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#film music
cardassiangoodreads · 2 months
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The Oscar nominations are out, and I've already got to talk about a bad take about film music that I've seen on this webbed site!
Y'all.... it is not "missing the point of the Barbie movie" to have "I'm Just Ken" win awards for being the best original song of the year. It just. Is. It's the best one and it's the best used one in that movie (a top-notch musical number should always trump a background song), it's one that is designed to be the sort of thing that the Academy goes ga-ga over and also me and anyone who cares about film musicals (as an extended throwback to the musical numbers of the original film musical's 1950s Golden Age, particularly Singin' in the Rain, combined with the musical style of an 80s action movie training montage song. It's so good! I can't get over how good and how fun it is!) Yeah, it's in the movie to make a point about how silly the Kens are and how they're distracted from the Barbies regaining their Constitution... but it's also there to entertain and distract the viewer, and it's good at that! You can appreciate the artistry of it, enough to deservedly award it for being what I don't think is audacious to say one of the best musical numbers in film of the 21st century, and also understand that the Kens are the bad guys and they're being silly there. That's, in fact, key to appreciating it. The whole point is that it's over-the-top and camp and silly.
I feel like there are a few key things about both film and film music in particular that a lot of people on this website don't understand - which is fair, most people are never taught about this, but well, I guess I'll give away for free a tiny little bit of the thing I am literally paid to teach about to try to bridge that gap:
Film music is much much more about the way the music is used in the film than the pure quality of the song itself. There are bad uses of good music (the entire Forrest Gump soundtrack, for instance - don't @ me, you know I'm right about this if you search your heart. Playing the "don't you love her as she's walking out the door?" line from The Doors' "Love Her Madly" as a woman walks out the door? A guy mentions going to San Francisco and immediately after we hear the Scott Mackenzie song? It's way too on-the-nose. It's silly. It's lazy. There are so many great movies with fantastic 60s-70s soundtracks. Come on). There are great uses of crappy music! (I can't stand most of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stuff but I love the use of "Memory" in The Marvels; speaking of The Doors, I think "The End" is an overlong, pretentious mess on its own, but its use in Apocalypse Now is masterful.) Film music is about how it's used. "What Was I Made For?" is fine and it adds some nice poignancy to what could have been a much cheesier scene, but it just doesn't come to the level of the spectacle and mastery that is the entire "I'm Just Ken" number. I mean, I also personally like the song better, but that's taste and that's a lot more subjective. And yes, I'm aware that the Academy often doesn't understand this, either, but that's the truth. The number one thing I try to hammer into students when we study film music.
While artistry and narrative themes in any great film - as Barbie is - should be and usually are deeply interconnected, the idea that it means that rewarding a piece of artistry if it was part of a form of misdirection, performed by the "bad guys," etc. means the people doing so somehow don't understand the movie is ludicrous. If you have a really good piece of misdirection, that deserves accolades! If the best song in a film is the villain song, give it an award! It's very possible to be aware of the narrative purpose of a particular thing in a movie as "villainous" or "bad" or "a distraction" or whatever and also be like "okay but well, this was spectacularly made." Just like how you can stan a villain and also understand that they are a villain, understand that they did something wrong (though all my villain faves did nothing wrong, just so we're clear). Again, it was a successful distraction. That was the purpose of it. That's why the film spends more time on it than the Barbies' constitutional convention. Because that's the point. A film is a work of fiction, not a portal into another world. It's fair to reward it for succeeding at its goals as a work of fiction.
And on a related note: was Margot Robbie robbed? Yes. Does that mean that they shouldn't have nominated Ryan Gosling? No. He stole every scene he was in. Come the fuck on.
