HANS ZIMMER

I don't think that ever happened. What did happen is that composers composed pieces of music in advance. Sergio Leone had Morricone's suites playing on the set to get the actors in the mood. The "Extasy of Gold" Sequence was famously coreographed based on the music. I believe Morricone worked that same way with other directors too. Also didn't Williams write some music in advance for some Spielberg project? I don't remember right now.

Volker

Something very close to that has happened with The Thin Red Line and Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns.

Hans was asked to write music that Malick played on the set to get the crew and cast in the proper mood. However, when the film was edited, he wrote the score completely anew.

Yeah, after realising that trying to score it the "normal way" didn't quite work.

It is, but it's not really like Morricone/Leone. Williams was still writing to picture, they just ended up editing it differently to allow the music to flow better.

As far as I understand Morricone was scoring 30-40 films a year back then and he did it by writing a number of themes (however many were required - sometimes only one) based sometimes on the script, sometimes on the film, and then on the scoring stage recording a number of variations on those themes for the director to use as he wished. The Leone examples are special cases where some themes were written in advance of filming and played on set to "inspire" the actors and later the film was sometimes cut to the music.

But it was only really in Hollywood where film music has been about hitting sync points with music over the years.

The Zimmer way of working, as far as I understand it, isn't that far removed from the old European way - writing themes/suites early on, then taking pieces from those suites to inform the score to picture.

Zimmer composed a hymn for the dancefestival Tomorrowland 10th anniversary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG0rJ4Xt1RM

How can you say that based on those brief background cues? It's a 10-minute piece that premieres in the summer.

The thing that gets me though is, how can he make "real" horns and (according to hearing the music in the video) make then sound so synthy?

But then my next question would be, why would he want to go and - in my view - cheapen the glorious sound of untainted horns by doing that?

"Artistic vision" probably?

If I understand correctly, boosting the volume and bringing it closer to rock music, but that's valid.

1980s?

He does want to have a kind of concept album/rock feel to his music for sure.

He does it because he likes it. He like that poppy bassy sound. He has been asked that question and that was his answer (paraphrased) ,

That's pretty cool, I always felt the soundtrack album needed more score for my taste.

Anyone else think that ASM2 is the most disappointing Zimmer score (on album) in recent memory?

In my completely personal opinion, this is how I feel about it:

There's almost no proper action music in the score, and what there is, seems to meander and mickey-mouse with little or no structure.

The main Spider-man theme is cool, but tragically undeveloped and appears too few times.

The Electro vocal stuff is creepy in a dumb, annoying way that makes me want to turn it off. I don't know that I've EVER said that before about anything Zimmer wrote. I can't fathom how ANYONE from the director to the studio to the test audiences thought this was a good idea. The film reviews generally seem to think the Electro vocals are just as dumb as they sound on the album. I didn't know this was Spider-Man, The Musical.

This is the first time Zimmer worked on a film written by Kurtzman and Orci. Given what we know about how Zimmer likes to get a feel for the emotional core of the story before he writes his music, I suspect that perhaps Kurtzman and Orci's complete inability to create stories with emotional cores, may have thrown Zimmer for a loop and put him in a place where, for the first time in the 21st century, he was trying to score a film that the writers themselves had ZERO idea where the emotional core was. And thus he went astray. But this opinion is probably BS since I'm very biased towards Zimmer and against Hollywood's favorite pulp fiction writers.

And in conclusion, I just thought people might get a kick out of a fanatical Zimmer fan disliking a Zimmer score that more traditional critics seem to enjoy, so have at the irony: I really hate this score. I blame the film writers and Zimmer's "Magnificent Six" collaborators more than I blame HZ himself, but he IS responsible for the end product and he let me down this time. Hope Interstellar gets him back on track!

No, quite the contrary -- it's one of the most appealing Zimmer scores I've heard since INCEPTION (and I'm a Zimmer fan too).