"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.
Es cómo decir que el Main Title de SW es esto:
Las diferencias en cuanto a progresión armónica y orquestación no cuentan, claro.
"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.
¡Synch, menudos análisis! A ver si me haces alguno de las películas de Verhoeven![]()
"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.
After Batman, Danny Elfman did a number of action films (Darkman, Dick Tracy, Nightbreed), but it wasn't a dislike of the genre which forced him to call it quits after Batman Returns in 1992. "Personally I love doing those big action films. I had a great time writing the score to Darkman. It was a big, old-fashioned melodrama, and I love big, old melodramatic scores." Instead, it was the interminable sound effects of the genre that turned him off. "It was during the screening of Batman Returns that I decided I want to write music that will do what it was meant to do for a film; I don't want to write music that will compete with an opera of sound effects. Contemporary dubs to my ears are getting busier and more shrill every year. The dubbers actually think they're doing a great job for the music if a crescendo or horn blast occasionally pops through the wall of sound."
The situation on Batman Returns was his worst ever. Elfman wrote his music with dynamics in mind, only to find that everything was flattened out by the dubbing mixer. The film was so poorly dubbed that Elfman believes his music actually hurt the picture; had he known how the sound effects would have been used, he would have simplified his writing. "In the end result, I believe that if 25% of the score and 25% of the sound effects had been dropped, the entire soundtrack would have been infinitely more effective than the busy mess it became." Many composers will argue that a good relationship with a director will help get their score across in the final mix, but unfortunately most directors "don't have good ears, even the brilliant ones. With Tim Burton, I had my best and worst dubs back to back. I've never had a better dub than on Edward Scissorhands, and I've never had a worse dub than on Batman Returns. No director does this consciously, they just lack the audio skills to deal with such a complex science."
As an example of good dubbing, as practiced in the past, Elfman mentions Lawrence of Arabia, where the first several minutes of a huge battle scene are played solely with sound effects, and at a specific cut, the music takes over completely. "The music raises the emotional level enormously, and you're not aware that all the sound effects have stopped, your brain thinks they're continuing. That to me is perfect dubbing." Another example EIfman gives, enthusiasm bubbling, is Hitchcock's sparse use of sound effects. "Hitchcock was wonderful at giving a heightened reality to a scene by being very selective with the sound. We would rarely hear sound effects for action that we did not specifically see, and he would let the music fill in all the holes in our imaginations. It let us imagine these things are there all the time, but we're not hearing everything all the time, and you don't think anything is wrong."
Today, however, "sound people tend to look at each individual moment. They look at five seconds, and if something's missing for a fraction of a second, there tends to be a panic. They don't look at the context over the entire soundtrack and the entire film. Hitchcock's films, if dubbed today might become a whole different animal as the soundtrack would get filled from top to bottom, leaving no room to breathe, and certainly no room for Bernard Herrmann's marvelous scores. There is a point at which all of this starts to wear down on the audience's ears." EIfman compares the experience of dubbing a film to mixing an album - in each case, you tend to scrutinize it moment to moment, looking at every single instant, and if there are major flaws your ear tends to grow accustomed to them just by the repetition. Even if it's wrong, it will start sounding right. However, a major difference is that when you mix an album, you can "A-B" it with another recording just by popping in a different CD and re-aligning your ears. "You might pop in another album for comparison and realize, 'Oh my god, there's no bass!' But it's only by listening to something else that you realize that you almost completely lost your bass, because your ears will compensate for it and make you think you've been hearing it all this time. That's a luxury we have when we're mixing, you can pop in something else at any time and re-adjust your ears to see if you've slipped, but you can't do that on the dubbing stage of a film. You can't just turn on another film and go, 'Beep beep, A-B, whoa! Why does that other movie sound twice as good as ours? Maybe we're doing something wrong here.'"
Elfman isn't critical of any particular sound designer, as much as the entire freight-train dubbing mentality. "They're simply doing their jobs, which is to provide every possible sound. It's the mixer's job to select sounds and ask, 'Do we need to hear everything that you see and don't see all the time?' What contemporary dubbing is doing is taking all our imagination away from us."
Nevertheless, film remains a medium obsessed with creating an audio-visual "virtual reality," a type of sensory overload, to the expense of the story and characters, even though those are what people are going to see. "An audience very seldom realizes when they're hearing a terrible score, any more than they realize when they're watching terrible editing. If they could magically see a scene edited much better, they would notice the difference, and likewise, if they could suddenly, magically see the same scene with a very effective score, they would find themselves unconsciously more involved."
