15 Oct 06
Film Scores Music
I'll let you into a little secret here... I like classical music. There, that gets it off my chest! I checked the UK Top 40 today, and I only like 5 of the tracks, now that's less than 13%.
That said, I wouldn't want you to think I don't have a wide and varied musical pallet. I mean, if you leave this blog today going, "Adam doesn't like popular music", you will be wrong. My iTunes library has everything from acoustic to funk, hard-rock, jazz, punk, pop, R&B, trip-hop, blues, but one of the largest categories is "classical".
Now I'm not talking about Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Johann Sebastian Bach, although all perfectly fine composers, I'm referring to a different type of classical music: Film Scores. Whenever you watch a film, be it Star Wars or A Clockwork Orange, The Matrix or The Incredibles, there will be an orchestral score.
Klaus Badelt's Pirates of the Caribbean score is a rousing, glorious mix of classical strings and grumbling bass choir is fun, exciting and frankly as silly and over the top as the movie, but... Hey! It's a pirate movie, what are you expecting?
The score has plenty in it to make you think, "have I not heard this before"? And you will have done if you heard Hans Zimmer's Gladiator or The Rock score, major themes from both appear in Pirates. But Zimmer nicked cues was influenced by Holst and Wagner, so maybe this is a musician thing. The Gladiator score, (like the film), is huge, impressive, powerful and yet at times extremely tender. Not surprisingly, it won Zimmer a Golden Globe, Grammy and Oscar nomination in 2000.
Other soundtracks to hear if you get the chance include Craig Armstrong's score to Plunkett & Macleane, Van Helsing (Alan Silvestri), Requiem for a Dream (Clint Mansell), The Incredibles (Michael Giacchino), Sin City (Rodriguez, Debney and Revell), and Joe Hisaishi's amazing score for Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away. You can buy all of them on Amazon, and most of them on allofmp3.com.
Below is a quick, (less than 3 mins), sample of the above soundtracks. I made this mostly because I miss using Adobe Audition and fancied the play!
My point to all of this? Not much, but I just wanted to point out that film scores are orchestral, and sometimes the world is a better place after hearing something classical than the UK Top 40.
Update
Following a comment on my post Requiem for a Tower, I've got a list of all the tracks used in the above montage in order:
- Sin City (Rodriguez, Debney and Revell)
- Spirited Away (Joe Hisaishi)
- Plunkett & Macleane (Craig Armstrong)
- Gladiator (Hans Zimmer)
- Van Helsing (Alan Silvestri)
- The Incredibles (Michael Giacchino)
- Requiem for a Dream (Clint Mansell)
- Pirates of the Caribbean (Klaus Badelt)