vacuouswastrel

vacuouswastrel

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13 years ago @ Winter Is Coming - GRRM: Blackfish not in... · 1 reply · +1 points

I hope they don't just make Bronn win everything because "he's badass". Because a) the fact that Bronn won not through being badass but by being smarter and more cunning is one of the things that helps elevate the books above cliche and into realism, b) the fact that Bronn only took the fight because he'd out-thought his opponant makes it make sense that he doesn't take the duel in the third book - whereas if we knew 'Oh, Bronn's an incredible badass with a sword', we'd be wondering 'well why doesn't he try taking on [spoiler]?'; and c) if you DO make Bronn an incredible badass with a sword, you're eating into the badassery of other characters. There can only be so many incredible fighters, after all, and every passing mercenary should not be in that category.

13 years ago @ Winter Is Coming - GRRM on composers · 0 replies · +1 points

Please, please, please, for the love of all gods please, please not MORE American faux-Celtic music. I would be liable to punch the TV.

There's nothing in the word 'fantasy' (nor in the words 'whistful', 'sad', 'moving' or 'historical', while we're at it) that mandates soft Irish piping.

13 years ago @ Winter Is Coming - GRRM on composers · 0 replies · +1 points

Hey, Band of Brothers had a composer, but that didn't stop them using Purcell's "When I am laid in earth" for the concentration camp scene.

And by 'using' I mean 'shamelessly stealing without giving any credit'.

But yes, I think Purcell would be a great sound for the series.

13 years ago @ Winter Is Coming - GRRM on composers · 0 replies · +1 points

It worked well on The Wire... but The Wire DID have a score. Every car that went by, half the houses... there was lots of music around. And even when there wasn't music, there was LOTS of noise.

I don't think idea would work as well in the dark ages. The riders don't have ghettoblasters, and a lot of the time there'll be no background sound at all other than the sound of people walking/riding. [King's Landing scenes excepted, obviously].

But I agree that there doesn't have to be swelling strings every second. They can use long stretches of silence.

13 years ago @ Winter Is Coming - GRRM on composers · 0 replies · +1 points

Er... well, if you're going to include film composers as well as TV people then Williams and Morricone are still alive and would take some beating!

Other candidates would have to include Lalo Schifrin, David Shire, and John Barry, though all of them are better known for work a long time ago. Of modern people, you'd have to mention Thomas Newman, George Fenton, and James Newton Howard.

And then of course there's Philip Glass himself - maybe not a 'soundtrack composer', but he does write soundtracks!

Regarding the slow movements in BSG: ok, those three pieces aren't BAD. The first is bland and cliche (with that faux-celticness). The third is an ok kind-of-cliche film theme which I think works well in context as a cue, but isn't great music in its own right (and after you've heard the melody, you may as well stop listening). The second is the best of the three - in fact, I think it's good, but it's not really what I was talking about (too agitated).

I think by far the best piece of music on the show was Glass' Metamorphosis One (which apparently they didn't even credit). Followed by the Watchtower orchestration/variation, and Gaeta's medieval solo. And then a whole load of really excellent filler and background music.

13 years ago @ Winter Is Coming - GRRM on composers · 0 replies · +1 points

I don't know - but I'd have thought it would depend on the composer. The role of 'composers' in general seems to be very variable. Some are just minions - the guys in charge will shoot it all, and say what musical effects they want where, and maybe specify some tracks to be used. Others are massively important to the entire process. Famously, Morricone's scores were written before Leone's films were shot, and were even played on set to choreograph the movements and give the actors the right sense of tone.

So I guess it might vary?

13 years ago @ Winter Is Coming - GRRM on composers · 0 replies · +1 points

Oh, I'm sure lots of thought went into it. I'm not accusing him of being lazy - just of not being very good.

Yes, he throws in some leitmotifs, but that's not much remission from the tedium. You can't go three minutes without thinking 'this is the LotR soundtrack', whichever three minutes you pick.

In some ways it's like Schubert: he just can't bear to not make every second be a tune. Difference is, Schubert could use a different tune each time.

[Also, most of those themes he uses are pretty similar to each other, at least in mood, and often in melody]

13 years ago @ Winter Is Coming - GRRM on composers · 0 replies · +1 points

If you're going to resurrect someone, resurrect John Williams. I know he's still alive, but only in undead form, musically. Resurrect the John Williams of the early 1990s, when he wrote Schindler's List.

Or Ennio Morricone?

Seriously speaking, what I would want is something that goes with medieval ideas without being gregorian chants. Sparse monophonies, modal melodies. I'd combine it with something modernist, like the film music from the sixties, Schifrinesque, though obviously updated - heavy on percussion and texture, unsettling (and that's the part which McCreary might be OK for). I think the two strands can go together because of the rhythmic complexity of renaissance music - we don't think of it being so because they didn't use much percussion, at least in their surviving sacred music, but the melodies are very rhythmically complicated, and that could mesh well with a more modernist background score.

13 years ago @ Winter Is Coming - GRRM on composers · 5 replies · +1 points

I agree. It's a bad piece of work. The theme is a nice tune, for a minute or two, but there's no subtlety, no variation, no development. Barring a little alteration in volume, it's like having the same three one-minute tracks repeated again and again. By the end of the third three-hour film, I would gladly have stabbed Howard Shore. It really hurt the films, I think. It's not even particularly epic - it's a hamfisted attempt to sound epic, but it doesn't approximate the work of the great composers.

[I was brought up on Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovitch - so I may have different standards for epic music than others do.]

Even Gladiator/Pirates of the Caribbean had more epic, more sophisticated scores - and even they weren't too subtle. And interchangeable, which is a big flaw of modern composers - half of them just reuse the same obsessions time and time again.

There's quite a dearth of really good composers around, it seems. McCreary's work on Battlestar was mixed. There's no doubt there were really good parts - anything with the drums, and most of the 'dramatic' music, including the Watchtower quotation. On the other hand, as with most modern composers, the quiet bits let him down (faaar too mawkishly sweet for the 'Adama' squishy moments, faaar too cliche, too) and sometimes the cuts from one piece of music to the next were too strained. That's no surprise - the loud, fast, dramatic bits are relatively easy to accomplish. Trawl through the nineteenth century, and there's a hundred composers who could write five minuts of heart-thumping excitement, and a hundred who could write a little light-hearted dancing - but very few who could put together a truly moving slow movement.

The only big, original score that I can remember as really brilliant from the last ten years was "Road to Perdition". Happily, it was written by someone who's worked with HBO - he wrote the theme for Six Feet Under, and set the musical tone by scoring the first episode. Unfortunately, the music for that was VERY similar to that for Road to Perdition, and not the style to go with GoT.

Doesn't matter too much, though. Chances are, the score won't be great, but it shouldn't need to be. I'd prefer something that can just fade into the background most of the time, if they can't get a top composer. To be honest, I can't really remember the music from series like The West Wing, 24, The Sopranos, or even Six Feet Under, all barring the main title themes, of course.

13 years ago @ Winter Is Coming - Breaking down the new ... · 4 replies · +1 points

Has anyone even heard of Robson and Jerome outside Britain?

Even within Britain, half the audience will be too young to remember him - I remember Robson and Jerome as names, and I could recognise Robson because of his acting career, but no way could I see a guy now and think 'hey, that must be the guy who was a pop star of sorts about fifteen years ago but who then disappeared from public gaze!'. I did't even realise it was THAT Jerome until people here mentioned it.

[Rather weirder will be seeing Grouty as Aemon. Ironically, I think he'd have made a fantastic Pycelle...]