Film Music Sheet Music

I am curious to know how many of us can read music?

I can't. But I have always had an interest in looking at music notation examples that are sometimes present in books about film music: notation examples of themes and motifs. I enjoy seeing these musical examples and trying to follow them when listening to the relevant pieces of music. These examples are usually short enough and simple enough that I can follow them.

So, with this in mind, I bought the recent book, ALIENS in full score - a lavish 210-page book featuring James Horner's music for this excellent movie. The book features the music as heard on the deluxe edition CD release.

I have to admit that I find it almost impossible to follow but I also find it really fascinating to choose little passages of the score that features iconic moments of music and then try and see how the music appears on the manuscript itself. The action scoring is REALLY difficult to follow and I find that, in order to follow any of it, I have to follow the anvil parts of the manuscript (thanks James for including those!). But then I am so busy trying to follow the anvil I can't look at any other parts of the music!

I am seriously thinking of getting Omni Music Publishing's STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE Full Orchestral Score but I dread to think how much it would cost to have it shipped here to the UK from the US.

The Aliens full manuscript book wasn't the first I had bought a score manuscript. I had previously bought a copy of the full manuscript for John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH - from Alan Howarth's site of all places! - and that's really difficult to follow. The music in the film (and on the CD) seems to be chopped about a lot from the original manuscript and there's a lot of notation on this copy of the hand-written score that's difficult to decipher. But, again, it's a fascinating read. The image on Howarth's website of the cover to the book looks quite different to the spiral binder with the plain grey cover that I have. It would be interesting to see if he's had the manuscript written up to the level that the Horner and Goldsmith scores have been written up to.