Break through with Paramount made!

yep, that I can understand. At least there has been a release published of it. But no release? If some composers of today would have the same feeling of some of their work, we could have been spared of some real duds

alas

If anyone has special powers, it's Williams!

And at my typo!

Indeed. Look at the complaints that some people have about the Intrada releases of the Horner scores.... Horner assembled them with a listening experience in mind, not a "here's everything i wrote" approach.

I just had a thought. What if they found ALL of the notes that Mahler wrote for one of his symphonies. He was known to do things over and over so a symphony could be several hours!!! Yikes. My point is that not everything written needs to be heard.
Thomas

Well there's one guaranteed sale of "LORD OF THE RINGS: THE COMPLETE 156 HOURS OF COMPOSITIONAL SKETCHES", from the sound of things.

It's an interesting issue in art. I know I'd rather do a 2 hour discussion of the issues of making one of my short films - showing storyboards, pointing attention to things that were accidents/compromises, making a case for choices - than just showing one of them. But most people aren't after that - my process is not nearly as interesting for them (unless they are also practitioners) as the concise result. The Mahler academics would have a year of Christmas days with the material Tom describes, but the rest of us would probably be happy just to listen to a good recording of the finished work, partly because it was finished, but partly also because time is precious, and there are other desirable things to hear.

When I wear my producer hat, my goal - first and foremost - is to put together an album that makes an interesting listening experience. While I try to stick to film order, sometimes that's not the best. Sometimes you have to mix up some tracks and even combine cues to make a more coherent listen. The problem with that is that sometimes it might change the composer's 'intent' of the music, and since (in some cases) the composer is deceased, it's not my place to presume to know what the composer might have intended had they been alive.

I agree with Southall that sometimes a shorter thought-out album is definitely preferred over a 78-minute slog-fest. With some of these older scores, for archival purposes, it makes more sense to include as much as we can, while still trying our best to maintain a solid listening experience. It might not be as successful - for instance, I am sure I could have sequenced a nice solid 1-disc album of GODZILLA, but there was a lot of great music that would have gone by the wayside. In the end, it might not be the BEST listening experience - but that's why people have iTunes, or programmable CD players.

I gave your GODZILLA 2CD a chance. It didn't work, so I had to sell it. So the easier thing for me to do than to sit down for hours and create some random playlist out of the complete "raw material" that I am presented (with no musical education whatsoever), I'd rather pick up a nice, already-arranged listening experience by knowledgeable people, such as the 50 minute-something promo that was floating around. I'm now on the lookout for this again (which I stupidly gave away when I bought the 2CD set).

So you'd rather go through the effort of selling the 2-disc set and then finding the promo just so that you can avoid the 'hassle' of making a far superior playlist to the promo? I'm sure if you asked here on the forum for a 50-60 minute playlist taken from the complete score, you'd get it in no time. (Don't ask me though, I wouldn't be able to bring myself to reduce it to 50 or even 60 minutes.)

Absolutely. But I find it strange that some people take it to such extremes like Thor and flat out refuse to listen to anything longer than 60 minutes!? Yeah, okay. Opinions. They make the world go round, everyone's different, nobody's the same... blah blah blah. But still... it seems a bit extreme.

Most people will agree that there is no hard-and-fast rule which can be applied to everything. Which seems so obvious really!

There has been a complete reversal over the last ten years though, from almost everything getting a shorter release arranged for maximum listening pleasure (with a - when you think about it - very small proportion of albums unfortunately missing some great material, for financial reasons), to almost everything getting a bells-and-whistles release which doesn't even vaguely consider listening pleasure. Personally, as I've said earlier in the thread, I wish the albums would come with what the album producer considers to be the best possible listening experience, and then the other tracks put there as bonus tracks afterwards, so people who do want absolutely everything can have it, but for the majority of people who just want a nice album to listen to, they've got it.

PS: I must complain about the tired "That's what programmable CD players are for!" line. It's the album producer's job to provide the best possible album, not the listener's. You don't get a 10,000 page unedited version of a novel and then get expected to filter it down yourself to something you might actually enjoy reading - the editor does that for you. And that's what an album producer should do for the listener. Sure, put the rest of it on as bonus tracks so the "must have every last note" brigade can be happy too. But please go back to a situation where it's the average listener that the album is being targeted towards, and not the vaguely freakish people who want four consecutive 30-second variations on the same theme, just because that's how it happens in the film.

I find a trend we saw emerging over the last few years of selling double-CD soundtracks with "the complete score" on the one CD and "the album version" on the second to be an outstanding one!

That is exactly the kind of creative thinking that I am looking for and that caters to two very different and very hard-to-please types of customers in what is a niche market anyway.

Yup, as well as Jones' The Dark Crystal or Goldsmith's The Wind And The Lion.
This is the sort of release I'll gladly pay top dollar for as it really is the best of both worlds.

I fully agree. But as with all things, the line may prove thinner than expected, no? I already thought Boys from Brazil was milking it...