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THIS is what a REAL epic orchestral score looks (and sounds) like:
Not the catatonic locomotive CRAP that HACKS would have you embosom. And you won't get anywhere near the REAL just by blasting orchestral unisons and chords that somebody ELSE prepared for you.
Molto Sonore indeed Maestro! I sincerely apologize about sharing the piracy, but given the current state of film-music and what passes for it, I am sure you understand.
Wait, is this "Epic" music? I only want Epic music!
LOL..just kidding. What a treasure this music is and how it stands as a testament against the mediocrity that is so prevalent in film music of today!
A related anecdote. Someone I know (who is not into classical music and does not profess to know about music in general) told me that he recently got into 'epic' music. I pointed to him that classical music is the real epic music and asked if he has listened to it. He said he has heard some pieces and found classical music boring. I promised to take him to a concert that will change his mind.
The next month, I took home to a free concert at the New England Conservatory in Boston. The youth orchestra there played a Mozart piano concerto, 'Barber's symphony no 1' and Rachmaninoff's 'Isle of the dead'...two pieces that are as epic as it can get. And that was my first time listening to that Barber piece, what a piece of music that was...21 minutes of genius.
He was simply blow away and even stunned! He said that he never knew that there was this kind of a sound posisble. Here is a person who had minimal knowledge of music, was only exposed to HZ and other epic orchestral (indeed locomotive) crap on YT, and he could instantly be moved by Mozart when hearing it live and even complex pieces like Barbers Symphony 1. He swore this would be just the beginning of his concert experience (btw he was someone who I had lots of disagreements professionally, and is not easily swayed by what I say)
I've had this experience with many friends of such minimal musical background. They come with fresh and curious ears and I think there is something about live performance that is so uniquely engaging, but is unfortunately diminishing in our modern digital world. People do not have time to go to live concerts anymore and only listen to audio in their little phones.
So my mission is to proselytize 'real' orchestral music as much as possible.
Anand
Well done Anand! Proselytization is what we really need! We are not short οn professional musicians, especially composers! What we are in dire need of, are cultured audiences! They dwindle by the year...
I also took this opportunity to pay my respects for the passing of one of the two remaining of the 'Last Generation', so to speak. Although I find Penderecki's early period much more interesting, I do own a few CDs of his post-1975 works, and had opportunity to meet him briefly following a concert of his St. Luke's Passion that he conducted. I wish it were the Threnody or Polymorphia, but then I suppose I did have the privilege of hearing a great work by one of the most important of living composers, with him on the podium. I am not complaining.
I thought to append this post to this thread, in the context that most sequencer-composers today do not realize that many of these "Strings FX" (I suppose 'effects' is too long a word...) that they use in their... "creations" by pressing a key on their keyboard - but that they could never notate - were invented by this man who passed away some hours ago, and that they were in themselves a powerful and new aesthetic a few decades ago (now cheapened, and the property of any hack), and it fell to men like Xenakis, Ligeti, Penderecki, and a handful of other pioneers, not only to invent them, but to find cogent ways to convey them in musical notation, as well as to teach them to orchestral musicians. They didn't just press a button or tweak a knob to achieve these sounds ex nihilo, and I believe they deserve a great amount of respect.
So thank you Mr. Penderecki for having expanded my musical horizons, and for some powerful musical experiences.
In the further spirit of proselytizing, the Berlin Philharmonic's digital concert hall is providing a month of free subscription—until the end of April. They have an incredible library of concerts, films, interviews, and an ongoing program of live concerts. An unparalleled resource!
www.digitalconcerthall.com
Sad to know about Penderecki. Thanks for telling us Errikos. I would have missed this news in the ocean of other tragic news in these dark days. I will listen to his 'Thernody for the victims of Hiroshima' in his honor.
Ken I did read about the free concerts and was drawn to the Berlip phil's website and videos. I ended up buying Rattles farewell of Mahler 6th on Blu ray, more as a sign of donation since everything is free these days. But this is a great recording and I wanted to own it.
I think many other orchestras including the Met are doing free live streaming.
Anand
Sorry to hear about Penderecki.
I am also disturbed by that aspect of dumbing down the original musical elements he and other modern composers - especially Ligetti - created simply as part of their compositions, and making them into a kind of atonal soup for scoring horror movies or what-have-you.
It's nothing new though, and reminds me of two things: one in the 1940s Hollywood studio era, in which countless film scores were made out of a Rachmaninoff/Liszt Faux-Romantic soup, endlessly repeated. An egeregious example of this is the score for "The Secret Heart" which is a really well-done film in itself, but is marred by a HORRIBLE uber-Romantic pastiche that was literally snippets of Rachmaninoff, Liszt, etc cobbled together! It is sickening to hear to the point that you can't continuing watching the film without getting enraged.
The other thing it reminds me of is how a great abstract artist - Thomas Wilfred - created in the 1930s-40s "Lumia" works, which were pure light projections and devices that could run unattended (and still exist) and that had a beautiful cosmic quaity and are of such perfection of design that they are still beyond any digital simulations in their quality. (One of them was used in a recent large-scale Terrence Malick film.) And yet nowadays, such abstract light forms have become totally mindless and non-artistic as screensavers. But they can be a complete art form, if created by an individual.
One thing that is encouraging is that the copycats all fade into oblvion, while the original creators and visionaries who actually made something emerge once again out of the muck of the commonplace.
Kenneth: Thanks for the information. I knew about the BPO channel but not of this free-special!
Anand: I always encourage people to buy as many CDs and Blu-Rays as they can afford, even though some of the materials are "available" online, in order to do 'the right thing', as well as support the industry. As for having met Penderecki, yes, it is one of those moments you carry with you, one of those moments that you feel more alive because you're closer to the flame, brimming with meaning. There have been other occasions like that, the most recent of them last year when I met and chatted with Terry Riley after a concert.
Bill: Thank you for the wonderful post, you are always a fountain of great information! I had never heard of Thomas Wilfred. I just briefly checked him out, what beautiful and original concepts! I remember how amazed I was the first time I saw screensavers on my first computer, which sported a 17" colour monitor. I was amazed at these abstractions, and that was 1984, not 1930!
As for the soundtracks of the '40s-'50s etc., with faux-Rachmaninov/Wagner/Strauss and later '70's-'80s faux-Prokofiev/Holst/Shostakovich/Mahler, of course that has almost always been the case in film, and to us they were laughable at times when things were taken to extremes. However, the imitators of the great masters, at least they knew the craft. The last two decades of soundtracks have been just 'faux' (the vast majority).
But the last point you make rings very true, and I take solace in it.
P Paul moved this topic from Orchestration & Composition on