Also, while we're at it: The technical awards shouldn't all be identical to what are the overall best movies of the year. I mean, Barbie is one of the best movies of the year (and Greta Gerwig was robbed for Best Director - especially because sooooo much of what made that movie so amazing was her direction) but the idea that the movie's narrative excellence is automatically reflected in what is in the sound category is silly; that's a whole new category. But in general: an otherwise weak movie can have one really good thing, and a movie can overall be one of the best but not be the best at every single element, or even weak in one or two particular ones. Case in point: what the fuck is nominating Oppenheimer for best sound? Or maybe this is a reason we need to have kept those two categories separate. Sure, it has great sound editing (making new sounds); you have to on any movie that good about bombs. But the sound mixing (overall soundscape) was garbage! There were so many times you could barely hear the dialogue over the soundtrack. Wtf, sound division! What were you thinking?!?
Anyway, his face when "I'm Just Ken" won the Critic's Choice Award was not there to validate your poor understanding of film music. It was just him being floored that his silly performance as a literal doll is getting so many accolades. Come on guys!
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citizenscreen · 2 months
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Happy birthday, John Williams 🎹 🎼
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mikrokosmos · 16 days
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Fendrix - Soundtrack for the film Poor Things (2023)
I've probably said this before but I usually don't post film music on this blog. Mainly because it's questionable how much a score for a film could be considered "classical" or of the classical tradition. On the one hand, the kinds of genre and styles used for films, and the specific function of the music as accentuating or being part of the overall finished work of the film makes it out to be its own unique genre. On the other hand, classical composers in history have written incidental music for stage plays as well as scores for films, from early / classic film scores by Saint-Saëns or Prokofiev or later in the century by Takemitsu or Glass and going through to today. Regardless I had heard this music before seeing the film Poor Things and was immediately taken in. I loved it so much that I was disappointed that it did not win the Oscar for best film score this weekend (though I won't complain much because the winning score by Ludwig Göransson for Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer was evocative and intense so it was worthy of the award and praise). Still I have a soft spot for Jerskin Fendrix's imaginative and otherworldly music fitting for the equally "otherworldly" and fantastical atmosphere that the world of Poor Things tries to evoke. Yorgos Lanthimos is one of my favorite living directors and I was excited to see this film, even moreso after hearing the score. While I love the exuberant style, unique cinematography, and the dreamlike images, I will admit I was somewhat disappointed by the film overall (I didn't love it as much as I did his 2018 film The Favourite), and am still uneasy and disturbed by the subject matter and implications of an infant/prepubescent mind developing in the body of an adult woman, and all of the uncomfortable sex scenes and conversations as the film goes along. Still, I do love this score as a stand-alone album. Bella's theme is awkward, slightly out of tune and discordant, conveying the kind of naivety, curiosity, and somewhat self consciousness of being a "child" trying to understand the world they live in. The score continues with keyboard textures, detuned harps and winds, scratchy violins, vocalized oos and ahs, creating a lot of artificial and even alien sounds that disorients the listener in the same way that the wide lenses and porthole shots disorient the viewer. And later in the film (mild spoiler alert) when "Bella's" "real husband" arrives, we are made to feel sick and unsettled by the low frequency pulsing that makes us dread his arrival. A lot of textures and harmonies are unexpected in ways that make me wish Stravinsky were still alive so he could hear and share his thoughts. I especially thought of Stravinsky with my personal favorite track, "Portuguese Dance II", with violent and punchy, comically disturbed accordion chords that open into a catchy dance tune which may as well have come from one of his ballets. This same music gets its own awkward dance scene (another Lanthimos trademark) with Emma Stone's Bella and Mark Ruffalo's despicable Duncan. Again this is a bit different from my usual posts but regardless I hope you can enjoy the bizarre and wonderful soundworld that Fendrix created for this film.
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velvet4510 · 11 days
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I guess I’m one of those weirdos who so deeply feels the essence of an instrumental leitmotif from a film score associated with a particular character or couple, that I start associating said leitmotifs in my head with ANOTHER character from an entirely different film/book/series. And I’ve built up a whole library of leitmotifs for LOTR characters even though I ADORE Howard Shore’s original score and wouldn’t change it for anything. I consider these leitmotifs to be add-ons, NOT replacements. Nor do I intend to completely dissasociate these themes from their intended films/characters. It’s just my mind going wild like usual.
