What got you into film score?

When I was four or five I heard my dad playing the Dances With Wolves score and thought it was magical manna from heaven.

Later on in my childhood my parents got me a few popular score albums like Star Wars and Jurassic Park, but more because I was interested in the films than the music for its own sake.

When I was 15 I got the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack myself as soon as it came out, again as a way to experience the story through music, rather than an actual interest in film scores.

A few years later I started noticing the really fun music in films like Pirates of the Caribbean and Armageddon. So I sought out a few of those scores for their own sake, finding them at Barnes & Noble bookstores.

Then I went away to college for a year and discovered file sharing and discovered dozens of new scores but felt guilty about keeping them so that did not do much to expand my collection. When I got back home a year later and got a job and had my own money, I decided I was more interested in using my money to buy music than for anything else in the world. Prior to this I had mostly bought Christian pop albums, but at this point I realized that film scores were much more enjoyable and varied and so I started buying scores from Amazon every time I had any spare money. And now I have close to 1000 CDs plus many more pirated because I am now poor and in debt.

It only just struck me that JAWS might be the first soundtrack album I bought that was to a brand new release? Though the very first albums I bought were Geoff Love's cover versions of popular themes and the very first soundtrack I bought was GOLDFINGER and a Morricone double bill of FISTFUL OF/FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE I'm pretty sure the first score I bought after seeing a brand new film at the cinema was for JAWS.

So what was it? Some kind of instant epithany??

Now you're just being a puh...puh...puh...

Star Trek. 'nuff said.

There's an animated series?

It doesn't show.

Yes, you might also not be aware that there was an animated series called Henry's Cat, though that one didn't feature William Shatner.

Me and film music...

Well, the first soundtrack was the MC of The Lion King which we got very soon after buying the movie. It did get quite a bit listens from me and most of it was actually ignoring the songs and going straight to the score, but then my awareness wasn't existent.

The way my real passion started was for very weird reasons, admittedly, so it demands a bit of a backstory. Back in 1995 Sierra On-Line (who remembers that company?! Except Martijn ) released the fifth part of it's classic Police Quest series, called SWAT. It was about the anti-terrorist branch of Los Angeles Police Department, which has military training. It got me completely passionate about guns and things like that, especially special forces. I wasn't Internet-savvy at the time, so my knowledge was really small and I didn't research it, but I was playing around with toy guns at the tender age of 11.

In 1996 my brother told me he saw two great action movies about special forces in the cinema. One is famous only for probably the best and quick way to get rid of Steven Seagal in a movie and on this board for a rather mediocre Jerry Goldsmith score. Yes, that one. The other one was The Rock, which I saw on cassette and my brother told me how great the music is (he's not a score fan at all, actually). I bought the cassette in a newsstand (yes, imagine that!) and it got a huge workout. The credits listed three names: Nick Glennie-Smith, Hans Zimmer and Harry Gregson-Williams. Something made the name Hans Zimmer stand out. I started to use the internet and got on Filmtracks to get clips, etc. That's how my passion for film music and film started and that's how I started to dream of being a film director. Yes. It WAS a Michael Bay movie. Looking back, I must sadly say that it's basically really the ONLY Bay movie I find completely watchable (OK, OK, there's also Bad Boys and Armageddon is a lot of a guilty pleasure).

The next year or two years later, based on Filmtracks sound clips I asked my family, who were going to America for vacation to get me either Crimson Tide or Backdraft. They got back with a very hard-to-get copy of the original 1991 release of the latter (I still have a huge sentiment to that CD), which marked my first CD of film music. A bit later I somehow pulled out the cassette to The Lion King, looked at the credits and realized that that guy I like, Hans Zimmer, actually did THAT score. That was a bit of a shocker, but I recovered quickly.

There were composers except Hans, which I started to notice just by their sound in cinema. They were Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner and... Carter Burwell. I got an old Prague collection of Steven Spielberg themes, which I own to this day, but would gladly get rid of it (the performances are perfect, etc.). After seeing The Phantom Menace in cinema I bought it on cassette. Later one shop was closing and they had discounts on CD. One of things I bought that (except Hans' rather forgotten As Good As It Gets) was The Edge and the only reason why I didn't get the Lala CD of that score (which features a corker of a theme) is the huge sentiment which I have for what was the first Jerry Goldsmith addition to my collection. Now Goldsmith is second most-represented composer I own.

1999... Well, forgive a 15 year old kid for not knowing who Terrence Malick is. But this 15 year old knew who Hans Zimmer was, so (and after some issues to get tickets) I went to see The Thin Red Line. The score worked great and I got it some time (a year?) later in a store. I didn't listen to it much at the time though. 2001 was a moment of crisis in my liking of Hans Zimmer, but then I got to a store and blindly bought Hannibal which, at the time, ended up to be my all-time favourite score. I was an active reviewer already, I set up a private website on my high-school server (!) and did my reviews, but I also got in contact with some great guys. Two websites and like 6 years later (and 4 broadcasts of the Malick movie later) I wrote an article about the score to The Thin Red Line. I was set to be a Zimmer fan for life. I already knew more composers and OWNED more composers and actually started respecting and loving James Horner music (which I hated after hearing bits of Titanic, while I own it own and warmed up to it, I still don't think it's one of his best) and I reviewed more composers, obviously.

I believed my article was good. I was really proud of it (now I see it as somehow naive), so I decided to translate it to English. Bregt was great enough to host the English version. With some help of our own Ravi (who suggested me as a friend to him) and a bit of... should I say wishful thinking on my part? I posted the link on my Facebook and the next day got a very warm thank you from nobody else than Hans Zimmer... Little did I know it was just the beginning. The rest... is history.

This seems to be a recurrent feature in the histories of many film score fans, but I never did it. I think it must have been before my time. Did many of you do this?

I did it and was probably not before your time!

Steven = geek fail

I was in a bit of a hurry yesterday evening, so let me expand a bit on my earlier gossip:

Early purchases in film music on CD were: The Mission (Morricone), and the compilations Williams did with the Boston Pops for Philips. Especially Out of this Wolrd was played ad nauseam. I'd make a copy of it on cassette an play it on my Walkman in the bus on the way home from school.
Once I heared some beautifull music in some documantary about South America. Determined to find aut what is was I sent a letter (snail mail of course) to the TV station. They were kind enaugh to answer that letter. It was "On Erth as it is in Heaven". So that was the same guy who had composed all that amazing Western music! I got The Mission and a compilation of spaghetti western themes.
About "Rain Man" I found out by whisteling the tune to the employees of a local private record store.
And so it went on.
Luckily, listening to progressive rock, The Beatles and film music rather than to chart hits, did not render me a misfit, for I had a couple of friends with excentric tastes in music, so that was all right. If the group of misfits is large enaugh it rivals the mainstream and that exactly was the case. Happy memories!