My Top 6 Film Composers

I've already talked about my favorite film scores, which was almost impossible to write, but now I'd like to get a little bit broader in a sense. I figured that I might as well write my favorite film composers as well. Now, this list is going to be really biased, mostly because a lot of my composing is truly inspired by some of the guys on this list. I was actually going to do my top 5, but then couldn't decide who should be the fifth and who should be left out. But either way, this is my list of top 6 film composers.

Harry Gregson-Williams
One of the two reviews that I've ever actually done is by this guy. He's done movies like Narnia, Shrek, and the Martian. He's also done a few 3A video games in his time as well, including COD Modern Warfare and Metal Gear Solid 5. But my biggest reason for putting him on this list is because of his really compact themes that contain so much emotion. Especially in some movies he's worked on with Ben Affleck, he's managed to write beautiful themes without all the gratuitous stuff like what John William's music sounds like.

Michael Giacchino
This is the composer of that one other review I did... He's done movies like Up, Ratatouille, Doctor Strange, and Rogue One. He's also known for the entire Lost series. He's managed to win an Oscar for his work on Up in 2010, and a nomination two years before that for Ratatouille. Personally, I really like his flexibility. He can perfect a score like Up, but still be able to pull off something totally different like Rogue One. Giacchino is also the only composer to have written for every branch of Disney (Doctor Strange, Rogue One, a bunch of live action, and a bunch of Pixar).

Thomas Newman
Newman is probably the unluckiest guy on this list; he has 14 Oscar nominations and 0 wins. He's done movies like The Shawshank Redemption, Nemo, and American Beauty. I personally really like him because of his amazing use of leitmotifs in a lot of his movies, but also because of his incredible use of instrumentation. He also has a relatively minimalist approach to composing, which is something that I feel works 90% of the time, and I really enjoy music like that.

John Williams
Oh no... he's not at the top of the list! The only reason why Williams isn't much higher on this list is because of how similar all of his scores are to each other. If it weren't for this, he'd probably be up at the top.

Howard Shore
Ah... Leitmotifs. Howard Shore satisfies my desperate need for them. I've talked about them before, and if my explanation doesn't make sense, compare it to the Wiki and mine might start to seem like a good explanation. Especially on his work with Lord of the Rings, the leitmotifs add SO much to the entire movie. His composing genius astounds me all the time anyways.

Hans Zimmer
Zimmer is quickly becoming the most financially successful film composer yet. He's written music for movies like Inception, Interstellar, and Pirates of the Caribbean. His music is possibly the most powerful in Hollywood today, and his dynamic portfolio is incredible. With the ability to write for any scenario, Zimmer easily deserves a spot at the top of my list.

Hans Zimmer in his insane studio. Courtesy of Guitar Master Class

A Rant About Deadlines

As mentioned in a previous post, I've had the opportunity to score a student film that I took a part in producing. We planned to submit it to our high school film festival, so we had to be on our game. Sadly, the deadlines messed us up from the start. We wrote the script with only about four hours of work put into it, then rushed into filming. Our original plan gave us three full days to film the full movie, then a week to edit and score. However, filming was pushed back because of weather, and so we had to fit in two days of filming into one day, which means that if you get a shot and aren't happy with it, too bad. When we had all the shots that we wanted, there were only six days until the submissions were due. It took four days to finalize a rough cut for me to score... leaving me two days to write a film score, record it, and mix it. And I had school on those days as well. Yeah. I hate deadlines.

This was my first project that I've worked on with such a tight schedule. Sometimes it takes me that long to get a melodic sketch of one song that I really fall in love with. The problem is that I couldn't write something then say "You know what, that could be a lot better". I didn't have time to make changes. I spotted the movie with the director at about 5:00p.m. on Wednesday, then had to hand him a finished .wav file at 7:00a.m. on Friday... This forced me to write whatever first came to mind then move on. I would have sections of score that were basically just whole notes. Here's a picture of a few seconds of the score:

Clearly VERY boring score...

I've been able to quickly discover how deadlines can ruin a score. I worked long hours on something that I wasn't proud of. I slaved away at a computer for about half of a 62 hour period, without sleeping, for nothing. The film wasn't even accepted into the film festival, I'm learning now. It leaves me to wonder, what if the music was better? What if I had another week to work on it? Would I have made a better score, then been accepted into the festival? If we had been accepted, would I have the chance to redo the music? I WILL NEVER KNOW!

But this leaves me to wonder, does this happen to pro film composers to? There have been a lot of questionable scores for really great movies before. Is it just because they didn't have enough time to do what they're good at just because of a freaking deadline!? This rant sounds really stupid, but my point still stands. Deadlines suck.

