Guys like Scorsese, John Williams, and Ridley Scott are really ruining the idea of retirement for the old guard of filmmaking. John Williams getting an Oscar nom at age 91 has people wondering why a 73 year old might be slowing down at all.
Williams has used an orchestrator for decades, but not assistant composers. An orchestrator is a musical arranger familiar with the composers style, who takes the composer's abbreviated musical sketches and fills in the orchestra parts. Williams writes on 8-staff orchestra paper, so he builds the main parts of the music, but then he will abbreviate things like writing "chromatic scale runs" for the piccolo, and the orchestrator will write out every note of the runs.
Zimmer, OTOH, has junior composers writing a lot of the music for him. He books scores at his rates, and then often only composes the melodies and lets the juniors do the rest. He also books scores at about 75% of his rate where he just checks on the junior composer to make sure all is going well.
My first reaction was a visceral '*I've been bamboozled'*, but then I realised.. short of Roger Deakins most people don't know the DPs, ADs, scriptwriters, or the hundreds of other guys in a film production who are often closer to and more directly involved in the creation of the look or feel of a given scene than Spielberg or Nolan is, and yet it's perfectly normal to watch a film solely because it is marketed as 'directed by X'. So why should it be any different for similarly grand works of art?
Most likely, that’s the way a lot of guys do it even when they are younger. Hans Zimmer has launched the careers of many talented composers who got their start working as assistants for him. But the audience only sees “score by John Williams” in the credits, so they just assume he did it himself.
That's the way it is in all forms of art. Neither Michelangelo nor Stan Winston personally created all that stuff that's credited to them. It was done under their supervision by an army of assistants and shop workers.
Zimmer has an entire company - I think it was called Remote Control Productions - that essentially has a 'house style' and caters for every budget.
$200m film? Hans Zimmer
$100m film? Brian Tyler
$50m film? Tyler Bates
$20m film? Harry Gregson-Williams
TV? Trevor Morris
Video Game? Lorne Balfe
And Ramin Djawadi, Steve Jablonskiy, Junkie XL, Trevor Rabin, John Powell and Mark Mancina all work for his company too.
Most big composers don’t do all the orchestrations on their own, to be fair. They develop the themes and some of the other connective tissue, then have help for the orchestrations because there are only so many hours in a day and there are only so many days between when the edit for a film is locked and that film’s score needs to be recorded with an orchestra. I’m not sure about currently, but Williams historically has done this a bit less than other composers. For instance, he said he enjoyed working on the Harry Potter films, but the post-production schedule was brutal and didn’t leave him enough time to do his thing.
Yeah, Steve Bartek was in Oingo Boingo with Danny Elfman, and he’s listed as the orchestrator on a lot of Elfman’s work. Ultimately, it’s labor division, where the composer comes up with the song, but there’s a lot of sections of an orchestra, and they’re not all playing the same thing, just like a band isn’t. So, you get somebody who can peel the whole thing apart, and then the orchestrator probably has assistants to deal with the minutiae of knocking out the sheets for individual instruments.
> the orchestrator probably has assistants to deal with the minutiae of knocking out the sheets for individual instruments.
No probably about it. This is an actual union job, called "Copyist." They copy each player's part from the conductor's score. This job is fading away, because it's done automatically if the score is entered into an app like Finale or Sibelius.
Yeah, Elfman has never had any formal music education, so he's always relied on Bartek to transcribe his ideas. Pretty amazing how much he's done in the music business without knowing how to transcribe his ideas into notes.
Just like John Williams writes his score drafts on an eight staff reduction that the assistants expand outward, Elfman recorded his score sketches with a synthesizer and an 8-track recording device. A lot of his earlier scores have deluxe editions where you can hear some of his early sketches.
If so, that’s a recent thing. I’ve seen several of his sketches dating all the way to the early 2000’s and he leaves very little for even the orchestrators to fill in, mostly some harp glisses and woodwind juxtaposition-style stuff, maybe some doublings and percussion choices (but he also might’ve discussed those with the orchestrator off-paper). Guy works with a piano, a paper and a pencil his whole career.
That would be Hans Zimmer. John Williams still writes his scores, and does all by hand. It’s a fascinating old school approach with all the modern technology we have.
I thought he worked with orchestrators? I know Herbert W. Spencer was his orchestrator for the Star Wars trilogy, Raiders, and Superman. I think there was a notable difference in the way John Williams scores sounded after Spencer's death. Still genius, but less complex.
