Additional Unused Material

I was a metalhead for many years too. Same situation there. Even worse. Lots of very expensive black market bootlegs that have horrible shitty sound quality and people talking coughing farting and burping ontop of the music, recorded on one-channel shitty mono tape or something, selling like crazy. Totally non-objective and not-down-to-earth fanboys of all music niche musical genres need their food

It's sometimes interesting to hear what wasn't used to better appreciate what was eventually used. Surely having an interest means that it would be interesting to hear what was left by the wayside?

True, it's probably only a small minority who would want to hear that original version of a cue that had that intrusive triangle hit 2 minutes into the music that was inadvertently synchronized with a dog sneezing in the background and which drew some unwanted attention to the event.

But, for something like Goldsmith's original take on "The Enterprise", it's interesting to hear the original to compare with what was used (and to appreciate just how 'wrong' that original attempt was.

Well that's different. That's like those score bootlegs you find full of SFX from the movie. I can't listen to those at all.

You couldn't be more right!

Just to chip in (a day late and a dollar short), I almost never listen to the early synth mock-ups that they include on expanded albums, and I usually can't really tell what the difference is between the alternate takes that they include. If there's something majorly different, that's one thing, but if the only difference is one little triangle hit or something, I don't really care to have the alternate take. One case of this that I thought was particularly egregious was the recent expansion of DAYS OF HEAVEN. There were a lot of alternate takes included on that album and it just made listening to the whole thing a real chore.

I find that quite interesting that you of all people aren't interested in hearing the minutes of a film score and what I'm getting at is your musicological degree.

I've kinda discussed the Thor position, though too from a purely academic perspective it's something a bit baffling. When Tom mentioned early drafts/fragments of books in an earlier post, I think he kinda got to the core of the argument and it's, more than anything, a historical one. Of course there are cases that make it somewhat difficult (as much as I love it, I wouldn't like to hear the complete Beyond Rangoon or The Last Samurai just because the compilation is so perfect and in case of Samurai in particular it's quite meticulous storytelling, much more nuanced and subtle than the film itself), but the core of the problem lies here.

Let's forget for a while the completists. because that's not exactly fully rational. We know that some of us are film score completists (also in terms of C&C vs. A&A, as we dub the discussion here) just because we're geeks and that's fine. But, I'm sure Tom must know that, there are so called critical editions of literature, where variants of a work are present. Early drafts, deleted words/lines/pages. In fact the nature of a so-called critical edition is that you compare all available manuscripts/works and mention all the differences in the footnotes. In some cases it may lead to hilarious results (a Polish poem from 17th century, in its main manuscript, has a verse saying "I'd kiss you a thousand times", to which someone else, which is evident from the handwriting, added "in the ass"), but it's very important to note down these differences.

A complete and chronological album of a film score, available on these editions, is a critical edition featuring an introduction, even (liner notes). It could focus less on trivia and more on the real issues behind the film score (I know that at least in one case the author of the notes had a mention of very obvious classical quotes removed from the final text which made him, as he told me, "livid") and be a real "academic" introduction to a critical edition. You can always go to Los Angeles and look at the sheet music, should you read music and need to look at it, but the mockups, alternate cues, etc., can be very useful for researcher. You can use the "popular" editions still, but the critical stuff serves afficionados and academics well.

I respect your opinion Pawel very much and I'm glad that you understand my point of view. The more I listen lately the more that my ear is drifting me toward the classics, specifically the classical film composer who accepts an assignment to do a film score for money such as Copland (The Red Pony), Vaughan Williams (Scott of the Antarctic), Leonard Bernstein (On The Waterfront), and composers Miklos Rozsa and Erich Korngold who were really classical composers. All of the mentioned works should be in your collection. As far as manipulating classical works Schubert named his Unfinished symphony not for someone to come along and change it from his sketches. In my mind it is complete.
Tom

Well, I obviously don't mean it in a literal sense; more as an ideology, the 'preserving historical artifacts in as complete a state as possible' part of it.

yeah for the standard busy working people of today i think that with all of our everyday needs, running around, job , burdens etc, there's often not even enough time for the properly built official releases, and definitely no time or will and energy at all, for leftovers. As a musicologist with a degree (non practicing anymore but as you brought it up ) even more i'd say, i value the work of music and album editors into putting all that scarce recording sessions' chaos into listenable order, with beginnings, middles and ends, and coherency.

I agree with you Demetris and I really have no time for them anymore.

Well, there is 'film order' and there is 'pure music order'. Two completely different things. Just as you make changes, omit passages, restructure the sequence of events etc. when you adapt a book to film (same story, two different media), so -- too -- should you make changes when adapting the music from film to album (same story, two different media), IMO.

It's exactly the same. It's about adapting a thing from one medium to another.

You said it yourself. The music was written for the film. It was not meant to be listened to alone, especially not on a structural level. So you make the appropriate structural changes in order for it to function as independently as possible.

It makes very much sense, if you try to re-experience the cinematic narrative in the abstracted way of listening to the complete music in chronological order. This doesn't work with every score though and in that cases I prefer the album.

Volker

Film music is about storytelling for me, so changing the order and cutting out stuff...well, there have been some very fine abridged versions written over the years, but it's still not the same thing.

Same here. I expect a musical experience from the film on album. Not to listen to the film again without sfx or dialogue.