In some cases, the characters these themes were originally written for don’t resemble the corresponding LOTR characters very much, or at all. It’s just the melodies on their own, without context, that have come to remind me of a particular Tolkien figure. In other cases, they resemble them exactly.
I mostly have found lots of “love themes”, both romantic and platonic, for Middle Earth relationships, as you’ll see. I know Shore already gave Aragorn & Arwen one, but as I said, these are all extra additions and not replacements.
I sadly have yet to find a theme that reminds me enough of Samwise Gamgee, my favorite character, to officially include it here. But I’m totally open to suggestions from fellow weirdos who also tend to do this!
And yes I have a lot of Star Wars stuff in here, because I love Star Wars…but I love Tolkien more.
For the heck of it I’ll share some of these. It’s hard to explain why I made these choices/associations, but maybe you’ll get it if you listen to some of them. (All these are on YT.)
Frodo = “Romeo,” composed by Nino Rota
Aragorn = “The John Dunbar Theme” by John Barry
Gandalf = “Yoda’s Theme” by John Williams
Lúthien = “Jill’s America” by Ennio Morricone
Éowyn = “Rey’s Theme” by John Williams
The Valar = “Guardians of the Whills Suite” by Michael Giacchino
The land of Valinor = “Out of Africa” by John Barry
Frodo x Sam = “Love Theme from Ben-Hur” by Miklos Rozsa
Beren x Lúthien = “Speak Softly Love” by Nino Rota
Faramir x Éowyn = “Han Solo and the Princess” by John Williams
Aragorn x Arwen = “Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso” by Ennio Morricone
Sam x Rosie = “Love Theme from Dances with Wolves” by John Barry
Bilbo x Thorin = “Midnight Cowboy” by John Barry
Thingol x Melian = “Indecent Proposal” by John Barry (unfitting title, obviously, but very fitting song by itself)
Fingon x Maedhros = “Wuthering Heights” by Alfred Newman
Legolas & Gimli - “Rain Man” by Hans Zimmer
Boromir & Faramir - “Luke and Leia” by John Williams
Bilbo & Frodo - “The Mother’s Love” by Miklos Rozsa (melody is heard in the first minute of this track, 0:00–1:01, and again towards the end; also, the love theme I associate with Frodo & Sam starts playing at 1:03, making this whole thing fit all the hobbits even better)
I may edit this as I think of more.
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iffeelscouldkill · 1 year
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Singing the Honor Among Thieves drinking song ("No fortune found, nor faith divine, come close to toping the juice of the vine...") to myself and feeling a Yearning
I would love a movie-esque version of this to listen to. There's a lovely version by Daniel Kelly Folk Music played on a homemade lyre (with two additional verses he wrote himself!), but it has a slightly different tune. I would love a version that had a lute or some flute instrumentals, maybe leaning into an Irish folk music sound 🪈🎶
It doesn't have to be an official version but it would be great if they released one, I think everyone who's been going feral over that song since the film came out would love it xD
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aphroditeslover11 · 4 months
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I’m back with my own little take on the music of Oppenheimer and Oppie’s own experience of music. Please note I’m a non-professional violinist with a classical background but fuck all knowledge of theory!
I can also sympathise with hating the piano, I tried to learn at a similar age but was awful. I’m limited to a very simple piece of Schubert and the introduction to ‘I don’t like Mondays’ but the Boomtown Rats!
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thirtytwoelvismovies · 5 months
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John Carpenter scores.
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bloodynereid · 3 months
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damn the narnia soundtracks slap
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capn-o-my-soul · 2 months
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okie okie so i made a thing
(it's not calligraphy)
so for about a month now i've been writing my own version of a film score to accompany The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but it is taking a little bit longer than anticipated. i finished Act 1 of 6 today, which is about 12.5 minutes long. please give it a listen and tell me your thoughts!
