OK but gay country music would go so hard though. Ladies singing about the girl in cut offs sitting next to them in their truck, dudes singing about showing off for the farmers son, bi people singing about how the county fair is hot but it ain’t cause of the heat. 90% of country music could be fixed if we removed the heteronormativity
The other 10% of country music is fine just the way it is cause that’s the 10% that’s women singing about killing their abusive husbands.
Most composers spend just 10-12ish weeks working on a film’s music. John Williams spent around 14 weeks on each Star Wars movie, 40ish weeks total for the whole OT……but composing the LOTR trilogy’s soundtrack took four years
The vocals you hear in the soundtrack are usually in one of Tolkien’s languages (esp. Elvish). The English translations of the lyrics are all poems, or quotes from the book, or occasionally even quotes from other parts of the films that are relevant to the scene
When there were no finished scenes for him to score, Howard Shore would develop musical themes inspired by the scripts or passages from the book. That’s how he got all Middle-Earth locations have their own unique sound: he was able to compose drafts of “what Gondor would sound like” and “what Lorien would sound like” long before any scenes in those places were filmed
Shore has said his favorite parts to score were always the little heartfelt moments between Frodo and Sam
Shore wrote over 100 unique leitmotifs/musical themes to represent specific people, places, and things in Middle Earth (over 160 if you count The Hobbit)
The ones we all talk about are the Fellowship theme, the main Shire Theme, and the themes for places like Gondor, Mordor, Rohan, and Rivendell…but a lot of the more subtle ones get overlooked and underappreciated
Like Aragorn’s theme. It’s a lot less “obvious” than the others because, like Aragorn himself, it adapts to take on the color of whatever place Aragorn is in: it’s played on dramatic broody stringed instruments in Bree, on horns in battle scenes, softly on the flute with Arwen in Rivendell….
Eowyn has not just one but three different leitmotifs to represent her
Gollum and Smeagol both have their own leitmotifs! Whose theme music is playing in the scene can often tell you whether the Gollum or Smeagol side is “winning” at the moment
The melody for Gollum’s Song in the end credits of the The Two Towers is the Smeagol and Gollum themes smushed together (it’s Symbolic)
And then there’s the really obscure ones. Like there’s a melody that plays at Boromir’s death that shows up again in ROTK in scenes that foreshadow a major death or loss
Shore wanted the theme music to grow alongside the characters– so that as the characters changed, their theme music would change with them.
You can hear that most clearly in the Shire theme. Like the hobbits, it goes through A Lot
Like compare the childish lil penny whistle theme you hear in Concerning Hobbits/the beginning of FOTR with (throws a dart at random Beautiful Tragic Hobbit Character Development scene because there WAY TOO MANY to choose from) the scene when Pippin finds Merry on the battlefield, where you hear a kind of shattered and broken but more mature version of that same theme in the background
I could write you a book on how much I love the way the Shire theme grows across the course of these films
Unlike the hero’s themes, which constantly change and grow, the villain’s themes (The One Ring theme, the Isengard theme, etc) remain basically the same from the very beginning of FOTR to the end of ROTK. Shore said this was an intentional choice: to emphasize that evil is static, while good is capable of change
Shore has said that between all the music that made into the movies and the music that didn’t, he composed enough for “a month of continuous listening”……..where can I sign up
It even gives you a description of the scene so you know when/where you heard it
Look!
you guys probably already knew about this but yeahh. I’m just really excited because I was wondering what that song was when Mickey walks into the club
Fun Story: My director kept telling me and my tenor sax buddy to play softer. No matter what we did, it wasn’t soft enough for him. So getting frustrated, I told my buddy “Dont play this time. Just fake it”
Our Band Director then informed us we sounded perfect.
To my readers: “p” means quiet, “pp” means really quiet. I’ve never seen “pppp” before haha.
On the contrast, “f” means loud, and “ffff” probably means so loud you go unconscious.
I had ffff in a piece once and my conductor told me to play as loudly as physically possible without falling off my chair…
Me and my trombone buddies had “ffff” and he sat next to me and played so hard that he fell out of his chair.
