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I thought this would be right up your alley. Tons of bombasticism!

Yes, bombast.

NP: UP (2009) - Michael Giacchino

First Listen. Playful, jazzy and melodic. Fun. Is it Ragtime? Something like that. I need to see the film now.

But I would have given the Oscar to Avatar ...

Volker

Far From the Madding Crowd - Craig Armstrong

Well, I didn't know Armstrong could do this sort of thing. Some Vaughan Williams inspiration here (same as JNH in some of his Shyamalan scores), at times a hint of Rachel Portman. Gorgeous!

Even 10 years ago, King Arthur was just another step along a path that Zimmmer and friends had been trodding since the early 90s in their quest to take over the world for Lord Ostinato.

When I bought that score in 2004 I did not think, "oh, this is a cool new musical device." I thought, "cool, more of this fun musical device that Zimmer and friends like to use a lot". One could definitely say it was the first modern Zimmer-style score to be structure around ostinati that extensively, to be sure.

I always wonder if I'm missing the point when people talk about ostinato-based music as if John Powell invented it and got further confused by Pawel's comment about King Arthur (though like I said, maybe he meant something other than what I took it to mean).

Ostinati, vamps, riffs, loops, arpeggios ... it's been part of music since the beginning of time.

vampires?

In 2004 when King Arthur came out, there had never been another action/adventure score that had ostinati woven so deeply into its DNA. That's why it's relevant. I mean, I only went to the trouble to figure out the meaning of the word because I wanted to know what that cool musical device that King Arthur used was. It's an enormous milestone in the history of modern film scoring and the ostinato revolution thereof, especially to someone who came into the fandom through the MV/RC "gateway drug". Now, I'm rather sick of ostinati in general unless they're really well done and unique, but I don't think there's any denying the importance of King Arthur in a discussion of ostinati in modern film music.

Am I just imagining all the Goldsmith ostinato action music? Miklos Rozsa's!? There were probably thousands of ostinato-based action scores before King Arthur. Certainly hundreds.

My technical knowledge ends here, but I can say that to my brain, that usage of an ostinato that you posted is a completely separate technique from the one that Powell, Zimmer etc popularized in the early 2000s. I'm not sure how one would define and categorize the different usages. But the exploding popularity of that specific type of ostinato since the early 2000s implies that it's not just us crazy overanalyzers who see the Zimmer/Powell ostinato as a distinct and important phenomenon. It's the directors and producers and marketers. We all know there's a specific "sound" that most modern moviemakers are looking for in their scoring, which they consider to be "cool", and the specific type of ostinato that Zimmer and Powell pioneered in the early 2000s is somewhere very close to the heart of that sound. There's been even further evolution since then (TDK, Tron Legacy etc were game-changers by lowering the melodic complexity necessary to achieve "the sound" even further) but the early 2000s were when it began, and Powell's work on Bourne Identity was the unintentional prototypical blueprint for the last 13 years and counting of Hollywood's new understanding of what "cool" music is.

It's nice that you have such a strong personal connection to KING ARTHUR, Scribe, but I think you're over-estimating its importance -- both in film music and Zimmer's career. If it had been so important as you suggest, more people would hail it as a reference point. At most, it -- too -- bears some BOURNE influence here and there.

That being said, I agree with you that the 'Bourne riff' is a very different type of ostinato-driven music than previous versions, like Goldsmith's or even Philipp Glass'.

OK, let's be more specific.

First of all, the paradigm here is 'contemporary action movies'. That is important to stress. It is only within this genre or paradigm that the sound/change occurs (even if it's been adopted elsewhere too over the years). The setting is often more realistic, thus requiring a sound that is less 'overt'. As such, Powell did this:

* A 4/4 ground bass
* A 16th note "supra" ostinato on strings, fluctuating between a chord or two or three.
* Fragments of a melody at some point, almost with a Middle-Eastern quality (lots of quarter tones)

Hence it's a riff more than a beat. Here it is in BOURNE IDENTITY (John Powell, 2002) from 1:07 onwards:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkNA1ZErJeI

And here's another example from HITMAN (Geoff Zanelli, 2007), at 0:50:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCsBUcvaPn4

NP: SOMEWHERE IN TIME (John Barry)

Gorgeous!

Pawel was the one who brought it up and gave it an even greater importance than I did. And I never attempted to base any of my statements off of any personal connection I may or may not have to the score. You are developing a frustrating tendency to write off anything I say as "due to a personal connection" instead of discussing what I am actually saying. "Everything you say about McKenzie not being pastiche is wrong because you like McKenzie"



I feel this is an oversimplification. Ostinati are everywhere now. They're an all-consuming virus. You'd have to have an extremely broad definition of "action movie" to make this statement work. Is Tron Legacy a "contemporary action movie"?

Or are you saying Powell's device is a distinct phenomenon (the King Arthur / Da Vinci Code / Batman trilogy / TRON Legacy / etc development of that type of ostinato)? I could buy that. It's just that I've always lumped that device in with Powell's device when I look at the development of film music trends over the past 15 years.

I need to stop being a caffeine addict

Yes, I meant Hans, though while Goldsmith music is based on repeated ideas, I wouldn't call it as ostinato-based as I would call, say, Bernard Herrmann's approach. The motifs are somehow a bit too complex for me to call them an ostinato, though I could be wrong here and I'll happily stand corrected.

Of course Herrmann was all about ostinati quite often, so I'd never say that it was the first ostinato score ever.