HANS ZIMMER

don't mind the clock. hate the fact that i hear actual sfx in my music though. want airplane and spitfire sounds, screams sirens or explosions? do it with an orchestra.

Just like Hans did with the "sea wind" with the choir in Interstellar?

yes, it was fantastic. beautiful and eerie.

thanks Bregt, will watch next week!

There are still many orchestral scores and many movies that have focus on the characters instead. Dunkirk relies heavily on the state of the situation, feeling of fear, being trapped. Dunkirk is rather an exception. I wouldn't have liked the see a small side story of some of the lead characters in Dunkirk, like Jon proposes in his review. It would not make sense within that movie ([spoiler]there's a scene where Brannagh says "I can see it from here. home"[/spoiler]. That sort of didn't fit completely with the rest of the movie).

Just wanted to put this Prince of Egypt medley out there, another brilliant french horn (and trumpet) rendition by the multi-talented Marc Papeghin.

And in plain, legible English?

I don't know. I have stated before that composers (in the general, not the academic sense of the word) that come from a pop music background have been present in film scoring long before Hans Zimmer. A friend of mine, a colleague who teaches music at my school, once put it: Zimmer doesn't write music, he invents it. Although I believe he is quite capable of reading sheet music.
Think of Vangelis: He never even learned to play the piano. He doesn't read of write a note of music. That didn't stop him from creating great film scores and the same is true for Hans Zimmer.
Yes, his background is very different from that of Williams. Zimmer's music is not as relevant in an artistic way as is Williams' music. Zimmer's music is not as nuanced, as complex, as methodically structured. But some of the most interesting sounds created with synthesizers that I have ever encountered, were made by Zimmer. And boy has he "invented" some gorgeous melodies!
So lets not compare apples and pears here. Sneering at self taught amateurs is intellectual arrogance. Williams may be the Beethoven of film music. Being the [insert your rock star of choice] of film music isn't that bad either.

Volker

He can at least follow full score during recording and talk about specific bars, even change orchestrations during a session. I can attest for that.

I'm interested in what Captain Future and Thor think is intellectually arrogant or even negative about Audissino's assertions. He hardly claimed anything controversial, let alone anything really negative. The only thing he says against Zimmer is that he makes no "virtuoso pretensions" and that his scores are rather similar to one another. I bet Zimmer himself would agree with the first claim (he's admitted his music is quite simple), and it's not as if the second is any radical or new statement.

I wasn't actually quoting it as an invective against Zimmer, I just thought it was a great summary of his music. I think that what Audissino describes, "His music is a kind of rock/techno arranged for symphony orchestra" is an interesting field of music that has yet to be fully explored, despite a great showcase of its abilities in TRON: LEGACY.

And frankly, Thor, I have to wonder which is more arrogant and intellectually dishonest, writing a paragraph attempting to analyze a man's body of work (in a book that quotes literally hundreds of sources), or calling such paragraph 'hogwash' without offering a single refutation or counter-point. Do you disagree that Zimmer is a " self-taught keyboardist with a background in rock music "? Or that "His idiom can be recognized by simple motifs characterized by hompohony, basic chord progressions"? If so, I'd love to hear some more detail on the topic.

I'm in total agreement with Thor here. The value judgement is quite obvious and without empirical backup. The author sounds like a Williams fanboy pissed off by the fact that a self taught upstart that makes plastic music with computers rivals his idol in popularity.

Volker

Exactly. It's like criticizing Bob Dylan for not writing as good electronic music as Vangelis. I believe it's the rhetorical fallacy called 'false equivalence'.

Really? In this day and age, that's really weird. Especially because many people actually live out their social lives on computers.

Also, exactly, this. Love this story, and this whole discussion by the way, as it perfectly illustrates my frustration with how a lot of people on message boards and 'in the community' criticise the current state of filmmusic as if the old fashioned way of doing it is the one all and end all, while Brosse clearly was snobbistic about it and then showed he clearly didn't understand the value of electronics. Let's hope he learned from that situation, but I fear he didn't.

The man still conducted the original recording of Elliot Goldenthal's Final Fantasy though.