On the bright side, I've reached my goal. I managed to compose as much music as I decided to by the end of the school year. It ended up being terrible, but I still reached my goal either way. I'll just stop here.

Film Score Review #2 - Rogue One

Rogue One. Courtesy of Starwars.com

When I went to watch Rogue One in theaters for the first time, I was only disappointed by one thing. The music. Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible score. But at the time, I didn't think composer Giacchino did it... right. Since then however, I've watched the film more and become familiar with the ins-and-outs of the music.

Long story short, I think it's amazing.

Before I dive into the music, let's talk about the background of this score. It was originally going to be scored by Alexandre Desplat, a successful French composer. However, after he had scored the movie, most of the movie was redone, and they needed him to come back. However, due to his busy schedule, Disney turned to one of my favorites: Michael Giacchino. Because of rough deadlines, Giacchino only had four weeks to score the whole movie (that's less than half of normal). Disney made it very clear before and after the film's release that the movie was totally a standalone. That's why, to my disappointment, we didn't get the normal Star Wars opening or music. Anywho, back into the review.

Giacchino is more than familiar with using themes and leitmotifs in his scores. This was more than obvious with this movie. For starters, I'll briefly talk about some of new leitmotifs he's made for this movie.

Jyn Erso has a theme, and I believe it's the most widely used in the movie. We first hear it when her mother gives her the necklace at the beginning of the movie, and hear it for the last time as she's hugging Cassian before getting Death Starred. It's really emotional, and also represents hope. I won't explain how I know this... but it might have to do with the track being named "Jyn Erso and Hope Suite" on Spotify.

Like any Star Wars movie, it has it's own bad guy theme but that's really self explanatory.

Also, Giacchino alludes to a really.... really old piece of music called Dies Ires several times (it's a really old Gaelic chant that translates to Day of Wrath). It's the equivalent to a Wilhelm Scream only way more serious. It's basically the entire score for the third section of movie.

Now for the juicy part... the leitmotifs from the old movies. Giacchino was really careful to not overuse the themes for the other movies. Only when the two storylines overlap did he use music from the other storyline. For example, the classic "Force Theme" is only heard twice, once when Organa appears, and again when he is talking about Obi-Wan.

The Imperial March is only heard two or three times, and only when it's necessary. The big surprise for me is the distant lack of the Rebel fanfare. It's heard a few times, but the entire movie is still about the Rebel Alliance... Shouldn't we have heard it more than that? Maybe that's just me, but I would really have loved so see a few more allusions to that as well.

In general, I'd have to rate this score a solid B+. It won't be on the top of my list for scores in general, but I really loved seeing it come of Giacchino. As the only composer to have scored a movie from all four branches of Disney, I think it's great to see all the different genres he can compose for. However, I felt that some of his new leitmotifs and themes were a little bit underdeveloped. This likely has to do with the fact that he only had four weeks for whole thing, and it's really hard to get a perfect theme in that time. Trust me, I've been working on two different leitmotifs for about three months now.

Anywho, that'll be it for this post, and I can't wait to see what score comes next.

What Makes Themes Memorable?

One of the many jobs of a composer is to make the music for their film memorable. But what can composers do to make their music memorable? Well, I decided to look at some examples of really memorable themes and try to find patterns. This may prove to be more challenging than I'd like, but I'll take a stab at it anyways.

The first step is to find some examples of memorable music, which might be the easiest part of this. I went to a friend of mine and played some film music for him without telling him the movie and asked him if he knew what it was from. All of the scores were ones that I, as a film score nerd, would probably know. I then looked at the examples of ones that he recognized, especially the "obvious" ones and saw the patterns in them. Here's what I could come up with.

Repetition
This one is kind of obvious. The music that was repeated a lot in the movie it was in tended to be easier to recognize. The really fast recognitions were pieces like Hedwig's Theme or the theme from Finding Nemo, both of which are hear often throughout their themes.. On the other hand, the really slow realisations were pieces like Rey's Theme from Star Wars, Time from Inception, and Your Father Would Be Proud from Rogue One. This, however, does not appear to be a constant factor.

Uniqueness
The music that wasn't very similar to many other movies were the easiest to be recognized. I noticed that music by John Williams was easily mistaken with other pieces, specifically other scores by him as well. For example, my friend thought music from Hook was from Harry Potter, and music from E.T. was confused with music from Harry Potter as well. On the other hand, Hans Zimmer's music was never confused with anything else. Again, this never really seemed like it was true for all music.

Fast Build
Pieces that didn't take a long time to get to the real juice of the song were also easy to recognize. The really big one was Hedwig's Theme. John Williams wastes literally no time to start the song, opening with the iconic notes as played by a celesta. This piece took less than one second to be recognized by our volunteer. Other music that has a fast build, like Monster's Inc., was easy to be recognized. Still, this third factor didn't help in making all of the pieces more recognizable.

