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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Ripping off "Gladiator" music
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 11-11-2003 12:28 AM
quote:
And I always thought that John Williams' theme for Star Wars was a rip-off of John Barry's theme from "Born Free".
All of John Williams' music is either ripped of from someone else, or completely forgettable. He is the scum on the bottom of the barrel of film composers, not just because he's often bad, but because he has no ideas. There hasn't been a score he's done that hasn't made me grind my teeth or want to just shut it off. It's either just po', or it's like he's running "Name That Tune" while you're trying to watch a movie.
Enjoy the march from Prokofiev's "Love for Three Oranges"
Or heck, if you like making those weird little bogus trailers for nonexistent Star Wars movies, pull a whole soundtrack:
http://www.iclassics.com/iclassics/album.jsp?selectionId=4069
I've never understood the intense fascination & attachments people have made to the Star Wars movies. When the first one came out, I thought it was a clever pastiche, & the young folks who glommed onto it just fell into a demographic crack when there were no longer so many old Prince Valiant, western, & George Pal movies running all the time on TV.
The music drove me up a wall, though. When the hero got into his space ship with the little robot to go attack the evil Death Star, I just *knew* the soundtrack was going to break into "Peter & the Wolf". I could HEAR it.
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Michael Schaffer
"Where is the
Boardwalk Hotel?"
Posts: 4143
From: Boston, MA
Registered: Apr 2002
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posted 11-11-2003 06:09 AM
quote:
All of John Williams' music is either ripped of from someone else, or completely forgettable. He is the scum on the bottom of the barrel of film composers, not just because he's often bad, but because he has no ideas.
That is really an unfair statement, and also one which leaves some doubt about your understanding of how the creative process in music (or maybe in general) works. There is no such thing as complete originality in music. Everything has been there before, only in different form and stylistic context.
A lot of great musical ideas are very similar to others which have been there before, what makes a musical composition "new" or "original" is the way in which it is "composed", meaning in which way the material is synthesized into a new composition.
That also goes for Prokofiev, who was a very "original" composer, but whose ideas can in turn be traced back to other music before him. What made him such a great composer was his very sure hand in applying various stylistical techniques to his material. That, by the way, is not my opinion - Prokofiev himself commented extensively on this subject.
The "creative" quality is basically a sensitivity to the expressive and stylistical potential of melody, harmony, rhythm, color, and the ability to combine these elements into a musical shape which captures a certain "mood" well or fits into a stylistical context.
For this reason, musical composition can be seen as much as a craft than a creative art. John Williams certainly has a knack for selecting the right material for his scores, and shaping it into very striking musical material. That may not make him one of the greatest and most "original" composers, but it certainly makes him an excellent and versatile composer for film music.
Other than music which is composed as a statement by itself, theatre and film music first and foremost of all has to underline the emotional world of the given film or play.
In fact, a lot of musical masterpieces are based on very simple motifs. If you look at another piece used in films and "ripped off" many times, Richard Strauss`introduction to "Also sprach Zarathustra" (heard in "2001"), from an analytical point of view is a relatively simple C major cadenza, and the famous rising motif is nothing but C-G-C, the most basic sequence of fundamental, first harmonic, and octave. What makes it such an enormous experience to hear is not which notes Strauss "came up with", but how he treats this material in its musical context.
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"Star Wars" begins with a half-note followed by a whole note while "Born Free" opens with a dotted half tied to an eighth.
I don`t know which Star Wars theme you mean, but the one at the beginning of all movies opens with a 8th note triplet, two half notes, another triplet on the beat, a half and a quarter note and so on. A dotted half + an 8th note doesn`t make a full bar. Does anyone have a link to a recording or the music for "born free"? I seem to hear an echo of that in the back of my head, but its been decades since I heard it.
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William Hooper
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1879
From: Mobile, AL USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 11-12-2003 01:46 AM
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That is really an unfair statement, and also one which leaves some doubt about your understanding of how the creative process in music (or maybe in general) works.
I think *that* is unfair to composers who toil to create original works. It's an implication that it always begins with association, & a further one that creativity does not imply a drive towards originality.
Williams just seems to spot films by association with music he's familiar with, & then use schoolbook variation techniques to disquise it slightly. And then add some VERY lame bridging material. He's even an insult to composers who work by creating compiled scores, which is the oldest film accompaniment technique. Carl Davis' score of a video issue of Thief of Bagdad doesn't say "Score by Carl Davis", it says "Score by Carl Davis from themes by Rimsky-Korsakov". (His entirely original scores are excellent too, except the man cannot effectively score a chase or comedy to save his life.) Film composers who worked largely in compiled scores, probably the most familiar being Carl Stalling, are honest about their quotations, & almost all better composers of original material, too. One Road Runner score is more manipulative, original, & effective than any Williams dreck I can think of.
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There is no such thing as complete originality in music. Everything has been there before, only in different form and stylistic context.
That's a common reduction to absurdity: "There are only 12 notes; there's nothing new except how they're put together". Let's try: "There is no such thing as originality in painting or photography; there only three colors, the only thing different is how they're put together." The 2009 Honda Prelude has already been invented. The ancestry of Eminem's music is the German baroque. These are silly, & easy.
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That also goes for Prokofiev, who was a very "original" composer, but whose ideas can in turn be traced back to other music before him. What made him such a great composer was his very sure hand in applying various stylistical techniques to his material. That, by the way, is not my opinion - Prokofiev himself commented extensively on this subject.
Oh, come on. Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies are Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, inspired by folk melodies, not transcriptions with mildly obscuring touches. George Harrison's famous plagiarism case of "My Sweet Lord" was plainly "He's So Fine", unconscious though the lift may have been. Oasis & Jeff Lynne like to work within a genre of Beatles-sounding composition techniques; they're not PDQ Bach. And Peter Schickele is millions of miles surpassing in originality & cleverness than slimy John Williams.
How did I have this premonition that if I went to Google's usenet archive & typed in "John Williams hack" that it would turn up the bazillion hits it did?
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The "creative" quality is basically a sensitivity to the expressive and stylistical potential of melody, harmony, rhythm, color, and the ability to combine these elements into a musical shape which captures a certain "mood" well or fits into a stylistical context.
Note that "originality" isn't included in your assessment.
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For this reason, musical composition can be seen as much as a craft than a creative art
It's a craft because it requires knowledge & work. Work without originality, and poor work, is hack work.
I am always distressed by people who dislike an artist personally because they simply have no taste for their work. Anybody can be not so good or their work just not to someone's taste. But for John Williams, I not only dislike the junk he emits, but the lazy, dissembling mind that produces it. I don't like him. I hope he has a hard stool tomorrow morning. I hope the people in the next block hear his anguished screams.
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