Oh yeah, it’s a wonderful soundtrack for an amazing movie. Likely one of Horner’s best. I can’t even remember now where I drew the parallel between that one particular song and Carmina Burana. Maybe the liner notes of the CD or something…
I agree that it is probably Horner’s best score. And if you listen to the Orff and the scene you excerpted side be side, it is pretty remarkable how much they line up. That track was my first exposure to the film composer’s lament, the phenomenon known as “temp love,” when the director/producer/whoever just cannot accept anything other than the pre-existing musical pieces that were dropped in over the images during months of editing. Sometimes composers will write something (almost overnight) that they think will surely be dismissed as too much of a blatant ripoff of the temp track, and the director will say, “No! Make it more like what we already had in there!”
Under the circumstances, I think Horner did a great job of pleasing the director while simultaneously doing his own thing, and composing a cue that really captured the heroism of the characters.
I think my all timer here is the Aquarium movement of Camille Saint-Saenz’ Carnival of the Animals.
Terrence Malick used it as his theme for Days of Heaven, and the dreamy, woozy, other-worldliness of this piece of music makes it maybe my favorite piece of classical music ever:
But then…Malick had commissioned Ennio Morricone to do the rest of the soundtrack from Days of Heaven, so Morricone took this piece from Saint Saenz and built motifs and callbacks to it in his original soundtrack score, which is, frankly amazing because it gets you amazing pieces of music like this:
How about how awesome misfit 1970s sports movies used classical themes?
The Bad News Bears used Bizet’s Carmen throughout.
Breaking Away used Mendelssohn and Rossini extensively.
Wow, I didn’t know any of that. Thanks for the insight!
Does “classical” music have to be old? If not, Bill Conti - “Gonna Fly Now.” Rocky.
Better yet, “Going the Distance.” Also, Rocky.
“Classical” can mean various things. It sometimes refers to the era of music roughly between the death of J.S. Bach and the death of Beethoven, in which a style of music exemplified by the works of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart predominated (or at least emerged triumphant in the eyes and taste of posterity).
More broadly, it refers to the European art music tradition that goes back as far as the late Renaissance and has never really stopped (there are still composers working in this tradition today). In this sense it’s less about how old the music is (e.g. Henryk Gorecki’s 3rd symphony sounds pretty ‘classical’ but was composed in 1976) than about the instruments used and the aesthetic/formal tradition to which it belongs. That said, of course, there is always lots of crossover, and plenty of compositions (e.g. Rhapsody in Blue) can be said to belong to more than one tradition.
Some movie scores try very hard to sound like ‘classical’ symphonic music, but something like “Gonna Fly Now” seems to me more hybrid in style. It nods quite a bit in the direction of funk and rock. On the other hand it also makes extensive use of strings… but then so did a lot of '70s disco (there’s that genre crossover again).
tl/dr: It depends on what you mean by “classical”. I take from the thread title that in this case we are mainly talking not about original movie scores but about pre-existing music that was co-opted by a film such that you associate the two very strongly.
Which I find mildly irritating because the Classical period is my least favorite era of “classical” music. Give me Baroque or Romantic any day.
It’s a bit like lumping together Wes Montgomery, The Beatles, and Slayer because they all used electric guitars.
Mozart is the source, my friend
(Mind you, I adore Baroque and Romantic too. The Goldberg Variations is on my short list of ‘greatest artwork evar’ and I listen to Chopin constantly.)
I appreciate him, but with a few exceptions don’t actually enjoy his music. I just wish he’d been born in a more interesting time!
FWIW, the older I get, the more I like him. I will leave the final word to Wolfie.
That’s a fair point. I won’t give up on him entirely.
Partially it’s my great preference for minor key works, and the piano as my primary instrument. Major key pieces from that period just do absolutely nothing for me. The exception to that being Beethoven’s later works, but by that point he wasn’t really working in the Classical style any longer.
That said, I do adore some of the Romantic period takes on the Classical style.
Alkan’s Concerto for Solo Piano is easily in my top five musical works of all time.
Even if you only like minor key music, that still leaves you (from Mozart) the D Minor and C Minor concerti, major chunks of Don Giovanni, the A Minor and C Minor sonatas, the Mass in C Minor, the slow movements to the E Flat concerto K.271, E Flat concerto K.482, and A Major concerto K.488, the two (big and little) G Minor symphonies, and various other compositions.
On the major key side, if this or this do absolutely nothing for you, I can only say… agree to disagree!
I do get it when a composer doesn’t click, though. I’ve been trying to dig Haydn for 20+ years and he still hasn’t taken.
Oh, I do love the minor key pieces you mention–those are my exceptions! :)
Again, I have the utmost appreciation for the works, and play a few of his sonatas myself. But that era of music often just doesn’t resonate with me on an emotional level.
I’m learning his C Major sonata K.310 and F Major Sonata K.332 myself. Playing them has certainly deepened my admiration for the fellow.
I find Alkan to be a fascinating character, by the way, but his music has not yet grabbed me to the extent that his more famous contemporaries (particularly Chopin and Liszt) have. I come back to him from time to time, though.
As might be hinted by my avatar, I adore Alkan! Maybe not the single greatest composer in history, but he absolutely deserves greater attention and recognition than he has received.
I’ll be lucky if I can ever tackle two of his etudes, but his miniatures are some of my favorite works to play.
Have you listened to Haydn’s Schöpfung yet, Gordon? It’s tremendous, if only for the overture (which is Haydn’s depiction of the chaos before the universe began and was written about 200 years before its time in several spots), and a bit later on when god creates C Major (not that I did not capitalize god but did capitalize C Major).
This recording is my fave:
I’ve been reading about The Creation and The Seasons for ages but never gave them a proper listen. Those massive oratorios always intimidate me a bit, but it’s certainly something I should try.
Gordon, you will know in precisely 8 minutes and 10 seconds whether or not The Creation is your jam. And you don’t even have to know much German. The first few lines of Genesis until C Major…erm, I mean LIGHT is created.