John Williams scoring Harry Potter, the most easily recognized score. Courtesy of Wikia

In general, it seems like repetition, uniqueness, and a fast build all help in making themes more memorable. However, some pieces with all of these things were still not easily recognized. So then, what does make a theme memorable? Something... Unexplainable, especially by me. The only underlying factor that I've found in every single piece is that it certainly helps to have a musical ear. As a musician, I find that it's much easier for me to recognize scores than it is for a "normal" person.

Either way, I can't find any "formula" for a memorable theme. I'll soon be reviewing some of the scores that I found were particularly memorable, especially the ones found on my list of top five film scores. Until then, keep listening to more film scores.

My Favorite Film Scores

I kind of knew that one of these days, I'd have to make a list of my favorite film scores. Really, the only hard part about this is deciding which ones! I have so many scores that I adore, and wanted to put tons on the list... But still, I've decided to think of my favorites that come to mind first. Buckle in for a terribly made list of my five favorite film scores.

I tried not to just pick movies that won Academy Awards, but I'm not sure how well I succeeded there.

5) Finding Nemo
Right of the bat, a film from one of my all time favorite composers, Thomas Newman. The emotion that he is able to draw from the movie is incredible, particularly in the case of the leitmotif for Nemo and Marlin. It's one of the few scores that I've heard live, and that may be what pushed it onto this list.

4) Up
Yeah, another Pixar movie... Another one of my favorite composers, Michael Giacchino wrote the music for this one. A perfect example of how you don't need a violin solo in a minor key to create sadness, the music from Up is able to make it onto this list.

3) E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Finally, a John Williams movie on this list. Took a while didn't it? Either way, this score is one of my all time favorites, yet I still never want my symphony director to tell me we're playing it. The score is one of the first ones that I really noticed how much the music helped the movie along. The light yet triumphant theme of the movie is really one to remember. Can you imagine Elliott flying in his bike with E.T. WITHOUT Williams' music? Exactly, and that's while this score made it onto the list.

2) Star Wars: A New Hope
Oh dear, I don't know how I managed to find something better than this score. I may just be in a bad mood today, but this iconic score did not make it to the top of the list. However, there are still a lot of reasons for why it's this high on the list. For starters, it's music by John Williams, so it must be good. After that, it has leitmotifs... Which are great. Finally, I would argue that this score revolutionized film music. Those are some of the great reasons why this movie made it to number two.

Honorable Mention
I may not have mentioned this, but this was a really hard list to make because of all the great scores there are. For that reason, I've decided to add one very honorable mention.

Schindler's List
If you've ever watched this film, you know why I couldn't leave out this score. The pairing of John Williams composing and Itzhak Perlman as a violin soloist is a match made in heaven. I'm currently playing the famous violin solo from the movie, so it came to my mind sooner than a lot of other movies did. Either way, this score definitely deserves to be mentioned.

Such an Honorable Mention I added a picture. Courtesy of IMDb

1) Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings
Now that I'm this far, I'm almost ashamed of putting this as number one. But as a total fanboy of leitmotifs, there's nothing better in my opinion than Howard Shore's score for this movie. I talked about this film score in a previous post, so I won't go into much more detail about it here. But no matter what, the leitmotifs of this movie are why it's number one on this list.

That was a rather lengthy post, but it really needed to be done. In the near future, I'll probably do a review of one of the movies on that list. But until then, keep listening to more film scores.

Goals... and how bad they're going.

In a post from long ago, I stated that I wanted to write forty some posts by June. That of course, won't happen. I also said that a wanted about a third of those posts to be reviews. That's even less likely to happen. As it turns out, it's pretty difficult to review a film score. First, you have to know the movie inside and out. Then, you need to know the music inside and out. Personally, I like to get a rough transcription of some of the leitmotifs and themes from the movie as well, making my life that much harder. For that reason, I'll probably start leaning towards the majority of my posts being about writing film scores instead of specific film scores themselves.

On the bright side, I'm getting kind of close to the goal I set for composing. If you remember, I wanted to have written four different pieces of music by June. That counts both film scores and absolute music of any genre. Since that post was written, I've written three pieces in my spare time. Two were film scores for student films, both of which were totally out of my comfort zone. 

The first was something that took me a span of about thirty hours of work. It was a horror movie, and the music was something that I put together in GarageBand with almost twenty different tracks. I had just gotten a new keyboard to do it on, which was a blast to work on.

