Now Playing XLI

Since John Powell found his own voice I tend not to think of him in the 'Zimmer and his ilk' way.

And there are certainly a few Zimmer scores I love and would not be without.

Most scores I have from films I haven't seen are by composers who have scored films I have seen.

Is that right? Yeah, I think that's right.

I approve of this post.

I have just checked (I love my database! It makes these statistics so easy! )

Of the scores I own, I have only actually seen 24% of the films they were scored for!

33% of the scores I own are by composers I have never seen any film by that they worked on!
And that's increasing every year, so if anything I am moving away from the whole visual aspect more and more!

I don't have a database but a brief scan of my shelves suggest that I've seen around 90+% of the films scored by John's Barry & Williams.

Ennio Morricone on the other hand is a miniscule %, I'd loved to know Peter's percentage?

There's only a small percent of us who talk about scores from before the 80's so I can never see that happening.

Holy crap, I just counted, and I've only seen a bit over 7% of the movies that Ennio scored.

Peter

I'm mostly a morriconian so some examples could be: I promessi sposi, La califfa, 122 Rue de Provence, La venexiana, Nostromo, Sepolta viva, Il cuore nel pozzo, Questa specie d'amore, Il clan dei siciliani, Il prato, La dame aux Camélias, Cosi' come sei, La tenda rossa, Le casse, I guardiani del cielo, L'eredità ferramonti, L'avventuriero, E per tetto un cielo di stelle. (Similar lists could no doubt be provided by tons of other composers, like Delerue, Kilar, Fabricius-Bjerre, Sahashi, Watanabe and even more obscure names)

I think any of these deserve more attention than for instance scores like the latest Robin hood or Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole got. Not that these two are bad scores, but in the grand scheme of things, they are just two average scores, getting tons of publicity because they happened to be attached to movies that got alot of publicity.

That said, I'm not claiming to be more knowledgable than the rest of you guys. I'm the victim of the same lack of information. We all need to be informed before we will spend money and energy on acquiring these items. We never get the information from the vast number of movies that have been made though, and we usually end up with a tiny spectrum of all the scores that have ever been made, and our collections end up reflecting a bias towards movies that got heavily promoted and of course released.

Peter

Depends on the score. There are ultra-obscure Morricone and ultra-famous Morricone scores.

In any case, it doesn't address my basic point, that there's tons of great music out there most of us have never heard of and will never hear of, so if popularity of movies truly didn't matter, our listening habits would be radically different.

Peter

Surely major films offer more exposure to their composers. It is utterly natural and expected. It's up to everyone of us to look out for lesser known composers. It is not the movies, but rather the names of the composers themselves the problem, in my opinion. Most people will wet their pants for a new Powell score for instance but will never investhalf the time to listen once to a score by Arnau batallier for instance.

I remember that discussion as if it happened yesterday.

Peter

Who says most people listen film music according to the movies popularity ?

So if you've never heard of a score, you'll buy it anyway? Are you seriously suggesting that publicity has no say in the matter of what you buy? Are you omniscient?

Peter

Who said this? Read my post above.

.... ?

!