Movie soundtracks: Apparently, there’s a method to the madness.
This story over on io9.com is a few days old, but I only just read about it yesterday. Are you a fan of the music from big-budget movies such as that composed by John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Hans Zimmer and so on? Well, it seems that there's a reason you might be attracted to such music in film after film:
io9.com: Bear McCreary reveals the physics behind your favorite science fiction theme tunes
Well, I'll be.
Those of you who read my blatherings here with any regularity know that I love film scores. I have the music from many, many movies in my rather extensive collection and, yeah, a lot of it is by folks like Williams, Horner, Goldsmith, and so on. The Star Trek series, the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones movies, Black Hawk Down, Gladiator, Alien, The Right Stuff, are all there, sure, as are ones you might not expect, like The American President or The Shawshank Redemption. I have a pretty eclectic selection from which to choose, which comes in handy if I'm looking for something to set the mood while I'm writing. For example, if I'm working on a Star Trek story set during the era of the original series, music from the show provides the ideal backdrop. For heavy action sequences, I might turn to one of the Star Wars films, or Predator or even some of Bear McCreary's own music from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. When writing a story for the Space Horrors anthology a couple of years ago, I leaned on moodier pieces from Jerry Goldsmith's scores from Outland and the first Alien film.
Though it's easy to recognize familiar patterns and from score to score, I never really picked up on the notion of there being a set of basic intervals which seem to be "money" for someone composing such music. I guess you can chalk that up to me having almost no musical talent or aptitude of my own; the only thing I play is the radio.
So, for those of you who *are* music hounds, and have the ear to pick up on such things, what are your thoughts on this? Any favorite film scores? Maybe I'll even get lucky, and somebody will mention something I don't have.
(Originally published at The Fog of Ward and cross-posted to LiveJournal.)