Who wants to help me translate Italian film score terminology by Thursday night?

I didn't think so :P For some reason I can't find either of my Ennio Morricone compilations for my end of the term Italian project this Friday, which really worries me. Sometimes I think my room is a giantic void that swallows up my soundtracks and spits them out two years later. It's a very disturbing trend.

The end of the world might be emminent as I did a week's worth of integral and differential equation homework in advance and enjoyed it quite a bit.

And *now* I have to find out that Michael Giacchino is married...I think. Actually, I can't seem to find any proof of said marriage, so perhaps there's still hope for me.


You didn't think I was being serious, did you? Every composer needs a devoted fangirl, I suppose :D

This is the coolest article I've read all week. In other words, researchers are confirming common knowledge; people tend to judge each other on their musical tastes as one's musical preferences reveal a lot about one's personality. No wonder people spend so much time making mix CDs as gifts for friends. And if we're to believe the conclusions presented in this article, I'm a terribly introverted person due to my overwhelming preference for instrumental music. Maybe my college essay isn't so irrelevant to real life after all.

That's exactly the sort of thing I'd like to explore in the future after pestering some nice administrators for research money. And perhaps I will double major in psychology and musicology after all if I bother to learn how to sight sing and pass a keyboard proficiency test. Mmmm, college...

Friends, tea, wagashi, and a new soundtrack (Amélie). Morning walks to Borders when class is cancelled and having bizzare semi-sketchy conversations in a sukkah and up in tree branches. Revelling in autumn with some lovely thematically complex neo-minimalistic music to boot. I hope to have more days like these.

For some reason I've been waltzing around the house and singing snippets of "Scarborough Fair" all evening.

If I could, I think I'd marry Yann Tiersen's orchestrations. But then I'd have to have a polygamous marriage because I want to marry John Barry's compositions, Bernard Herrmann's, Michel Legrand's and Michael Giacchino's. Well, a girl can dream...

Some people figure out crossword puzzles; I attempt to analyze incidental music for clues on what will happen in the next episode of a TV series.

It's almost disturbing how happy this makes me. I tried counting all of the post-it notes I've used for my findings for one show alone (I'm not even counting movies); it's somewhere around 35 at the very least. I would probably be a lot faster if I actually knew music theory and/or real terminology, but there are some really nifty cross-references that I'd like to trace further. In other words, I actually have a semi-legitimate excuse to wath TV!

One of these days I really need to transcribe and compile my notes onto Karen, my beloved laptop, so that I can actually read what I have. I'd hate to see my Alias project end up like my Incredibles (which I'm still working on; it's been about ten months so far and I've been slacking off on that)-I'm never writing down anything in pencil ever again.

In other words, I'm in the midst of finding every bottle of vitriol I can for my Newsweek letter to the editor for dissing my composer-god, Michael Giacchino (See the snippet on the extinction of the TV title song article near the beginning. The idiots can't even tell the difference between a song and a main title theme). If only I didn't completely and utterly botch the one and only article I've ever gotten published...

Sometimes I get the strangest feeling that I'm happiest when I have seven different things to do all at the same time. Then again, three of those deal with film music...

Horrifically long e-mails from good friends might also be contributing to my current semi-hyperactive state. And dinner with my godparents and my pseudo-sisters only makes things better! Dare I say that I feel like I might almost be on top of things?

But among other things, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie really doesn't hold well for a second viewing.

Because I am such a nice person, I do not want to pick up the nearest sledgehammer and use it on the next misogynist I come across.

Oh no, not me.

Techno is not the root of all musical evil.

To be honest, I've never believed that techno was the worst thing to happen to film music; I personally am not a fan of early 30's to late 50's film music which subscribes to "the Danube School of Music," to quote from Henry Mancini. "Sappy 1000 Violins Syndrome" for sentimental moments (i.e. non-location, non-suspense and non-action) is still a big issue today. But there are limitations on to how well electronica can replicate live instrumental music. I remember reading somewhere that even with an electronic synthesizer piano which plays each note perfectly without all of the tiny little wavelengths of notes that are close in frequency to the main note, listeners still prefered the original instrument because it sounded more interesting. The same applied to string instruments, if I remember correctly. There is a unique emotional quality to these tiny fluctuations in frequency that electronica simply can't replicate. The Danube School, for better or for worse, has ingrained upon society the standard of strings and occasionally woodwinds to carry the melody lines for the more emotionally complex scenes.