He Writes His Own Music, Already
Nothing has been as pervasive or damaging to Elfman's reputation as the constant belief and insistence by others that he doesn't write his own music. Never mind the similarity of style from score to score, the fact that he has continued to write large-scale scores without using Shirley Walker to conduct, who people at one point assumed really wrote Batman; that the scores his Iead orchestrator, Steve Bartek, have done on his own have been completely different from Elfman's music; and the sheer illogic to the assumption that Elfman could have a hidden army of ghost-writers somewhere without anyone naming names or coming forward. Yes, it is true he came up with the theme to Batman while on an airplane, then went into the john and hummed it into a tape recorder. Many composers and songwriters have been known to carry around tape recorders and hum out a melody when it comes to them; some turn over the tape to an orchestrator to flesh out, many write it themselves. Elfman took his tape of him humming the Batman theme, brought it home and wrote it out himself at a piano with pencil and paper.
"I use orchestrators, not arrangers. The difference may seem subtle. but it's not," he explains. "The orchestrator's job is to take music which has been clearly written and balance it for the size orchestra that has been designated. Steve Bartek has been my primary orchestrator on almost every film I've done. He never changes a melody, he doesn't add counterpoint, he does not change or add harmonies. That's the composer's job. He will elect what instrumentation might best express what I'm trying to convey in terms of doubling melodies and dividing the parts of the string section so they can be used most effectively. I don't want to minimize this job, it's very important. It's time-consuming and I, Iike most composers, depend on our orchestrator to complete the final stage of the scoring. John Williams uses orchestrators and he certainly doesn't need to. Prokofiev used orchestrators, though he certainly didn't need to. I use orchestrators for the same reason." To give specific examples, if Elfman wrote three parts for strings, Bartek will decide which individual players will play which note to best balance the orchestra. He might also write out more orchestral parts than are eventually used; for example, the oboe music might include lines from the flute part, so that even though the oboist is not expected to play, his music will include the flute lines in case it is deemed necessary for him or her to "double" (also play) it. It's simply easier to have it all written in advance than to have to rush and have the copyist scribble out new parts on the stage. "We may have the first pass of a cue over-orchestrated, and then have to tacit parts, but better that than under-orchestrated," he explains.
The orchestrator is helpful before the recording, as well as during it. "I have a tendency to overwrite, as you're well aware, and Steve is very helpful in finding train-wrecks before we get to the scoring stage. When I'm moving very fast, he'll be able to help me, like 'tell me where I fucked up by laying it on too dense.' Sometimes Steve will call me up, he'll say, 'Your melody is down there in this very loud section, I think you've got to make a decision between what the trombones are playing or where the melody is.'"
In two rare cases. Elfman has delegated a cue of a score to an outside composer, just to finish on time, Jonathan Sheffer wrote the helicopter music in Darkman (see sidebar p. 16), and Shirley Walker did one of the climactic action cues in Nightbreed. These resulted from Elfman knowing he could write 63 minutes of a 70 minute score in the time allotted, for example and delegating the other 7, often for particularly noisy, sound-effects laden cues he didn't want to deal with, to the outside musician. "The few times that I've asked orchestrators to do an arrangement and take a melody I've written and turn it into an original piece of score, I've always given them composing credit," he states. (For proof, see the end credits of the respective films.) "That same philosophy applied in many films today would leave very long and embarrassing end credits."
Elfman's first film was the aforementioned Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, and he briefly toiled with the idea of doing it the usual "rock and roll method," i.e. playing themes and having an orchestrator take it from there. But he realized. "to really get your voice sounding original, you need to do more than that. I started doing that for two weeks on Pee-Wee, and realized, this isn't going to work. I forced myself to start writing the stuff out." He got by on Pee-Wee by the fact that "it was a very simple score", same for Back to School. "I got up to Beetlejuice and over the course of ten scores got to the point where I could handle more complicated music and I had to push myself to do Batman. Once I got to Batman I had the confidence to hold much denser pieces in my head, because in order to write I have to mentally freeze the entire piece of music and write it down one part at a time. Same thing leading into Dolores Claiborne, I couldn't have done that at the time I did Batman, because at that point I couldn't really do dissonance, I had a hard time holding onto chords with odd voicings and movements, and moving things around in a non-rhythmic way. The key scores for me were Pee-Wee to Beetlejuice to Batman to Dolores, those were the big jumps, for me at least I'm not saying they were great leaps for music-kind.