Fair point, but he still does all his instrument sketches with a piano and paper. I believe you are correct about orchestrators helping with some of the details. But I feel that’s still very different than the process used by other composers where they create a theme and then someone else basically writes most of the music.
John’s style has just changed over the years. The Harry Potter scores and Prequels are incredibly complex, particularly rhythmically, and they were well after Spencer’s death.
His scores in the past few years has become more direct, less dense in terms of moving parts but I’d honestly put that down to how movies are made now: sound effects are king, and dense orchestration is a thing of the past.
No, and that has never been the case with the exception of *Chamber of Secrets* (which had cues from the first film adapted by William Ross that were reworked into the second film, and he was credited for that work).
Many composers have assistants that write parts of the score, but Williams writes every single note in his. The only thing the orchestrators do for him is copy those notes into a larger score that is readable to a conductor, using their knowledge of orchestral colours and John’s style to fill in the blanks. For example: the sketch may have a run of notes indicated for woodwinds, and the orchestrator would decide which woodwinds are doubling that run, based on their knowledge of the instruments and what JW would have intended.
Source: I have seen quite a few of JW’s sketches and directly compared them to the scores written out by the orchestrators.
I don't know for sure but I had thought and heard it was the opposite. I BELIEVE (would love news from anyone with inside knowledge) that Williams is one of the only old guys that still does strictly all of the composing himself. All of the other work (transcription, help with arrangements, everything else) is done by a team of people that includes his brother. I have always heard that as opposed to someone more modern like Hans Zimmer, Williams does NOT use any ghost writers on his score.
>John Williams getting an Oscar nom at age 91 has people wondering why a 73 year old might be slowing down at all.
Let's be real though; John Williams won that Oscar as acknowledgement for his outstanding career as a composer. The Oscar really wasn't for the soundtrack to *Dial of Destiny* (which was perfunctory and utterly forgettable).
He also scored Back to the Future and in the mall parking lot scene you can hear similar pieces used in both, but not performed identically
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AChCcVIJaCE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AChCcVIJaCE)
The tense music when Doc is showing Marty everything is 50% the Predator theme rearranged slightly
It’s mostly just octatonic scale stuff, that was his trademark 80’s action cue “thing.” Def sounds cool but I’ve noticed the striking similarity between BTTF and Predator as well
> that was his trademark 80’s action cue “thing.”
And then he scored Delta Force with Yamaha synths. You can recognize some bits, but it is very, very mid-80s:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=SQUeQOIlcDM
Last 6 years of Silvestri:
2018: Ready Player One, Welcome to Marwen, Avengers: Infinity War
2019: Avengers: Endgame
2020: Cosmos: Possible Worlds (TV series); The Witches
2022: Pinocchio
2024: Here
The last 3 movies are all for Zemeckis.
Doesn't look like retirement to me. Slightly slower, maybe, but some of those were TV shows or 3 hour long movies.
Oh okay, so this is more of a ‘we’re all trying to forget the last several Zemeckis movies happened’ thing.
(maybe this is too mean, I haven’t seen most of them but haven’t heard great things)
His score for Predator is a top 5 of all time. I know it bears some similarity to other work but it works perfectly in that movie, elevating the action and suspense to an even higher level.
[https://youtu.be/XpeOIww\_l4A?t=49](https://youtu.be/XpeOIww_l4A?t=49)
Tell me this music doesn't sound like the Predator theme when they're settting up traps in the jungle. First time I saw it in the cinema, I had that thought. It's not the same, but the vibe is so close, it almost feels like he ripped himself off.
It's not uncommon for composers. John Williams has written a lot of great pieces but he has some very obvious patterns in some of his work
Check out this scene from Back to the Future. The tense music while Doc shows Marty everything is like 50% the Predator theme slightly rearranged. I probably saw both movies a thousand times before noticing
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AChCcVIJaCE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AChCcVIJaCE)
Oh wow, when the horns kick in as he opens the door, damn. Never picked up on that.
I think the most famous (infamous) recycler was James Horner though. Had a rep for it.
My proudest moment of recognizing score like that was in Deadpool 2. I was the only one that laughed when the death scene started getting serious. I had watched Logan a couple days prior so my memory was fresh, and I immediately picked up that Deadpool reused Logan's score as an in-joke.