The lengths we go for music.
Okay yeah so I play the bass clarinet and the amount of air you have to move and the stiffness of the reed means it only has two settings and that is loud and louder, with an optional LOUDEST that includes a 50% probability of HORRIBLE CROAKING NOISE which is the bass equivalent of the ubiquitous clarinet shriek.
One day, when I was in concert band in high school, we got a new piece handed out for the first time, and there was a strange little commotion back in the tuba section — whispering, and pointing at something in the music, and swatting at each other’s hands all shhh don’t call attention to it. And although they did attract the attention of basically everyone else in the band, they managed to avoid being noticed by the band director, who gave us a few minutes to look over our parts and then said, “All right, let’s run through it up to section A.”
And here we are, cheerfully playing along, sounding reasonably competent — but everyone, when they have the attention to spare, is keeping an eye on the tuba players. They don’t come in for the first eight measures or so, and then when they do come in, what we see is:
[stifled giggling]
[reeeeeeally deep breath]
[COLOSSAL FOGHORN NOISE]
The entire band stops dead, in the cacophonous kind of way that a band stops when it hasn’t actually been cued to stop. The band director doesn’t even say anything, just looks straight back at the tubas and makes a helpless sort of why gesture.
In unison, the tuba players defend themselves: “THERE WERE FOUR F’S.”
FFFF is not really a rational dynamic marking for any instrument, but for the love of all that is holy why would you put it in a tuba part.
This is the best band post
Everyone else go home
Oh man, so I play trombone, and we got this piece called Florentiner Marsch by Julius Fucik, and we saw this
which is 8 fortes. We were shocked until,
that is 24 fortes who the fuck does that
Who does that?
This guy. Take a good look – that is the moustache of a man with nothing to lose.
Julius IdontgivaFucik
More like Julius Fuckit
Pyrozod’s tags for this were too hilarious not to share
The Netherlands democratically puts a list of the 2000 best songs together every year around New Year’s and the biggest mystery every time is whether Bohemian Rhapsody wins again
i’m serious, if it doesn’t win, it’s second place
every winner before 2005 is Bohemian Rhapsody as well
why arent we talking about the constant presence of hotel california
Sometimes I just start singing and my mom joins in
Whoa…
#don’t trust this #they’re probably sirens
These two are singing “O magnum mysterium” by Tomas Luis De Victoria! It’s a very pretty piece from the renaissance that has a lot of different voice parts singing totally different melodies that mesh well together. I sung tenor for a song of his as well. It sounds ethereal in cathedrals and bathrooms alike my opinion. Its the room’s ability to bounce sound and make it resonate, giving it it’s “mermaid siren” like quality. It sounds great. Congratulations, you both! Sounds very pretty and seems like a fun time to clean with things like that.
yes its back on my dash
god lol
I always reblog the bathroom sirens ❤
Welcome to why I sing in stairwells and bathrooms. IT SOUNDS SO MUCH BETTER.
Remember the last time the FCC nearly killed net neutrality?
Tumblr had this nice big banner at the top of your dashboard alerting any active user about the problem. Guess what has changed since then? Verizon, one of the companies gunning for the death of net neutrality owns yahoo who in turn own Tumblr. Spread the word, tell everyone you can: battleforthenet.com tag posts you see about net neutrality with popular tags so the news spreads.
Not gonna lie, one of my favorite parts about writing urban fantasy is determining how and where the fantasy meshes in with reality.
Like, I’m not saying Freddie Mercury WAS a siren, but have you ever heard anyone NOT sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody?
I rest my case.
It is a six-minute song with incomprehensible lyrics that seem to have something to do with murder and demons, with five sections that are completely different stylistically but no chorus.
It was number one on the the UK singles charts twice, 15 years apart, and is by many measures one of the most popular, or the most popular, single of all time.
Yeah, there’s magic involved.
And an absurdly broad swathe of people know it. I have no memory of learning it, do you?
andtheytoldustotellyouhello 