"It's always amazed me how far and widespread the rumor that I hire other people to write my music has gone," Elfman states. "It's most interesting to me that Steve Bartek, who has orchestrated 95% of my music, never seems to be the one given that credit, which usually gets bestowed on conductors and secondary orchestrators, for reasons which I can't fathom. I've only heard a thousand times that Shirley Walker 'really' wrote the score to Batman, that Bill Ross 'really' wrote the score to Beetlejuice, that Mark McKenzie 'really' wrote the score to The Nightmare Before Christmas - the list goes on and on, and it's very boring."
Elfman's initial response to a request to print his sketches was an emphatic "No way!" and one just has to look at his work to see why he might be defensive. "I'm embarrassed for good musicians to see my written music. My writing is self-taught, and as is with any illiterates learning to write, they often teach themselves in peculiar ways. My uses of sharps or flats often have a random quality as to my ear A-sharp and B-flat have no difference. To a trained musician, of course, they are different, in how they're read. Often I catch myself writing in sharps and realize I should be in flats and switch half-way through a phrase, creating some very confusing looking notation, particularly when changing keys. In that sense, I'm certainly an orchestrator's biggest nightmare.
Also, I'm most comfortable writing in treble clef, even if it means using 15 or 31vb [one or two octaves lower than written] next to the phrase because this requires the least amount of concentration while I'm writing. When I feel alert, I write in bass clef, it just depends on the time of day. My writing is very much like an illiterate person who taught themselves the alphabet and how to type while writing a novel. They may be able to accurately tell their story, but it will be filled with misspellings and grammatical errors. Because of this, they, like myself find the viewing of their original manuscripts to be embarrassing. I can't make up for a dozen years of training that I never had, but musically speaking, I am able to say exactly what I wish to say, though often in awkward ways."
So basically, Elfman is a bad speller. However unlike a self-taught novelist who can use a spell-checker on a computer, there's no spell-checker for writing music with pencil and paper. "Those misspellings stay forever in my music," he says.
"There's a big bitter contingent of people out there who feel like their place is being robbed by people like me," states Elfman the composer, forced back into self-reflexive mode and still paying for the career-defining error of admitting he has no formal education. "The most annoying thing about composers is their inability to accept the possibility that one could be self-taught. That doesn't exist in any other field in film. A director doesn't need to go to film school and no one will question him. But a composer cannot be a composer doing their own music without going through formal musical training. If that's what they think, fine, I don't give a fuck. The fact that there are a lot of composers that on their own would be better orchestrators than me, that's great. I think a good proportion of the composers working out there are really just orchestrators, and haven't a fucking clue what to do with a melody or how to use it or how to do variations on a theme; and/or they're songwriters who do what I'm accused of doing, although I don't, which is just coming up with melodies and hiring a team to adapt it into a score."
"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.
borrado por error.
Última edición por Bud White; 17/04/2018 a las 13:14
"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.
The jewel of the nile es asi, no es que suene sinfonica ni haya otras versiones, la autentica de la pelicula suena asi.
Romancing the stone fue reeditada por lalaland records el año pasado.
Es tambien limitada pero vale 20 dolares
http://www.lalalandrecords.com/Site/RTS.html
"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.
Vamos con un par de analisis rapidos:
Sorprendido por el último trabajo de Dominic Lewis en Peter Rabbit, muy divertido, muy en la onda de las habituales composiciones de animacion de los chicos de Hans Zimmer.
Y me lo he pasado teta con Rampage y Lost In Space, especialmente con el último, un compositor infravalorado Lennertz es.
Últimamente estoy exprimiendo la banda sonora de Frantic de Ennio Morricone. La he visto completa en Deezer. Totalmente deliciosa.
Un mago nunca llega tarde, Frodo Bolsón. Ni pronto. Llega exactamente cuando se lo propone.
Vamos con un par de noticias
Steve Jablonsky compondra Skyscraper (la nueva peli de The Rock) y esta grabando la banda sonora en los Abbey Road (y para cerrar el circulo), en los Abbey Road se grabo la banda sonora de la segunda parte de Jurassic World que tendra su CD para el 15 de Junio (seguro para el 8 de Junio se edita digitalmente)
Hablando de Batman, quisiera preguntar por las ediciones completas que lanzo el sello lalaland records. Se nota la mejora de audio respecto a la segunda edición que se edito en caja conjuntamente con Batman Returns??? se decia que partia de un nuevo master
"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.