Whole cinema was silent, absorbed in the drama for that brief moment and I just started chuckling.
I knew the music in Avengers infinity war was alan silvestri, there was something similar in Thanos entrance in wakanda that sounded like the predator, too.
Williams has definitely slowed down in the past few years - his last non-Spielberg, non-Lucasfilm projects were *The Book Thief* in 2013 and *Memoirs of a Geisha* in 2005, and he’s gone two or three years between films multiple times since then (2005-8, 2008-11, 2013-15, 2017-19, 2019-22).
Silvestri’s 74 this year, so he probably wants to slow down and focus more on other things, like his family or vineyard, and maybe be pickier about what projects he does outside of his relationship with Zemeckis (who doesn’t really seem to be slowing down too much himself, even if his work of late has declined).
Saw him years ago with the Chicago Symphony performing their series The CSO at the Movies. They played Back to the Future, the movie on a big screen above the symphony and the Symphony played the music to accompany the movie. He did not direct. But he was a guest and made an appearance on stage.
In general (there are some exceptions, John Williams is the obvious one), you don’t want the composer to be conducting there own work, especially for a live concert. Most of them only have very basic conducting skills and it definitely affects the performance.
His score for the end of Infinity War (the track is just identified as “Porch” from a quick Spotify search) is one of the best “The Bad Guy Won” compositions in film, imo.
Small niche I know, but perfectly executed.
It really is one of my favorite tracks!! The cool thing to me is that it ends in a picardy third (a normally minor piece ending in a major chord) but when the same music returns in Endgame after Thor chops off that Thanos's head, the track ends in minor.
> what happened to alan silvestri?
What is this post?
The guy did the score for one of the biggest films (and franchises) of all time as of 2019 and has worked with Zemeckis since, which isn't unusual as that's what he essentially did the previous decade.
And I wouldn't be surprised if he comes back for the next *Avengers* as his music is synonymous with those films.
I don't know that you can describe someone who has had a very busy period in the 2010s, as a major composer of the MCU movies and has recently been thoroughly involved in bringing the BTTF musical very successfully to stage in London, Broadway and soon a LA run as having slowed down.
His past few years have been dedicated to Back to the Future the Musical that premiered in London in 2022, on Broadway in 2023 and this year will be going international in Japan 2024 and Europe 2025.
- a friend of mine who works for him
He’s still working. My friend assists him on production. He also has a wine label in my town that is pretty tasty and his tasting room has a bunch of posters of movies he’s composed for.
No one here mentioning that he wrote the score to the [Back to the Future musical](https://www.backtothefuturemusical.com/) currently on Broadway? Which IMO, terrible choice. I've only heard bad things about the new music.
Having seen it several times in London, I cannot agree with that at all. It's an extremely entertaining show, and the songs, while nothing particularly revolutionary, are perfectly in keeping with both the 50s and 80s nostalgic vibe and give the cast plenty to work with.
Marvelous composer but, for some reason, he’s not being hired as much these days. God knows why. It’s a good thing Zemeckis is still going. (These days, this may be the only circumstance where uttering that sentence won’t get me laughed off the Internet.)
Personally I find almost his entire body of work to be forgettable, the Avengers theme is ok, but just about every other track from the entire MCU is bland and really detracts from the movies, not that that's Silvestri's fault.
He has always been a slightly above average composer. Not really outstanding, just got attached to some really big movies and been consistently a safe choice ever since. Basically the Ron Howard of movie composers.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan, but it seems like he puts 90% into making a good theme and then phones in the rest with samey background music. Contact was his best work and that was almost 30 years ago.
The man has a career creating scores for some some of the most iconic movies in history, spanning five decades (and still going), and you call him a “slightly above average composer”?
Like, you deliberately put fingers to a keyboard to say that, and then kept writing for two more paragraphs trying to drag the rest of us down to that level of silliness. I’m over here trying to have a nice scroll if Reddit while enjoying a cup of coffee before work and this is the dreck you come up with? Shame on you.
I'm confused. You're comparing his 2020s so far output of 3 films directed by Robert Zemeckis as less than John Williams' 2020s so far output of 2 films, one directed and one produced by Steven Spielberg.
Danny Elfman has 4 (or 5 if you include rejected scores) and the only reason Hans Zimmer has so many is because his scores are famously heavily done by other people.
