One thing that flips this on its head in a great way is films in concert. Where they screen the whole film on a projector, with a live orchestra playing the soundtrack. I’ve seen Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in concert this way, and it’s a pretty great experience.
Except that they used the pre-recorded soundtrack for the Mos Eisley cantina music, which was a little disappointing. Understandable from a logistics perspective, but a little disappointing.
Hans Zimmer is, IMO, not as bad per se as his detractors make him out to be, but he is responsible for kicking off or at least popularising the style that has ruined film music over the last two decades. Producing, rather than composing a score, using samples rather than sheet music and real musicians (even if those samples later get converted into sheet music for real musicians to imitate). That, plus the ouroboros nature where today’s films use temp tracks of other film music (in contrast with Star Wars, which had temp tracks of the likes of Holst and Stravinsky), has led to the Zimmer-esque style of tremolo strings, brass chords, and big percussive hits, with comparatively little of the great thematic development and transformation that made Williams’ scores so great. I think the fact that recent films have done callbacks to Elfman’s Batman theme and Williams’ Superman theme are very fun nostalgia-bait, but are disappointing musically.
One thing that flips this on its head in a great way is films in concert. Where they screen the whole film on a projector, with a live orchestra playing the soundtrack. I’ve seen Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in concert this way, and it’s a pretty great experience.
Except that they used the pre-recorded soundtrack for the Mos Eisley cantina music, which was a little disappointing. Understandable from a logistics perspective, but a little disappointing.
Hans Zimmer is, IMO, not as bad per se as his detractors make him out to be, but he is responsible for kicking off or at least popularising the style that has ruined film music over the last two decades. Producing, rather than composing a score, using samples rather than sheet music and real musicians (even if those samples later get converted into sheet music for real musicians to imitate). That, plus the ouroboros nature where today’s films use temp tracks of other film music (in contrast with Star Wars, which had temp tracks of the likes of Holst and Stravinsky), has led to the Zimmer-esque style of tremolo strings, brass chords, and big percussive hits, with comparatively little of the great thematic development and transformation that made Williams’ scores so great. I think the fact that recent films have done callbacks to Elfman’s Batman theme and Williams’ Superman theme are very fun nostalgia-bait, but are disappointing musically.