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Film Music

Why Are Disney Songs So Catchy - How Disney Songs Hijack Your Brain?

    We’ve all heard them, and they get stuck in all our heads. But why? Why is it that Disney can seemingly create earworms?  Though there’s no such thing as a Disney formula, today we’re going to get close to one. And best of all, this theory is not one that I’ve hacked together to try to show something new and inventive. Not at all.  I stumbled upon everything you’re about to read.  About two months ago, I was asked to do a medley of several popular Disney songs. I ran into a problem.        One of the keys of a good medley is variety. The more I tried to put songs together, the more I realized that these songs are similar! Though every song seemed fresh and new when I first heard it, I began to find out that they borrowed many elements!  And for the past month, I’ve then been exploring these elements to see how present they are in Disney songs. Let me tell you, many of these tropes are everywhere.  So today, we’re going to look at just a few of these elements that Disney songs have that make them so…
Score: 1.47

How John Williams Creates Emotion (Part 3)

by nick

     As the number 2 film composer of all time, what makes John Williams so great?  One word: EMOTION.  His music is filled with emotion, and this is an exploration into why his music carries so much feeling.  In Part 1, we looked at how he Mickey Mouses emotion by carefully timing the emotional content of the music with the film.  And in Part 2, we saw how he uses leitmotifs to reveal characters’ emotions and how his emotional content is character driven. His isn’t trying to make the audience feel emotion but instead shows how the characters are thinking and feeling.  But this still leaves us with one last question:  How does his musical content elicit emotion?  We looked at how he enhances emotion through leitmotifs and Mickey Mousing emotion, but neither technique inherently gives emotion to a cue.  So that’s what we are going to explore today. And we are going to start exploring someone completely different.    Michael Giacchino and “The Chord”      Michael Giacchino points out many of the ideas we’ve been…
Score: 1.34

How John Williams Creates Emotion

by nick

    “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…
Score: 1.32

How the Rogue One Title Music Loses The Essence of "Star Wars"

by nick

      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…
Score: 1.3

How John Williams Creates Emotion (Part 2): E.T.

by nick

     John Williams has earned 51 Oscar nominations, more than any other living person.  In fact, he also has the second largest number of nominations in history, only behind Walt Disney with 59 nominations.  So John Williams may very well catch up soon and beat that record.  But this raises the questions: Why are his film scores consistently good? What makes his scores stand out above the rest?  If you’ve read Part 1, you may be thinking to yourself that it’s because he closely writes music to fit the scene’s emotions. But it’s slightly more than that. His music has so much emotion because it consistently reveals the emotions of the characters.  In his mind, composers are a slave to the movie and are there to support the movie. Because the story is paramount in a movie, it makes sense that he puts story above all else.  Today, we are going to answer a couple questions related to his music and character:   How does he relate an emotion to a character How can he show the development of a character…
Score: 1.14