Anoche revisé Scream 2 y no recordaba que, aunque la BSO es de Marco Beltrami (como en toda la saga), la música del ensayo de la obra de teatro en la que participa Sydney (Cassandra Aria) está escrita por Danny Elfman!
Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready
for the big moments.No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it
does.So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are
gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that
counts. That's when you find out who you are. You'll see what I mean.
Whistler (Buffy The Vampire Slayer - 2x21 Becoming, Part One - Joss Whedon)
"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.
Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready
for the big moments.No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it
does.So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are
gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that
counts. That's when you find out who you are. You'll see what I mean.
Whistler (Buffy The Vampire Slayer - 2x21 Becoming, Part One - Joss Whedon)
Di que sí, yo estoy igual, relajado escuchando música en el equipo de casa, que durante la semana no tengo tiempo,
Pero lo que me intriga es lo siguiente... es decir, el proceso mental por el cual se llega a decidir que vamos a llamar a Danny Elfman para este pista en concreto y solo para esta, en plan, imagínate a Wes Craven diciendo, bueno Marco, cómo se supone que es una ópera, necesitamos algo mucho más clásico, tú partitura orquestal/electrónica está bien, pero es el tipo de cosas que tu no, eh... tu no... un momento.
Agenda, contactos, Elfman, Danny...![]()
"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.
Y Elfman dice que si, hace SOLO ese tema en una película que no tiene que ver con el, se le paga y sigue a lo suyo.
Hollywood.![]()
"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.
De nuevo gracias a Branagh/Doyle toca revisión de BSO, hoy de Batman Returns
Cuál es el problema? Pues que aunque la he visto varias veces (cine incluida), tal vez 5-6? no se termina, aún, de impregnarse en mi memoria así que no he podido ir recordando a que escena/momento corresponde cada tema.
Birth of a Penguin sí lo recuerdo bien, ese prólogo que ya no es tan Batman sino puro Burton, en Navidades, con esa Gotham nevada, con personajes dantescos, y seguido de un Main Title revisado, de nuevo con más toques burtonianos (es decir, Elfmanianos)
Clown Attack no me va demasiado pero va perfecta para ese personaje enfermizo que es el Pinguino.
Ah! No recordaba Selina Transforms, toda la BSO tiene un aire navideño. De hecho la música de Elfman tiene mucho de navideño o estoy como una cabra?
Cat Chase y Roof Top Encounters me suenan más propia del Batman '89, tampoco sé ubicarlas..
Umbrella Source empieza casi como un Tchaikovsky y luego nos vamos a lo que debe ser ya los compases finales del film pero mola porque toda la BSO tiene detalles góticos, de esas figuras trágicas del cine de Burton, incomprendidos, monstruos...No me evocan gran cosa pero Elfman consigue una personalidad sonora asombrosa.
Última edición por Synch; 23/04/2018 a las 01:42
Bottom line is, even if you see 'em coming, you're not ready
for the big moments.No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it
does.So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are
gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that
counts. That's when you find out who you are. You'll see what I mean.
Whistler (Buffy The Vampire Slayer - 2x21 Becoming, Part One - Joss Whedon)
Vaya, esta ha sido corta pero lo entiendo porque es muy larga y además si dices que no tienes clara la secuenciación música-película, pues más todavía.
Pero si, es una cosa muy extraña/autoral, una mezcla gótico navideña, con toques freaks, trágicos, líricos... o te entra o no te entra. Ena cualquier caso, cómo dices, Elfman tiene personalidad propia, hasta el punto que diría que esta composición es algo bastante único. Y muy bello, a mi juicio.
Quiza una de los problemas que tiene la gente es que musicalmente tiene poco que ver con el primer Batman. La peli también.
A ver el exceso camp sonoro (con coñas e ironías sonoras incluidas) de Forever que te parece, si es que consigues aguantarlo.![]()
"There’s this misconception these days that a thematic score means a dated-sounding score. This, of course, is a cop out. There’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The art of composing modern scores is the having the skill set to keep motifs alive while being relevant. But too many times, newer composers have no idea what fully developed themes are because they grew up on scores that are nothing more than ostinatos and “buahs.”
John Ottman.