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Posted: |
Dec 2, 2022 - 6:05 PM
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By: |
Ado
(Member)
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Do we love his work, of course. Is he vindicated, no. Did he relentlessly repeat and riff on himself and others? Yes.
He can get credit for being, over the span of his scores, not always terribly original, but having the intelligence to reframe a lot of his work to make it sound quite different. The hard truth is that there were, are, many more creative composers than Horner, who will never be anywhere as successful or well known. He knew how to capture the audience of any given movie he worked on, even if it was derivative, and a recooking of what came before. FYI, I have a lot his scores, before I begin to be attacked. Yavar stated it well, I mean, just accept the truth
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If he'd been around in, say, the 30s we wouldn't be having these talks. Not as much anyway. We have the luxury/ curse of recordings to play. Stop, start, rewind and pause. Also back then they did it to a degree with regular quotes of popular tunes.
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Yes, yes, this is all very well.
But what I want to know is, when are we going to get Brainstorm Deluxe? For me it was when all this Horner music started, back in 1984 when I bought the TER vinyl album. So many Horner expansions etc, and yet we've never had the film version of this score.
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I remember Goldsmith getting testy when someone called him out for his classical borrowings in LEGEND.
And now poor Jerry is getting raked over the coals publicly for his derivative score to PLANET OF THE APES, in the film TAR.
And he was subtle compared to Horner.
If it was a competition though, Horner would be the winner.
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Posted: |
Dec 3, 2022 - 4:19 AM
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By: |
El Aurence
(Member)
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This is a very interesting thread so far and many arguments plausible and understandable.
My five cents:
We are living in the era of information and internet.
As I started listening to film music, in this case to the music of James Horner, I didn't have any information besides maybe the booklet or a book about film music. I was focused and concentrated on the music, was happy and enjoyed listening to Horner's compositions.
I remember the day when I bought my first CD: WILLOW. I enjoyed this music so much, I love this score until now, music full of joy, mystery, romance, action, beautiful melodies. I listened to it over and over again. I didn't care about composing techniques or from whom Horner borrowed or copied.
I listend to STAR TREK II and III (so much fun!), An American Tail, Brainstorm and many others.
Great time in my life.
Then came the internet, huge amounts of information, just like in this thread and the heroes of my past suddenly started losing their status.
Mr. Kendall mentioned this in his ANDOR topic: the magic is getting lost.
I understand that this is our hobby and we have interests not only about the music itself but also the universe surrounding film music.
But this often tends to go negative.
We - fans ( ! ) - should stop criticizing our heroes. We are not composers, haven't either studied music nor written a film score. I could imagine that this is very difficult issue. We should respect the artists and their achievements.
We should go where we were in the beginning, before internet started:
Enjoy our hobby and film music.
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We should go where we were in the beginning, before internet started:
Enjoy our hobby and the film music, of James Horner and all the other composers.
Yep. Nailed it. I'd just add to this that there is also an argument that we got older, there's nothing new under the sun, and that those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s truly were in the best of times that we really won't see again.
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This topic I also find interesting. My thoughts:
A composer who takes other melodies and interpolates them into his orchestrational structure or surrounding compositions is then at worst (other than being called a thief) an arranger. Coming up with the melody is only a small part of composition.
My problem as a listener is being distracted by hearing melodies that belong somewhere else. For example, listening to music from The Orville and hearing Born on the Fourth of July, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Trek The Motion Picture among others (despite having changed enough notes to avoid litigation) is just very boring to me. Come up with something new! Or at least take your melodies from something obscure so that the listener won't immediately detect plagiarism.
For me, I couldn't care less if it was revealed that John Williams used 50 ghostwriters to come up with all of his themes or that they were taken from obscure classical compositions. Is it creating insecurity in the listener to have their favourite film scores have a melody that was plagiarized? Are you insecure about having James Horner as a favourite composer because of his tendency to have taken melodies from himself or others? Not for me, as long as I am moved by the composition and am not personally distracted by melodies that I associate or have associated with something else beforehand. When a melody is very obvious, I think it should be credited.