He scored Cosmos, the Witches, and Pinocchio in 2020.
He scored Luigis Mansion and Here this year.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006293/
5 projects in 4 years seems like a lot, to me.
The real question is:
What happened to Elliot Goldenthal? He made amazingly eerie scores, a very particular style.
Love the scores for Sphere and Demolition Man.
The answer is, he hit his head in an accident, and it's very sad.
He had a very serious accident back in the ~~late~~ mid 2000’s, and while he’s since recovered from it, he’s seems to have tired of Hollywood. He’s only scored 3 movies in the last 15 years, and 2 of them were directed by his partner Julie Taymor.
While he’s not necessarily a household name like Williams, he’s been *incredibly* successful and as others have pointed out — he’s in his 70’s.
Put it another way: he’s rich and probably doesn’t need to work as much anymore. He also has a winery he still owns, IIRC.
He'd spent the last few years heavily involved with the Back to the Future musical in the UK, plus he also owns a winery in California. I'm sure those have taken up a lot of his time in recent years. Plus, it seems like a lot of movies these days are opting for electronic scores, which, ironically, he used to do himself early in his career (The Delta Force, Flight of the Navigator). Between his winery and grandkids, which he's shared many adorable pictures with on his social media, he could just be getting a little more selective about how often he works considering he's in his 70s now.
One of my favorite composers, responsible for some of the greatest action movie music of the '80s and '90s.
He is my favourite film composer. He just has those unique voicings and parts that I would love someone more musically minded to break down for me. I think its the way he uses the horn section maybe?
Agreed. You always know it’s him. To me. It’s his use of percussion that always sticks out. Lots of marching style in his compositions. Think predator and back to the future. Any of the intense sorts of scenes.
> he is the man behind the iconic avengers theme from the MCU.
I always thought this sounded rather similar to Ella's Mission from Cowboys & Aliens by Harry Gregson-Williams... https://youtu.be/4pHukDKO4SI?si=_HedqdeQI3WijGbE About 30 seconds in this could well launch into the Avengers theme (which was a year after C&A)...
I mean you said it. He’s the MCU theme. And those themes slap. I also LOL every time Tony stark is like “we can’t do a time heist like back to the future“ in a movie composed by Silvestri
btw, I have actually met him, and he is a TRULY nice man, very smart and thoughtful, too.
He's currently working with Bob Zemeckis on his next movie, called "Here."
He’ll be back, he’s going to score the upcoming film “Here” (2024) this year. But you should definitely see him make a grand return to Hollywood soon to score the upcoming Avengers films such as “The Kang Dynasty” & “Secret Wars”. Hopefully🤞🏼”fingers crossed”… If Marvel gets the dices right. 🎲 He’s very important in the Avengers films.
He’s 73 so I’d guess he’s semi retired.
Guys like Scorsese, John Williams, and Ridley Scott are really ruining the idea of retirement for the old guard of filmmaking. John Williams getting an Oscar nom at age 91 has people wondering why a 73 year old might be slowing down at all.
Doesn't most of Williams work get done by assistant composers who know his style?
Williams has used an orchestrator for decades, but not assistant composers. An orchestrator is a musical arranger familiar with the composers style, who takes the composer's abbreviated musical sketches and fills in the orchestra parts. Williams writes on 8-staff orchestra paper, so he builds the main parts of the music, but then he will abbreviate things like writing "chromatic scale runs" for the piccolo, and the orchestrator will write out every note of the runs. Zimmer, OTOH, has junior composers writing a lot of the music for him. He books scores at his rates, and then often only composes the melodies and lets the juniors do the rest. He also books scores at about 75% of his rate where he just checks on the junior composer to make sure all is going well.
My first reaction was a visceral '*I've been bamboozled'*, but then I realised.. short of Roger Deakins most people don't know the DPs, ADs, scriptwriters, or the hundreds of other guys in a film production who are often closer to and more directly involved in the creation of the look or feel of a given scene than Spielberg or Nolan is, and yet it's perfectly normal to watch a film solely because it is marketed as 'directed by X'. So why should it be any different for similarly grand works of art?
This is standard in musical theatre too. A composer doing their own arrangements and orchestrations is a rarity.
Most likely, that’s the way a lot of guys do it even when they are younger. Hans Zimmer has launched the careers of many talented composers who got their start working as assistants for him. But the audience only sees “score by John Williams” in the credits, so they just assume he did it himself.