The second took me much less time because it needed much less music. It was a spoof on a Bear Grylls kind of nature show. I worked with the same director as the other film, and he wanted African Tribal music. Ironically, I used Chinese drums instead of African Tribal drums. After I messed with the EQ levels for a while, I was able to design a sound that really fit what the director wanted.

The third piece I've done so far was a piano/violin duet. It came out with a lot of emotion, which is something that I was really looking for. Because I have limited piano experience, it's a fairly easy part for the piano, but it's rather difficult for the violin. I wrote it in Eb Major, which is a key I've honestly never really worked in before. Here's a picture of the piano part that I recorded on GarageBand with a MIDI Keyboard...

Yeah... That's a really easy piano part...

Finally, I'm going to be starting the score for another film in about three weeks. It's for a movie that a friend and I wrote and are currently in production of. I feel like I'll be able to get a really powerful score out of it, and will finally be able to add in some live recording as well. I've already begun working on some themes (leitmotifs) that should add a lot to the movie. I'll only have about five school days to get the music done, so anything that I can do to get an early start is crucial.

Anywho, that's basically how all of the goals that I've set have been going, and a quick update on a project that I've been working on. I'll see you again in three weeks when all four compositions are done!

Leitmotifs in Lord of the Rings

Lord of the Rings. Courtesy of Roger Ebert

In a previous post I explained the differences between leitmotifs, motifs, and themes in music, specifically film scores. Throughout this post, I’ll be talking about one of my favorite film scores and all of its leitmotifs. This score, of course, is The Lords of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, directed by Peter Jackson with music composed and conducted by Howard Shore. I won’t actually be reviewing the music in this post, or any other post for that matter. Honestly I’m probably too biased about it to review it fairly. Let’s just leave it at the fact that’s a great score, and totally deserving of all of its awards. I’ll just be focusing on the smaller aspects of the music.

The score was nominated for won an academy award for best original score in 2002, despite other outstanding scores by John Williams (x2), Randy Newman, and James Horner being nominated. Utilizing all aspects of an orchestra available to him, Howard Shore created several leitmotifs and called on them all several times throughout the film to compliment the already great film.

Throughout the entire film, Shore only uses a handful of different main leitmotifs, but has so many variations on each it honestly feels like there are more. I’ll briefly go a few of those in (roughly) the order that the appear before delving deeper.

The Lothlorian Theme

The very first thing we hear, even before we see anything on the screen. It can be considered Galadriel’s theme as well, and is often heard as a choir singing. It’s offsetting and foreign, much like what it represents. It’s not heard as often as many other themes, but still a big deal.

The Ring Theme

Perhaps the most unsettling leitmotif on this short list, The Ring Theme represents, of course, the one ring. It’s almost as minimalist as the famous motif from Jaws, using just a handful of different notes.

The Shire Theme

The Shire Theme is certainly a much lighter and happier piece of music, representing the Shire, Hobbits, and sometimes just the connection the the Hobbits in the Fellowship have to each other and their home.

The Fellowship Theme

This theme has the most variations and is called up very often. Shore is able to use this theme in several different situations and with many different feels and sounds, making it just a little bit different every time. It represents the Fellowship of the Ring and everything they want, need, and stand for. As we see this theme collapse, so does the Fellowship.

Even though I would kind of like to, I won’t be able to talk about every single measure of the score, but there are a moments in the music I’d like to highlight. By the way, if you’re not familiar with the movie, this next bit is going to be very confusing.

• In the first five minutes of movie, we hear four different leitmotifs: the Lothlorien Theme, the Ring theme, the Shire theme, and the Fellowship theme. Many composers (myself being one of them) wouldn’t be able to smoothly make these transitions, but Howard Shore doesn’t have three Oscars for nothing and makes the changes seem easy. This doesn’t necessarily represent anything special in the story, but I do think it’s rather impressive.

• Later on the movie, as Frodo and Sam are leaving the Shire, they stop by where they’ve never gone before, and we hear the Shire theme. Then, as they cross the threshold, the music changes to a humble variation of the Fellowship theme, signalling that the journey has officially started.
• We hear the Fellowship theme many times throughout the movie, but the last time we hear it in its entirety is as the Fellowship runs through the mines of Moria. During this portion, it’s faster, stronger, and is accompanied by percussion, creating a very clear sense of urgency. The Fellowship is being pushed one last time before it breaks, never to reform again. Shortly after we hear this quick piece of music, the ¾ time signature of the Fellowship theme is overcome by the 5/4 time signature of the orc music.
• Further on into the film, we see the Fellowship theme scramble to find it’s footing, but is never able to, appearing only in fragments or as a weak variation.

Unfortunately, this is all the time that I have in this post, despite all the other things I could talk about. Next time you watch this incredible movie, pay attention to every time you notice one of the themes.