that seem to come from an almost Freudian perspective, so many actually that I’ve now come to refer to Alien in my head as Attack of the Killer Space Vaginas. I’m not convinced.
Alien 3 is complete garbage, just another dipping-into-the-well that makes zero sense and worse, starts off by immediately killing the characters we’d come to care about in the previous film. I’ve never even attempted seeing the fourth one, any of the Alien vs. Predator exercises in lunacy, and I have no interest in Ridley Scott’s apparent Alien prequel.
But I did recently watch Aliens, the second film in the series, for the first time in maybe ten years. This one was written and directed by James Cameron, and it remains my least favorite of his films. But I do respect Aliens a bit more now, for the slick action entertainment it is. I was struck at how little gore there actually is in Aliens, for one thing. I do still have problems with the movie — mainly the way the plot just unfolds in a fashion that is almost grimly predictable. Everything that happens is telegraphed way before it does so; witness the awful foreshadowing of the movie coming to a crashing halt just to make sure that we all know that Ripley’s got some serious forklift-mecha suit-handling skills. Aliens has almost no surprises and mainly succeeds on the strength of the direction, the cast, the effects, and James Horner’s score.
Even there, though, we find problems. I’ve read that Horner had very little time to write the music, which serves as an excuse, but it’s still the case that listening to his music to Aliens is basically like listening to a greatest-hits compilation of Horner’s film music work to that point. He wasn’t a big name at this point; his highest profile work was for Star Treks II and III, but both of these are virtually quoted verbatim in Aliens. It gets awfully distracting at times — but there are still spots in the score where Horner gets it dead on. Perhaps the most famous of these, among film music fans, is the music that accompanies the final escape from the planet surface. It’s one of the best “climactic scene” bits of scoring I know. Here’s “Bishop’s Countdown”.
By the way, there’s a part in the movie where Newt, the little girl, slips into an air duct that goes down quite a ways. She screams as she slides down the metal tube, leaving Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) screaming in horror that she’s lost the girl she’s sworn to protect. Apparently during filming, the actress playing Newt found dropping down that tube a blast, so she purposely kept screwing up the scene so she could keep doing it. James Cameron finally had to promise her that if she got the scene right this time, she could spend the rest of the day playing on her new slide. I love movie-making stories like that!
In honor of the 100th birthday of film composer Bernard Herrmann, here are a few selections. First, the Love Music from Vertigo:
The theme from North by Northwest:
For the Fallen (a wartime elegy):
Herrmann was one of the very greatest of all film composers, and his legacy stands proud more than thirty years after his death.
I’ve been on a big SF-reading kick lately (memo to self: blog about books), so here’s some SF music: Michael Giacchino’s end-credits suite from Star Trek 2009. I wasn’t sure what to make of this score when I first heard it, a few weeks before I saw the movie, but it really grew on me to the point where it’s one of my favorite scores from the last ten years of film music. It’s just big, brassy, explodey-spaceshippy space opera music. I especially love how right off the bat he uses Alexander Courage’s famous theme from Star Trek: The Original Series; and at about the 1:00 mark, he blends in the main theme that he composed for this film.
Of all facets of the 2009 Trek, it’s the music that I think is most successful in capturing the tone of Original Series Trek at its best — intelligent space adventure that is optimistic about our future.