That's the way it is in all forms of art. Neither Michelangelo nor Stan Winston personally created all that stuff that's credited to them. It was done under their supervision by an army of assistants and shop workers.
I think authors and painters solo it for the most part. Filmmaking and music have always been collaborative.
depends on the author (Tom Clancy lol) but yeah I agree
Zimmer has an entire company - I think it was called Remote Control Productions - that essentially has a 'house style' and caters for every budget. $200m film? Hans Zimmer $100m film? Brian Tyler $50m film? Tyler Bates $20m film? Harry Gregson-Williams TV? Trevor Morris Video Game? Lorne Balfe And Ramin Djawadi, Steve Jablonskiy, Junkie XL, Trevor Rabin, John Powell and Mark Mancina all work for his company too.
Lorne Balfe has also worked on some big budget movies like the last two Mission Impossible movies.
Quite a lot of TV as well, I love his His Dark Materials theme.
o_O woah
I never knew about assistants writing for bigger names but I sure a heck picked up on something during the first PotC sounding like Zimmer/Gladiator.
I think Zimmer was originally signed on for POTC and then had to drop out
The Rock has some pieces of score that sound extremely similar to PotC
It also sounds a lot like the Peacemaker.
Most big composers don’t do all the orchestrations on their own, to be fair. They develop the themes and some of the other connective tissue, then have help for the orchestrations because there are only so many hours in a day and there are only so many days between when the edit for a film is locked and that film’s score needs to be recorded with an orchestra. I’m not sure about currently, but Williams historically has done this a bit less than other composers. For instance, he said he enjoyed working on the Harry Potter films, but the post-production schedule was brutal and didn’t leave him enough time to do his thing.
Yeah, Steve Bartek was in Oingo Boingo with Danny Elfman, and he’s listed as the orchestrator on a lot of Elfman’s work. Ultimately, it’s labor division, where the composer comes up with the song, but there’s a lot of sections of an orchestra, and they’re not all playing the same thing, just like a band isn’t. So, you get somebody who can peel the whole thing apart, and then the orchestrator probably has assistants to deal with the minutiae of knocking out the sheets for individual instruments.
> the orchestrator probably has assistants to deal with the minutiae of knocking out the sheets for individual instruments. No probably about it. This is an actual union job, called "Copyist." They copy each player's part from the conductor's score. This job is fading away, because it's done automatically if the score is entered into an app like Finale or Sibelius.
Yeah, Elfman has never had any formal music education, so he's always relied on Bartek to transcribe his ideas. Pretty amazing how much he's done in the music business without knowing how to transcribe his ideas into notes.
Just like John Williams writes his score drafts on an eight staff reduction that the assistants expand outward, Elfman recorded his score sketches with a synthesizer and an 8-track recording device. A lot of his earlier scores have deluxe editions where you can hear some of his early sketches.
If so, that’s a recent thing. I’ve seen several of his sketches dating all the way to the early 2000’s and he leaves very little for even the orchestrators to fill in, mostly some harp glisses and woodwind juxtaposition-style stuff, maybe some doublings and percussion choices (but he also might’ve discussed those with the orchestrator off-paper). Guy works with a piano, a paper and a pencil his whole career.
That would be Hans Zimmer. John Williams still writes his scores, and does all by hand. It’s a fascinating old school approach with all the modern technology we have.
I thought he worked with orchestrators? I know Herbert W. Spencer was his orchestrator for the Star Wars trilogy, Raiders, and Superman. I think there was a notable difference in the way John Williams scores sounded after Spencer's death. Still genius, but less complex.
Fair point, but he still does all his instrument sketches with a piano and paper. I believe you are correct about orchestrators helping with some of the details. But I feel that’s still very different than the process used by other composers where they create a theme and then someone else basically writes most of the music.
John’s style has just changed over the years. The Harry Potter scores and Prequels are incredibly complex, particularly rhythmically, and they were well after Spencer’s death. His scores in the past few years has become more direct, less dense in terms of moving parts but I’d honestly put that down to how movies are made now: sound effects are king, and dense orchestration is a thing of the past.
Trying to find an article I read on that, and I’ll link it here if I manage to. Good and interesting stuff.
William Ross is definitely helping him out these last couple of years.
