Eureka moment (when you realized you did or did not want to do something or that you should do something differently, etc.): My first TV show didn’t call to be scored to picture, but I chose to do it to get my chops up. I could’ve just written a lot of music for them to cut into the show as they wanted, but knowing the physical and mental stamina that it would take to do it, I still convinced myself to do it. This was 40 minutes of music a week and I could’ve made just as much money and slept a lot more if I hadn’t done it that way. But it better prepared me for my future and made my next opportunities much more manageable.
Next move: To implement the strategies we’ve been working on here at Daddy Jack Music. We’re all excited to see our five year plan take flight. The team here has designed Daddy Jack’s to be a modern day Brill Building, a place where writers and composers can express themselves, and to implement a new model based way more out the enjoyment of people collaborating that just outputting a bunch of music.
Visit Daddy Jack Music to find out more about projects Brett has worked on and keep up with current events at Daddy Jack.
IronMan2 Score features Rage guitarist Tom Morello
A few weeks ago, Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello confirmed that he was contributing your score for Iron Man 2. Could you give us a little more insight as to his involvement with this project? How has your experience working with Morello been?
"Having been a fan of Tom’s for quite awhile, I was thrilled when our director Jon Favreau asked me if I’d consider having Tom play on the soundtrack. My answer was a very enthusiastic “yes” and was thrilled with what Tom brought to the score. Tom and I worked closely together as Tom added his unique guitar sound to the score. I would write the pieces and then Tom and I would work on guitar parts. I’m thrilled with the outcome as Tom’s personality shines through."
You wrote over 120 minutes of music for Iron Man 2. What can we expect to hear from the movie’s score? Could there possibly be a darker tone to it, or will it retain a similar upbeat feel heard in the first film?
"The score to this film is quite different in many ways from the last score. This score while employing much guitar and more contemporary elements, it is also much bigger and darker in tone and scope. This film has a much deeper story arc to it than the first, and I think fans will be quite pleased by both the film and the score. We’ve included a large choir for some of the more dramatic moments even singing in Russian to capture the dark Russian soul of Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke)."
What's That Song? Commercial Edition: The story behind the new Target ad
That song: “Birds are sending down a message / flower blossoms overhead”… Dug up from the archives of some shoe-gazey, nature-whispering Brit-pop act, decades and continents away? Oh contraire, commercial-music friend. The track—or more accurately, stand-alone 30-second snippet—was made to order for Target by a Minneapolis production house, Modern Music.
We called MM’s headquarters in Minnesota to find out more, and learned that this isn’t the first time that one of their made-for-TV jingles spurred a raft of Yahoo! Answers queries. Their jazzy recast of The Sound of Music classic “16 Going On 17″ for a State Farm ad (streamable here) apparently inspired enoughdemand to instigate a full-length free download of the song on State Farm’s betterteendriving.com.
As for the still-untitled Liberty of London track, composed in-house by MM employees John Hermanson and Eric Fawcett, creative director Daron Walker tells EW, “We gathered a bunch of music we thought was interesting just for reference, and the first thing we did for it was this kind of glitchy slower disco, but it was just too trippy with the visuals. And then Eric, who’s British, was like, ‘It should be more British!’ We’re working on [recording] a full-length version, but we don’t actually own the song, Target does.”
Randy Newman talks about 'The Princess and the Frog' Songs
Q: Randy, how different is it to write for a movie?
RN: The primary difference in a song for a film is that it's supposed to do something to put the story forward a little bit. The story doesn't stop for the song. You can tell something about someone or describe some action that is to come.
Q: What was the most important thing to get across?
RN: Different things for different scenes. No one over-arching thing. It wasn't so much what I did, but it has to be natural for people to break into song. Or animals [LAUGHS] to sing. Come to think of it, it's also got to be natural for an alligator to play the trumpet. And that was done for me, in a sense. I wrote the songs, and I think it certainly doesn't seem artificial that those songs are where they are. I mean, like the songs or not, I don't think they're inappropriate to the setting or the story.
British composer performs ‘The Piano’ tracks at fashion show
The video on the left is probably my favorite piece of film music ever!! Good to hear Michael Nyman is still performing this amazing score (and has sold 3 million copies!)
British composer Michael Nyman has performed tracks from his score to the Oscar-winning movie "The Piano" during a fashion show by top Spanish designer Adolfo Dominguez. The 65-year-old played the tracks on a piano during the 12-minute-long showcase of Dominguez’s 1980s-inspired fall/winter collection recently in Madrid which was heavy on blue and black fabrics. Nyman’s melancholic score to "The Piano", which told the tale of a mute pianist and her daughter in a New Zealand backwater in the mid-19th century, has sold over three million copies since the movie was released in 1993.
Radiohead guitarist and avant garde classical composer Jonny Greenwood is lending his magical music to the cinema in Tran Anh Hung’s forthcoming film Norwegian Wood.
The film, based on the book by Haruki Murakami, is a coming-of-age story told in flashback, spurred by the sitar strings of The Beatles’ title song. As we reported last year, the film stars Rinko Kikuchi and Kenichi Matsuyama. Like Greenwood’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’sThere Will Be Blood, this piece will also be based on a previously existing work, a composition called Dogwood which the musician recently wrote for the BBC Concert Orchestra. Greenwood debuted the score last month at Maida Vale Studios, but for those of us who couldn’t make it, tune in to BBC Radio 3 on Friday, March 19th at 2 PM to hear the score for yourself. [Source The Playlist]
Is the World's Most Intelligent Music Composing Software as Creative as Bach?
If the thought of a Wiimote-controlled robot drum circle sounded vaguely disturbing, prepare yourself. This month, composer and software developer David Cope is set to unveil the first musical works composed by his latest creation, dubbed "Emily Howell." Emily is a piece of software that many see as the most advanced artificially intelligent music composer. The program is already stirring fierce debate over its supposed ability to generate creations indistinguishable from those composed by the masters--Mozart, Bach and the gang. Miller-McClune went in-depth with this strange and fascinating tale of creativity in the age of artificial intelligence.
Cope first turned to artificial intelligence after experiencing a bad case of composer's block that prevented him from finishing an opera commission. That led to the creation of a program called Emmy, which could effortlessly replicate the style of Bach or other great human composers, cranking out more compositions in one afternoon than any human could produce in one lifetime.
Emmy infuriated critics and music-lovers alike, especially when Cope asked an audience to distinguish between real Bach and Emmy-composed Bach and few could hear the difference. But many researchers hailed Emmy, and some even suggested that it had successfully passed some level of the "Turing Test," because people couldn't differentiate its artificial work from that of humans.
The title is pretty self explanatory. Iconic music from iconic games. We all know em, and we all love (or hate) em. There have been so many amazing games with fantastic music over the years that this list was pretty hard to come up with. There are, of course, some no-brainers; but there are also more than a couple of spots that many of you might disagree with. There will be some inclusions and omissions that will no doubt spark debate and many calls of “hey jackass, you don’t know a damn thing about iconic video game music” from you lovely lovely readers.
I can only hope that your love for me is not ruined by any difference of opinions we may have. Especially you sexy console jockeys who may have missed a couple of the classics which never made it to a Nintendo, XBox or Playstation.
