[Closed] HANS ZIMMER

Total agree

FIELD OF DREAMS and THE NAME OF THE ROSE are two other nice synth scores by him. Now, why the hell are we having this MASSIVE Horner discussion in a Zimmer thread?

You might be right about Horner and The Dark Knight - you do make some good points. But he could record himself farting for two hours and it would be a more effective score than the one the film did get.

And Frost/Nixon - I dunno. Horner could have done that. He tends to go saccharine, no doubting that - but it's probably because he's asked to. There's nothing saccharine in House of Sand and Fog or Beyond Borders or Chumscrubber. Frost/Nixon didn't really need a score - Zimmer managed to avoid ruining the film, but I don't really see that he added a great deal. I'm interested in reading why you think differently?

A European heritage.

Did a pretty good job with A Beautiful Mind.

Just to Give people some entertainment

Well, James Horner would score The Chronicles of Narnia perfectly. When it comes to storytelling - that's the thing I have with Horner, he doesn't tell me stories. I think the closest to it is maybe Legends of the Fall actually.

That's the thing - except the Troy situation - Horner would be perfect for some epics. Narnia in particular (let's leave Lord of the Rings to Howard Shore - he did it perfectly). Avatar is perfect in the movie - I think it's his best (as heard in film) score since... Enemy at the Gates (an underrated work for me)? And Enemy at the Gates has my favorite piece of Horner in 2000s - The River Crossing in Stalingrad. If I had to pick a Horner piece which sounds like a full symphonic movement - that's it! Nothing disjointed, everything perfectly developed (the themes are heard in full already, but I mean the voice leading, the string writing, the orchestration), logical, thought out. These are the pieces only James Horner can write. The thing is that, in this particular case, the piece works great in the movie (so does Samuel's Death from Legends of the Fall, possibly my favorite James Horner piece at all!), in many cases all this development sounds very bad in the movie.

I think Zimmer is the new Brad Fiedel, breaking a lance for electronic music to be employed in ways unheard of before. It's fairly obvious when you give it a good comparison: Zimmer has that same tendency towards multi-level electronic harmonies on relentless rhythmic devices which underscore the underlying metaphor.

Exactly!
That is just the point. It's a very comparable stylistic.
It just counterpoints the surrealism of the thing!

I think that's brilliant!

Or you may be as well. I've never seen a review mentioning Horner's storytelling on album. It may be the case that his albums are overloaded (70+ minutes), which might be Rhodes' fault. It's a case of sequencing an album.

Also Horner does everything to hide the story with his tracktitles.

Having watched the film recently I was struck by how well James Horner's anachronistic score worked so well. I couldn't give a toss that Horner hates his The Name of The Rose score, film music history is full of scores that our beloved composers hate but are fan favourites, so nothing new there. As for ALIENS I suspect Horner may have been talking about his working relationship with James Cameron which lead to them falling out until TITANIC brought them back together well over a decade later.

Having said that I personally feel that The Name of The Rose would have had a classic score had John Barry or Georges Delerue scored it, both of whom are masters of choral scoring which is a direction I believe both composers would have taken.

It also could have had a darker twist on the medieval sound, something Serge Franklin did with his L'Enfant des Loups score.

When it comes to the Aliens situation, the fallout was due to Horner coming to the movie just to see that the movie hasn't been done yet. The intensity of the collaboration was due to two things, I think: first is Cameron, who is a hard collaborator himself (his usual perfectionism) and Horner struggling with an undone film and having two weeks to score it. The fact that parts of his score were unused and replaced with either (ironically) Goldsmith's Alien score and a token snare rhythm for the Combat Drop sequence didn't help too.

One of the reasons of them making up was the fact that Cameron adored Horner's Braveheart score. Just so you guys know, I think Braveheart is one of cinema's greatest scores (and an example of score that was written totally against the director - Gibson originally said that he wanted an electronic-choral score, to which Horner responded with a short: "No, you don't" and went on to write his thing).

Back to Horner as a storyteller. Horner does use snippets of his themes, but only after they are fully developed. He also uses variations of his themes, as a respectable orchestral composer - often it's putting his major-key themes in minor key (Perfect Storm and Enemy at the Gates being the very notable examples, Windtalkers theme, while good, is so simplistic that it is unable to variate on it), uses them in different time signatures (alternating 4/4 and 3/4 often). Enemy at the Gates uses the main themes in full glory (ie. orchestral arrangements) often only from Betrayal, but it must be said that the theme is already used first in the wonderful first track of the score.

An interesting thing about Horner is the voice leading. My personal analyses of his writing (may be wrong, I am not a musicologist, all my music theory was self-taught from a book for beginners, mind you!) led me to the conclusion that it may lead to his repetitions: if you write a complex piece for strings, you have to write a different part for each instrument, which there is five of in a string section (make it 6, Horner often uses violas in a fashion that makes half of the section play one part, the other half another one, Demetris and others may tell more of the "divisi" technique, I caught that when I listened to Horner's directions to the orchestra in a Troy bootleg), you must repeat an older melody in one of the parts. It is not so shocking then if you have celli playing a motif from Patriot Games and violas playing a motif from, say, Titanic. Also, even if I am often annoyed by its usage, especially in Avatar, the four-note motif must be PURELY seen (I think) as one of the voices. The fact that it is so evident iis due to the used instrument. Trumpet is an instrument you'll notice always and everywhere, we wouldn't be talking about it so much if the motif was performed by trombones, a tuba or a French horn!

To Zimmer's Frost/Nixon score: One of the reasons why the score works so well is, I think, the fact that in general the score serves not only to give some kind of minimalistic flow (the motion thing I said earlier), but also, in general, gives the film a sense of understated, though still present, urgency. It is helped by the fact that Zimmer doesn't give each scene what James called "making the most important scene in the movie", which is something Zimmer overdid multiple times in his post-Gladiator scores (action movies aside, his 1990s works don't have that).

It seems that I'm the only one who find Giacchino's track titles with the humour of a twelve year old rather embarrassing.

Pissing on someone's head... ahahahahaah... how incredible funny. The guy who came up with such names has to be a genius... ahahahahaha give him the Pulitzer prize please.... ahhahahaha

The Pulitzer Prize is also given for writing and music...