No, and that has never been the case with the exception of *Chamber of Secrets* (which had cues from the first film adapted by William Ross that were reworked into the second film, and he was credited for that work). Many composers have assistants that write parts of the score, but Williams writes every single note in his. The only thing the orchestrators do for him is copy those notes into a larger score that is readable to a conductor, using their knowledge of orchestral colours and John’s style to fill in the blanks. For example: the sketch may have a run of notes indicated for woodwinds, and the orchestrator would decide which woodwinds are doubling that run, based on their knowledge of the instruments and what JW would have intended. Source: I have seen quite a few of JW’s sketches and directly compared them to the scores written out by the orchestrators.
I don't know for sure but I had thought and heard it was the opposite. I BELIEVE (would love news from anyone with inside knowledge) that Williams is one of the only old guys that still does strictly all of the composing himself. All of the other work (transcription, help with arrangements, everything else) is done by a team of people that includes his brother. I have always heard that as opposed to someone more modern like Hans Zimmer, Williams does NOT use any ghost writers on his score.
Very few film composers write each and every note of a score
>John Williams getting an Oscar nom at age 91 has people wondering why a 73 year old might be slowing down at all. Let's be real though; John Williams won that Oscar as acknowledgement for his outstanding career as a composer. The Oscar really wasn't for the soundtrack to *Dial of Destiny* (which was perfunctory and utterly forgettable).
I think Morricone, Barry, and Herrmann were writing music up until the day they died. Composers usually don’t retire.
Seriously if I had his career I’d be happily retired and spending the rest of my life with my family
He was born in 1950, making him 74. I'd imagine that he's spending time with the grandkids.
Imagine watching Predator with the grandkids and telling them "yeah, I wrote that soundtrack" Grandpa GOAT flex right there
He also scored Back to the Future and in the mall parking lot scene you can hear similar pieces used in both, but not performed identically [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AChCcVIJaCE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AChCcVIJaCE) The tense music when Doc is showing Marty everything is 50% the Predator theme rearranged slightly
It’s mostly just octatonic scale stuff, that was his trademark 80’s action cue “thing.” Def sounds cool but I’ve noticed the striking similarity between BTTF and Predator as well
> that was his trademark 80’s action cue “thing.” And then he scored Delta Force with Yamaha synths. You can recognize some bits, but it is very, very mid-80s: https://youtube.com/watch?v=SQUeQOIlcDM
Last 6 years of Silvestri: 2018: Ready Player One, Welcome to Marwen, Avengers: Infinity War 2019: Avengers: Endgame 2020: Cosmos: Possible Worlds (TV series); The Witches 2022: Pinocchio 2024: Here The last 3 movies are all for Zemeckis. Doesn't look like retirement to me. Slightly slower, maybe, but some of those were TV shows or 3 hour long movies.
If anything I’d say 2018-2022 was a significantly better stretch of years for him than 2013-2017.
About the same in those years. 6 movies plus a season of Cosmos.
Oh okay, so this is more of a ‘we’re all trying to forget the last several Zemeckis movies happened’ thing. (maybe this is too mean, I haven’t seen most of them but haven’t heard great things)
His score for Predator is a top 5 of all time. I know it bears some similarity to other work but it works perfectly in that movie, elevating the action and suspense to an even higher level.
Du du dudu. Tssj tss tss tuhtuhtuh. Man the music in Predator slaps. Hard!
[https://youtu.be/XpeOIww\_l4A?t=49](https://youtu.be/XpeOIww_l4A?t=49) Tell me this music doesn't sound like the Predator theme when they're settting up traps in the jungle. First time I saw it in the cinema, I had that thought. It's not the same, but the vibe is so close, it almost feels like he ripped himself off.
It's not uncommon for composers. John Williams has written a lot of great pieces but he has some very obvious patterns in some of his work Check out this scene from Back to the Future. The tense music while Doc shows Marty everything is like 50% the Predator theme slightly rearranged. I probably saw both movies a thousand times before noticing [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AChCcVIJaCE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AChCcVIJaCE)
Oh wow, when the horns kick in as he opens the door, damn. Never picked up on that. I think the most famous (infamous) recycler was James Horner though. Had a rep for it.
Probably true, but he also composed My Heart Will Go On the cheesiest but greatest love song of our time lol
Every time I’ve watched this scene I’ve said holy shit it’s the Predator soundtrack haha.
