Author: JimQ
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Jon Brion on Scoring Magnolia
Jon Brion’s career path has taken him to many corners of the music business: performer, record producer, session musician. He’s found success with all three at a relatively early age. He’s only in his mid-30s, yet he’s produced Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, and Rufus Wainwright, three artists whose respective sounds are vastly different. He’s got his fingers in so many pies, you might be…
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Rolfe Kent: A Gun Shy Composer
With no formal classical music training, composer Rolfe Kent became a self-taught musician while earning a degree in psychology at the University of Leeds. An association with local bands resulted in Kent’s composing music for a stage play called GROSS, produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Additional stage play music followed, and by 1989 Kent found his way into television and soon into films.…
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Alan Silvestri: From Stuart Little to Reindeer Games
Alan Silvestri’s latest scores continue to show the versatility and craft that have made him one of the industry’s leading composers. From early works like ROMANCING THE STONE and BACK TO THE FUTURE, genre favorites like PREDATOR and THE ABYSS, sentimental comedies like FATHER OF THE BRIDE and THE PARENT TRAP, to recent successes like FORREST GUMP, CONTACT, and MOUSE TRAP, Silvestri’s music has…
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John Frizzell on Teaching Mrs. Tingle
As you hear the impish notes playfully spring forth in the film TEACHING MRS. TINGLE, a realization of how intricately a film can be scored comes to mind.Here a first time director collaborates with a film composer who ‘s challenged once again to score a him in a genre he has never dealt with before. How do you score “A Wicked Film?” For composer…
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David Newman Swims Out to Sea
The story has Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon out on a ship posing as dance instructors, so there’s a lot of existing music. I guess the challenge, aside from the normal challenge of finding themes that help delineate characters is to deal with all the songs and music that were there. These kind of scores end up having a lot of different kinds of…
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Julius Caesar
In my previous articles about the music of QUO VADIS, IVANHOE and PLYMOUTH ADVENTURE I have expanded my theories about music written for historical films. Shakespeare’s JULIUS CAESAR presented new problems. If it had been merely a historical film about Julius Caesar I would have undoubtedly tried a reconstruction…
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Pierre Jansen
I started studying piano and harmony at the Conservatoire de Roubaix, and then went to Brussels where I studied with Henry Sury, a composer who had previously scored many films and documentaries. I immediately thought that writing film scores was very interesting, since it could give me the possibility to hear at once what I had written and…
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Film Music in Brazil
Of South American countries, Brazil is probably the most visible cinematically, with a large and prolific film industry. Likewise, its efforts in film music are also noteworthy and predominant among South American film making countries. A recent issue of the Brazilian magazine Film Cultura discussed the state of the art of film music in Brazil…
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Film Music in Holland
The Netherlands (also called Holland). Population: 14.5 million. Location: Squeezed in between Belgium, Germany and the North Sea. Annual production of feature films: 10-15. However: a leading European country in the production of documentary films, including those of Joris Ivens and Bert Haanstra. The interest in film music is limited in Holland…
Soundtrack! 