That being said, I think the best person to steal from would be yourself, as long as the original ideas were yours. However even that is distracting especially from Horner who's Star Trek II end credits ascent, for example, is heard everywhere. I'm sure composers have writers block and sometimes the process must resort to brute force determination to find notes rather than sudden inspiration such as David Raksin's divorce letter.
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Has anyone watched the video? In Jazz circles borrowing was the norm and encouraged.
I started to but fell asleep.
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Has anyone watched the video? In Jazz circles borrowing was the norm and encouraged.
I started to but fell asleep.
I knew I would lose the over the 70's crowd.
I'm not over seventy. I only feel and look over seventy. M'kay.
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Posted: |
Dec 3, 2022 - 7:32 PM
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By: |
William R.
(Member)
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There's just no getting around the fact that Horner was considerably less inhibited about "borrowing" than any of his contemporaries.
Yes, Williams and Goldsmith did it too.
Yes, the theme from JAWS is indebted to RITE OF SPRING, and the opening STAR WARS battle music borrows freely from Holst.
Yes, Goldsmith made rather brazen use of the opening theme of ON THE WATERFRONT in LA CONFIDENTIAL, and another user posted a Rachmaninoff piece with a melody awfully close to the theme for SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY.
Sometimes they even stole from Horner himself. Listen to "Scammed by a Kindergartner" from HOME ALONE; it's obvious that "Foraging for Food" from THE LAND BEFORE TIME was the temp track there.
It's a dead horse now, but Horner was still markedly more shameless about it. HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS got a lot of notoriety for this, but what blows my mind Horner had ALREADY ripped off the same exact Raymond Scott tune in BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. (There's also the obvious influence of the "Breakfast Machine" piece from PEE WEES BIG ADVENTURE). Compare this with Bruce Broughton's score for HONEY I BLEW UP THE KID, which has a very similar emotional vibe to Horner's score. Broughton's music clearly owes its inspiration to Rota, Rossini, Ives, and Carl Stalling, but it's still a wholly original work, and Broughton was almost as busy as Horner was at that time.
But you know what? I still really like the HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS score. It's almost impossible not to! That's how skilled Horner was. I'll always love BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS and ALIENS because they're excellent scores, even though they're packed with uncredited quotes from the works of others. One can acknowledge Horner being unusually derivative while still enjoying his work.
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…Goldsmith made rather brazen use of the opening theme of ON THE WATERFRONT in LA CONFIDENTIAL…
One could argue this was a deliberate creative choice.
This has undoubtedly been remarked by others, but Goldsmith "copying" Bernstein is not unlike the surgically altered "look-alike starlets" David Strathairn's Pierce Patchett has working for his Fleur-de-Lis "escort" service.
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...how many people will hear the beautiful bitter sweet keening strings in “Clear and Present Danger” (around Greer’s Funeral) and identify it as part of the third movement of Shostakovich’s 5th symphony, more or less note-for-note? It’s the passing off of other people’s work as your own that makes the difference, morally if not legally...
... I became aware of hours of classical music that I would have been ignorant of otherwise. So props for at least cribbing from geniuses...
Crediting really is the point. I only knew "When You Wish Upon a Star" was in Close Encounters (and prominently!) because it was listed right on the album, and then I had to find it, because 9-year-old me got too lost in the orchestration. Very nice work, Johnny. I know "The Water is Wide" is the base theme for The River Wild because it says it right on the album. I know "The Journey Begins" from The Fablemans includes excerpt from "Sonata No. 48 in C Major, HOB. XVI: 35: I. Allegro con brio," because I just copy/pasted that here from its track list (and credited my source).
I wasn't led to any classical music through a lot of other film music because the only way I could have known it was there would have been to have already known the music.
For me, legality is a minimum, not a maximum. Of course credit others' work if you have to. But also do it just because you did it. Legality is base requirement, not an integrity shield.
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