It’s been just over two years since Rogue One was released, and it is one of the best regarded Star Wars movies of the Disney era. Yet despite its success, it has one major flaw. The title sequence music. Though Michael Giacchino did an excellent job to differentiate this Star Wars spinoff’s music from the other scores, the way he redoes the Main Theme in this title sequence makes the music not “Star Wars”. Furthermore, there is a particular reason why I say that. Because while he only makes a couple of seemingly minor edits, those edits completely change the fundamental nature of this theme. Now before I get too far, I just want to point out that I think Michael Giacchino did a great job with this score. He is one of my favorite film composers alive and did an outstanding job with the very limited timeframe he was given. He literally only had a month to write, record, and edit the entire score. Most composers get two or three times that time. Moreover, so while I don’t think he sought out…
“It’s almost cheating when you have John Williams…he writes feelings”—JJ Abrams, Force Awakens Director (source)
Amongst the film music circle, it’s very well known that John Williams writes emotion better than most (if not all) composers in the film industry. Whereas Hans Zimmer writes “sound worlds” and Michael Giacchino writes based off an essential chord, John Williams writes the emotional underpinning of the scene. So this series of posts is going to explain the main three ways that he creates scores with tremendous feeling. We are going to look at his well-known use of leitmotifs as well as other, less popular techniques. And to start off the exploration, let’s look at one of the historical precedences for why his work carries such emotional weight: Mickey Mousing. Mickey Mousing Guess where Mickey Mousing comes from?
Hint: they’re from the early Mickey Mouse cartoons. Mickey Mousing is synchronizing the music to the actions that are on the screen. For instance, if there is a…
INTRODUCTION Outside of the realm of radio airplay and mass consumption, metal bands struggle to distinguish themselves while subjected to ever-shifting standards set by short-lived trends. All groups with media presence seem to have something to prove, and Florida native Chuck Schuldiner was no exception. When denounced by the other members of his band Death, Schuldiner arrived at a creative waypoint; he knew that he wanted something cleaner, and to “move forward musically.” In 1991, Death released Human, and Schuldiner claimed "this is much more than a record to me, […] it’s revenge,” in a 1991 interview. Though the trademark style of Death was called Floridian death metal at the time, listeners would later recognize Human as one of the first albums of technical death metal. Long before the term became accepted, Chuck Schuldiner and few other contemporaries maintained the sentiment of the subgenre, seeking analytical complexity over the basic stereotype of incomprehensibly growled…
Score: 1.25
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