Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Movie Music Musings


My movie Music Musings are going to be just that, thoughts about movie music. I'll leave the soundtrack reviews to the pros, several of which you'll find in the Blogs I Read and Sites I Visit section to the right. What you'll find here are mostly blogs about specific soundtracks, composers or just general ranting. When I tackle a soundtrack it will be more from the point of view of how it works in the film and specific styling I feel are effective or not so effective.
Keep in mind my musical vocabulary is limited. I love this stuff and want to share, but I'm also trying to keep this simple and relatable. Hope you find some of this as interesting as I do.

Movie Music Musings Topics
Score Sample

 Here's a list of the various Score Sample tracks and Anime Juke Box tracks I've posted. I figured I'd put them all in one place in case you wanted to listen to an impromptu playlist of sorts. Enjoy the music!
Anime Juke Box


Evolution of a Movie Music Fan

I've been a fan of movie music for a long time now. It all started with my love of all things Star Wars. I sought out a cassette tape of the soundtrack and discovered a rerecording that had music from Star Wars on one side and Close Encounters of a Third Kind on the other. I learned that both films had music by John Williams, and that started a quest.

Soon I was hunting down the scores to The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Star Trek IV which I believe had just come out in theaters. Combine this with a friend of mine who let me borrow cassettes of Conan the Barbarian and Star Trek: The Motion Picture and it was pretty much a done deal.

I pretty much stayed with John Williams scores for the most part in the early days of collecting. But when the 90's rolled around I started picking up some of the biggies of the decade: Last of the Mohicans, Braveheart, Pulp Fiction and Lost Highway.

The late 90's rolled around and I was drawn into the world of anime, and so my musical tastes shifted in that direction too. Anime music is filled with a lot of variety and some great composers were doing excellent work at that time. But after I stopped reviewing anime around 2001 or so, I stopped picking up the soundtracks. Here I pretty much stopped collecting soundtracks and was focusing on electronica and a healthy 80's collection.

But I was pulled back into the world of soundtracks when I started my day job working with procedure documents. I found that I couldn't listen to music with actual words in it, or else I ended up typing those words. So I went back to my old soundtracks and started enjoying them again. The variety of music was great and the acquisition of an ipod made the whole thing even better. I could edit playlists and create "best of" series providing a taste from each film. It was great and it made the days go by quickly.

And so here I am, still collecting scores, still enjoying the music. I've still got a healthy collection of anime scores, and have been dabbling in game soundtracks too. But films are my first love and that's what I'll be writing about here.

at

No comments:

Post a Comment