DISCLAIMER
the audio in the video is a MIDI preview, not an actual performance. with this comes some less than desirable things like the balance is kinda whack, etc. etc.
there is one part (in the clerk's office) where a muted trombone does a crescendo over a long note, then plays a short accented note. the long note is supposed to go all the way until the short note, but for some reason, the MIDI rendering cuts the long note a bit shorter than it should be.
enjoy!
the video is too big for tumblr, so here's a google drive link
if you're trying to access it within a few minutes of me posting this, it probably needs to process a little while before it is viewable, or you can download it.
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anabanana-romanova · 5 months
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James Newton Howard's soundtrack for All The Light We Cannot See is superior and i will die on this hill
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There is a lot that has been written about the ways that the Louis/Lestat relationship becomes an interesting sort of commentary on colonialism -- the white Frenchman who is framed as the more masculine and dominant partner with a black Creole man in New Orleans, who basically uproots his life so that he can be his forever companion -- but the decision in episode 3 to have Lestat basically help Jelly Roll Morton "write" one of his trademark songs is interesting to me in light of this, as someone who knows a fair amount about the early history of jazz and the role of race in it. It's framed as Lestat having the idea to inject classical music into jazz, and I've seen many people in the fandom suggest that he "invented orchestral jazz" in that moment. So it's curious that 2022 Interview with the Vampire, a show that otherwise seems very aware of the racial disparities it comments on through its changes to the original novel, not only gave a white European man that role but had him basically usurp the role of a real black Creole man from Louisiana who is widely acknowledged as one of the originators of jazz, particularly in terms of its use of improvisation and arranging/improving on preexisting works of music (as Lestat is doing there).
I don't say this is "curious" for the reasons you think. For one, I think it's important to remember that what we're "seeing" is Louis' recollections of what happened, what he's telling to Daniel Molloy, and not necessarily the unbiased "fact" of what went down. But more to the point, it's interesting to do this with "orchestral jazz" because that's a genre whose history is defined by that kind of appropriation.
I'm probably going to write way more about this than is necessary, so let's put this below a cut:
First of all, jazz has basically always had classical music as its close stylistic companion. There's a reason jazz originated in New Orleans, a city that had a history of having a black middle and arguably even upper class before Jim Crow laws tried to bring them all down to the same level (discussed in the show) -- a middle/upper class that particularly represented black people who had mixed European ancestry, which is historically what "Creole" meant in New Orleans when applied to people of color. And middle-class in the 19th-early 20th century meant having a piano at home and it meant at least some degree of "classical" training in music, and in America, an up-and-coming country that had become the industrial and political equal of Europe but was still struggling to be taken seriously culturally, a lot was riding on their association with European art forms like classical music. It was a big part of how class disparity was defined at the time, education about and interest in classical music.
This creates a situation where in New Orleans, we see a lot of overlap between classical musicians and black blues musicians, and that is one of the many influences that went into the gumbo (if you will) that is jazz. If you count ragtime as jazz, ragtime composers like Scott Joplin were pretty open about wanting to be seen as similar to classical musicians, with Joplin composing in classical forms like opera. (Granted, talking about ragtime gets us further afield from NOLA specifically, but it was part of that influence stew at the time.) If you go to New Orleans and you listen to the style of jazz widely played there, much of which attempts to harken back to the kind popular in the early part of the 20th century, you'll hear a lot more classical influence than you will with (some) later forms. It even includes some "classical" instruments whose popularity in jazz has waned in the decades since, such as the clarinet or the tuba.
