What's new

Favorite peice of film music

Even more cliché, possibly, but "The Asteroid Field" from "The Empire Strikes Back". From its opening with the bombastic, slowed-down version of the Imperial March, through the long, gradual build of tension through the middle, to the soaring, propulsive melody of the asteroid field proper (repeated twice), followed by a brief bit of the "love theme" right at the end, it really shows off so much of what an orchestra can do. The nice thing is, I actually am able to hear it anew since I joined VI-C and gained even rudimentary knowledge of orchestration and which instruments I'm actually hearing in the piece.

A huge factor for me was that it was before the age of home video. Unless you were insane or had theater connections, you couldn't see a "Star Wars" movie every day, but you could listen to the score over and over, to the point that the score actually became the movie in most respects — I actually knew the score for all three original films better than I knew the movies, because I'd listened to them so many times by the time I was able to buy the movies and watch them at home. To this day, it's actually shocking to me how much the score for ESB is either edited out or buried in the mix in the final film (much of even my favorite piece is quite muted).
My 1 year old son tries to sing Star Wars lines, and he hasn’t seen a single movie yet. He just hears me humming or singing them.

His favorite is “Da-daa-da! Da-daa-da! Da-daaaa! Da-da-da-da daa!”
 
John Williams will always be my number one, and as such it’s pretty much impossible for me to choose any one of his iconic pieces. Having said that, something always brings me back to the Temple of Doom soundtrack and in particular the End Titles (I guess because it’s more of a “greatest hits” from the whole soundtrack):

 
This is great on so many levels. The music is outright great in any context. When a composer announces the main theme in the timpani, you have a supremely confident and competent musician at work. Then again, whether it’s the percussion or brass or string or wind-writing - all are supreme. To say nothing of the thematic material and writing to film throughout.

As with so many scores mentioned in this thread, you have a great film-maker (Stanley Kubrick) choosing a great composer. The result being a score no other composer could have done as perfectly.

 
Marvin Hamlisch is rarely mentioned in the pantheon of greatest film composers, but he wrote the love theme for my favorite film, so I will include this short excerpt here:



Randy Newman is another composer who gets attention but not as much as the Goldsmith/Zimmer/Horner/Newman/Herrmann/Williams all-stars, but here is the heroic "home run" theme from The Natural, another film in my top 5 ("Go pick me out a winner, Bobby")




Ennio Morricone's Cinema Paradiso end credits score is. . . there are no words. . .we have the music:
 
@dcoscina you hang on to some really old score! Don't get me wrong, I guess I do too but not as much as you.

@Jimmy Hellfire so true about being somehow "light footed" despite the entire orchestra roaring along, tons of runs and figures in the winds and high strings, often a drum kit, choir, and frets too. Tough to be light footed with all that, but you're right, he does it.

Just listened to Powell's The Call of the Wild. Another feat of graceful and tasteful scoring. Not so crazy about the drum kit but that could have been introduced for any number of reasons.
That stuff is recent compared to most of what I'm listening to (Bartok, Shosty, Ravel, Varese)
 
Top Bottom