Your score collection by albums per composer

Don't worry, Morricone rarely does jazz. The few times he does it, it's actually pretty decent, even if you don't normally like jazz. That's my experience at least.

From the sound of your collection it sounds like you suffer from a disturbing deficit of pasta. You must immediately acquire "A fistful of dollars", "For a few dollars more" and "The good, the bad and the ugly". They actually all come on a single CD (RCA). Trust me, just start with this one. It's a crime not to have it, and you're not allowed to call yourself a film music fan before you do.

After that get "The untouchables" and "The legend of 1900".

It seriously hurts me to only mention these, because there are so many masterpieces out there, but no one wants to see a long laundry list, and you probably would have no idea what to get if I mentioned my countless favourites. So start with the pasta, and when you can afford it, then try the two others.

When you have absorbed them, and acknowledged the genius of Morricone, I've plenty of more goodies to recommend.

Peter

I wasn't talking about his brilliance but about how prolific he was (i.e. number of scores).

The first time I saw that number (347 scores) I was knocked on the floor. Delerue must have been one of the hardest working composers in history.

Peter

Hence my baiting comment D

As I said, I'm not an expert, but I've heard a bit of his earlier stuff (for the French New Wave etc.) and it was either quite jazzy or quite dissonant. A bit like Maurice Jarre's work for theatre, which was very much unlike his later epic scores.

I can't seem to find the CD you are referring to on Amazon. I see dozens of different versions and rerecordings of the scores but I feel as lost as I did the first time I tried to find the a specific Star Wars rerecording Erik recommended. Any way you can help...perhaps you can give me the exact name of the CD?

Perhaps it's this one- http://www.soundtrackcollector.com/cata … ieid=30703

I think you've heard the exception rather than the rule.

Of course with only 80 out of 350 scores, I could easily be mistaken.

Peter

The one BhelPuri linked to (thanks BP): RCA ND 74021

If you feel like spending a bit more money though, I instead recommend that you buy these 2 CDs:

1) "The legendary italian westerns" (which contains both "A fistful of dollars" and "For a few dolllars more" and a bunch of other great stuff)
2) The 21 track version of "The good, the bad and the ugly".

My collection is very small compared to most of yours. I’ll only include the composers for which I have more than 5 scores. As further exhibit of my nerdness, I’ll include the average star ranking (out of 5) that I have for them (I have this spreadsheet that I use to keep track of this kind of thing…)

Horner: 17 (avg. score rank: 3.98)
Williams: 12 (3.88)
Delerue: 11 (3.90)
T. Newman: 11 (3.55)
Goldsmith: 10 (3.75)
McKenzie: 8 (4.18)
Zimmer: 8 (3.60)
JNH: 7 (3.82)
Doyle: 6 (4.01)
Morricone: 6 (3.60)
Poledouris:5 (3.66)

I used my fingers, actually.

That's way too much effort for me to even think about attempting.

And here's mine (though this list may be slightly different from others - these are number of titles rather than CDs. So Jerry Goldsmith's Fox Box would count as more than 1...)

01 - Jerry Goldsmith - 150 (4.6% of collection)
02 - Bernard Herrmann - 110 (3.4% of collection)
03 - John Williams - 71 (2.2% of collection)
04 - Christopher Young - 57 (1.7% of collection)
05 = Marco Beltrami - 53 (1.6% of collection)
05 = Ennio Morricone - 53 (1.6% of collection)
06 - Howard Shore - 49 (1.5% of collection)
07 - Elmer Bernstein - 45 (1.4% of collection)
08 - John Barry - 42 (1.3% of collection)
09 - James Horner - 41 (1.3% of collection)
10 - Miklós Rózsa - 40 (1.2% of collection)
11 - Hans Zimmer - 38 (1.2% of collection)
12 - Various Artists - 36 (1.1% of collection)
13 - Danny Elfman - 35 (1.1% of collection)
14 - Trevor Jones - 32 (1.0% of collection)
15 - Max Steiner - 31 (1.0% of collection)

Arrange files by size.