Anyway, so this early influence was largely the work of black composers who were interested in classical music, But a lot of what "mainstreamed" orchestral-flavored jazz in the 1920s was -- as is so often the case with black music in the U.S. -- white musicians, helped along by Jim Crow making it hard for black people to get the opportunities and audiences white people did. (There are lots of stories where famous black musicians from the era like Louis Armstrong played in concert halls and clubs where they would not have been allowed to attend a concert as a spectator. Think about that.) Many people think of "orchestral jazz" and think instantly of "Rhapsody in Blue," a work by a white composer, George Gershwin (albeit, also a son of Jewish immigrants who had grown up in immigrant communities in New York, not someone who'd be seen as unimpeachably "white" at the time). But its first performance was in a band version by the group led by -- no joke, this is his real name -- Paul Whiteman. Whiteman is a controversial figure in the history of early jazz for having profited off the innovations of black musicians, including in making a lot of his fame from the "idea" of blending jazz with classical music. (As that Wikipedia article shows, there are some who dispute this, and note that he frequently collaborated with black musicians as much as was allowed during segregation, and no less of a black jazz luminary than Duke Ellington sung his praises.)
You could argue there is some inherent "whitewashing" going on in “orchestral jazz,” as it was obviously going to be more palatable to white classical music listeners who saw jazz as beneath them. There is, of course, a pattern of this throughout the history of black music, that continues to this day, and isn't always done by white people. (The popularity of Hamilton among people who don't otherwise listen to hip-hop always felt like a reflection of this trend to me.) Oftentimes it's made by minority musicians who like classical music (or whichever white genre) pretty genuinely. As stated before, a lot of the earliest orchestral jazz is just... jazz. It was the kind "originally done" by black people. But there's a reason that blending jazz more "obviously" (to the then-contemporary white listener) with classical music and other pre-existing "white"-coded genres (like the marching band tradition) is what helped get jazz into more and more "respectable" white venues. And that association with whiteness and white "respectability" is why white people were so easily able to take credit for something that in fact black musicians had been doing for decades.
So it's interesting to me that Interview with the Vampire, a show that is always very conscious of the racial dynamics of New Orleans in the early 20th century and particularly within the Lestat/Louis relationship, gives us a scene where Lestat gets to take credit for a big innovation in jazz history, by pretty effortlessly doing jazz-improvisation on a preexisting classical piece and it "inspiring" Jelly Roll Morton to try the same thing himself. You know, rather than that being something Jelly Roll came up with on his own and was already doing.
There's a lot to unpack here. Lestat admits later that Jelly Roll sounded fine, and he did what he did for other reasons; his snobbery toward jazz is also implied to be a front, and I think it pretty much has to be for him to be able to improvise that easily. I'm someone who has been actually trained somewhat in jazz, and let me tell you, that kind of improvisation on the fly is hard and not something someone would be able to do without being practiced at it. You're basically doing what composers do but on the spur of the moment, and in a genre that has distinctly different rules about harmony, rhythm, etc. than classical music normally does. He had to have had practice -- if indeed, this did actually happen as we see it.
I think what makes me take the side of that this story is false is the particular classical piece that Lestat chooses to improvise: the Minuet in G. This piece is often falsely attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach, and Lestat does that here; the joke about "he had 20 children" is a reference to a really common story about Bach. But it was in fact written by the lesser-known composer Christian Petzold, and only gets mistakenly attributed to Bach because it was found in a book of music that Bach gave to his wife Anna Magdalena. There are countless J.S. Bach pieces that are famous and that we know he wrote, especially for the keyboard -- and that's the one the show chose to have Lestat play, the false-attribution. Given how attentive this show has been to its music, I can't help but think that is intentional, and so it means history is repeating itself: false attribution on top of false attribution.
So if this didn't happen, or even just didn't happen the way we're told, what is Louis' reason for putting forward this story including to Daniel Molloy? I think it's one small piece of a mountain of evidence that even in the present day, he retains a lot more fondness for Lestat than you'd think at first glance. He clearly still has feelings for him, and in this case, to the extent of constructing a false and politically-incorrect story to attest to his greatness. You can also put it in context with the holes Molloy keeps poking in Louis' story of how great this relationship is. "Yeah, sure, my boyfriend was abusive, but he was also a musical genius, how could I not be drawn to him?"
(Daniel Molloy's own skeptical reaction to this story is also something to take into account here. And the conversation between them helps give viewers context for just how big of a wrench Louis is throwing in the history of jazz by claiming this.)