My favorite modern scores, and even some of my favorite retro scores, manage to combine "traditional" instrumental writing for the majority of scoring with live instrumentals and electronica for suspense and action cues. For example, take John Barry's the Living Daylights, the last James Bond score he wrote as of this point in time *fingers crossed for Casino Royale* As the All Music Guide review for TLD remarked, this score is one of the most contemporary sounding action/adventure scores of the 80's in its sparing use of synthesizers for key action cues. The drum loops in "Ice Chase," "Necros Attacks" "Hercules Takes Off" work beautifully as the rhythmic core; the emphasis is still on the brass and strings. For the suspense cues like "the Sniper Was A Woman," "Koskov Escapes," "Airbase Jailbreak" and "Afghanistan Plan," the strings dominate with brass and percussion accompaniment; these 18-year-old cues could just as easily fit into a 21st century thriller. As much as I love Bill Conti's For Your Eyes Only, the heavy emphasis on synthesizers and disco for the cues in the first half of the film make the soundtrack a retrospective of 80's disco masked as action music. I won't even get started on David Arnold's the World is Not Enough and Die Another Day because I'll burst a few blood vessels in the process.

Phillip Glass has also done some interesting work with electronica which of what I've heard I've liked tremendously, but his focus is more on expanding the limits of melody and thematic development rather than on tone color.

But with Arnold and other action film composers, the orchestra has been virtually tossed out, often at the behest of producers seeking a quick profit, for the cheaper electronic instruments. What happens is that it becomes nearly impossible and not worthwhile to distinguish the music from one action film to another. An experimentalist musical trend has become the new cost-effective standard, reducing aural art into a pre-programmed set of rhythms and melodies jumbled into different orders to present the illusion of originality. Thankfully there are composers like Michael Giacchino, David Holmes, and John Powell who rework occasional techno elements for a contemporary feel into seamless transitions with live instrumentals carrying the main melodies.

Semi-related links:

Cool Unused Composer's Choice Scoring for the Bond movies

OK, I'm advertising the above site because it's been my friend's pet project for the past few months. Essentially the edited scenes include the composer's intended cues that appear on the remastered soundtracks of the film instead of the in-film versions, but the research into the musical selection choices is pretty good.

Extremely cool remixes of From Russia With Love and On Her Majesty's Secret Service with great fan trailers

Some of the remixed techno elements sound a little obviously worked in, but the overall effect is rather pleasing and pretty professional sounding for a fan remix.

Yeah, I've gotten a lot of work done today...

I am starting to see why people claim that I am obsessive compulsive, except I'm not. Right.

There's a lot of Harry Potter madness over at the Harvard Coop; there must have been at least 150 people crowded into the bookstore at 11 tonight. Danielle, Sophia, Sophia's roommates, and Filippe (Sophia's roommate's boyfriend or unofficial 3rd roommate) and I waited outside just to see what people were doing. We noticed that quite a few people had arrived in costume (the best one was of Professor Trelwaney whose name I am sure I have misspelled) and many more arrived with painted lightning bolt "scars." The line was ridiculously long, so I'll probably get the book tomorrow or later this week as I still have other required reading to do.

Ellie got me a Phillip Glass compilation from the NY Metropolitain Museum of Art, Up Close, and I've got to say that the more I listen to it the more I believe Glass to be an absolute genius. There are composers who experiment for the sake of trying to attract attention, and there are composers who experiment in order to redefine the elements of musical composition while paying homage to the work of past masters. Glass is of the latter category, but he's the sort of composer whom people immediately worship or hate. Personally I'm intrigued by his redefinition of Impressionism as minimalism in exploring the development of harmonic fragments. To oversimplify somewhat, minimalism is just Impressionism taken to the extreme.

I never cease to be amazed by how pretentious I can sound despite the fact that I have no idea what I'm talking about.

And as a random note: I thought that this article was pretty cool about Israel monitoring the health of models (thanks to horosha for the link):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1528862,00.html#article_continue

Some things weren't meant to be played in an orchestral arrangement, like the very pop-flavored title theme for "the Persuaders."

Oh goodness-I'm seeing the sun starting to rise. I have to get over this insomnia or else I'll be completely screwed for class for the next few weeks and when I return home.