What's most interesting about this to me is how this troubles the story of Louis the Anti-Racist Crusader that we see both in the story he tries to tell and also, honestly, in terms of how a lot of the fandom misinterprets him. Here Louis is directly making a story less "black" in order to make his white boyfriend look better. He's truly "whitewashing" history, in multiple senses of the word. But if you look closely at Louis' behavior, this shouldn't be surprising. He's willing to play the game with white segregationists, people whose thoughts he can read now to tell that they don't really respect him (but I think he always kinda knew this), as long as he gets to keep his business running. He kills Alderman Fenwick already sorta knowing that what happens after is not going to be good for the black residents of Storyville, the people he claims to protect... but he does it anyway, and makes a very public tableau of what he did, because it felt good. He's not the good person he tries to represent himself as in contrast to Lestat; he has his own largely-selfish motivations, and his priorities are squarely focused on the little family of vampires he's built, not on any broader community. Maybe on his own guilt and wanting to feel like he still has a moral compass, but he regularly disregards that and amends his "moral code" as convenient. Louis is very sympathetic, especially with all the discrimination he experiences and the fucked-up way that Lestat treats him, but that doesn't make Louis a good person. But it does make him a far more interesting character!
The Jelly Roll Morton story is just one small piece of the puzzle, but a very telling one when you dig a little bit deeper into it and ask yourself why these storytelling decisions were made. Both in the out-universe sense of what the showrunners are trying to tell us by highlighting particular moments in Louis' long life, but also in the in-universe sense of the choices Louis makes in telling his own story.
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citizenscreen · 3 months
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Franz Waxman composing the MGM Fanfare in 1936
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yeoldecryptid · 3 months
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Chicken Run’s soundtrack had no reason to go as hard as it did. Oh to be a kazoo player in the orchestra for that film.
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mikrokosmos · 9 months
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Alexandre Desplat - Main Theme to Asteroid City (2023)
Last night I went out to the movies with friends and we saw the new Wes Anderson picture, Asteroid City. This is the first time in a long time that I've seen a film in a theater and I do have a lot to say about the movie and the unique way that it shows the kind of crisis and anxiety that artists have in the creative process. But from the first moment I fell in love with the score by the acclaimed film composer Alexandre Desplat. Just as Anderson uses picturesque scenes and stock characters of Atomic-Age Americana to evoke a nostalgia for this idealized past we can only experience as artificial recreations, So Desplat turn to post-war American music to capture not only an atmosphere of the era but also of the American Sublime. There are only a few moments that his score comes through mixed with retro country western tracks. The opening of this “suite” holds us with a high-pitched note held over a melody in the lower register of the piano. This distinct “Americana” sound feels that way because it is reminiscent of Copland’s orchestral writing. But then the oscillating xylophone and bells brings in a pulse that makes me think of American minimalism with the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Little wind arpeggios come in to heavily emphasize Philip Glass' style of “minimalism”, which can be heard throughout his scores. And this nod to Glass ends with a long held organ pedal point in the bass, reminding us of his iconic score for Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Then, unexpectedly, the held note which opened the score is revealed to be the opening to the serene and otherworldly prelude to Wagner’s Lohengrin (or at least a short pastiche). Why reference Wagner here? I'm going to guess that this is related to the Wagnerian sound of heroism, triumph, and the sublime all being paired with the reminiscent love for the cowboys of the Old West. And these long held notes, and evoking the repetitive and potentially endless sounds of looping American minimalism come together to create a musical depiction of the American Sublime of endless Horizons and expansive nature and the quiet beauty that places like the Southwest has. I might be reading a lot into it and I don't want to argue that this is what Alexander Desplat had in mind when he decided to write in an American musical style for matching aesthetics, but I think this adds a nice little cherry of a detail on top of an already complicated and multi-layered film.
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thedirectorscuts · 1 year
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Time and tide wait for no man
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jumpingbear · 1 year
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Ernest et Celestine (2012)
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