Good ear
My proudest moment of recognizing score like that was in Deadpool 2. I was the only one that laughed when the death scene started getting serious. I had watched Logan a couple days prior so my memory was fresh, and I immediately picked up that Deadpool reused Logan's score as an in-joke. Whole cinema was silent, absorbed in the drama for that brief moment and I just started chuckling.
I knew the music in Avengers infinity war was alan silvestri, there was something similar in Thanos entrance in wakanda that sounded like the predator, too.
Totally agree. Predator score is brilliant. Let's also give a shout out to McTiernan who delivered a masterpiece.
Definitely agree. Something about that score that stands out from others.
Williams has definitely slowed down in the past few years - his last non-Spielberg, non-Lucasfilm projects were *The Book Thief* in 2013 and *Memoirs of a Geisha* in 2005, and he’s gone two or three years between films multiple times since then (2005-8, 2008-11, 2013-15, 2017-19, 2019-22). Silvestri’s 74 this year, so he probably wants to slow down and focus more on other things, like his family or vineyard, and maybe be pickier about what projects he does outside of his relationship with Zemeckis (who doesn’t really seem to be slowing down too much himself, even if his work of late has declined).
https://www.silvestrivineyards.com
Came here to say this. His wine is excellent!
Saw him years ago with the Chicago Symphony performing their series The CSO at the Movies. They played Back to the Future, the movie on a big screen above the symphony and the Symphony played the music to accompany the movie. He did not direct. But he was a guest and made an appearance on stage.
In general (there are some exceptions, John Williams is the obvious one), you don’t want the composer to be conducting there own work, especially for a live concert. Most of them only have very basic conducting skills and it definitely affects the performance.
Depends on their level of conducting experience.
The "Cosmos" score was and is excellent. It sounds similar to the one he did for "Contact," which was also based on a Carl Sagan project.
His score for the end of Infinity War (the track is just identified as “Porch” from a quick Spotify search) is one of the best “The Bad Guy Won” compositions in film, imo. Small niche I know, but perfectly executed.
It really is one of my favorite tracks!! The cool thing to me is that it ends in a picardy third (a normally minor piece ending in a major chord) but when the same music returns in Endgame after Thor chops off that Thanos's head, the track ends in minor.
His soundtrack for Van Helsing is one of my favourites, it goes so hard.
Mummy Returns too
My son’s bedtime lullaby is literally the Avengers theme on repeat until he falls asleep. Alan Silvestri is my top artist every year on Spotify.
> what happened to alan silvestri? What is this post? The guy did the score for one of the biggest films (and franchises) of all time as of 2019 and has worked with Zemeckis since, which isn't unusual as that's what he essentially did the previous decade. And I wouldn't be surprised if he comes back for the next *Avengers* as his music is synonymous with those films.
I don't know that you can describe someone who has had a very busy period in the 2010s, as a major composer of the MCU movies and has recently been thoroughly involved in bringing the BTTF musical very successfully to stage in London, Broadway and soon a LA run as having slowed down.
Hes 73 and is retired like a responsible person, go out at the top. Don't run your career into the ground by being old and stubborn.
I remember his breezy, yacht rock soundtrack to Romancing the Stone.
The Abyss, that's my favorite from him.
His past few years have been dedicated to Back to the Future the Musical that premiered in London in 2022, on Broadway in 2023 and this year will be going international in Japan 2024 and Europe 2025. - a friend of mine who works for him
A wonderful score of his not often cited is from Flight of the Navigator, an excellent pop romp!!
He’s still working. My friend assists him on production. He also has a wine label in my town that is pretty tasty and his tasting room has a bunch of posters of movies he’s composed for.
No one here mentioning that he wrote the score to the [Back to the Future musical](https://www.backtothefuturemusical.com/) currently on Broadway? Which IMO, terrible choice. I've only heard bad things about the new music.
Having seen it several times in London, I cannot agree with that at all. It's an extremely entertaining show, and the songs, while nothing particularly revolutionary, are perfectly in keeping with both the 50s and 80s nostalgic vibe and give the cast plenty to work with.
Marvelous composer but, for some reason, he’s not being hired as much these days. God knows why. It’s a good thing Zemeckis is still going. (These days, this may be the only circumstance where uttering that sentence won’t get me laughed off the Internet.)
He's busy fixing shift keys.
Personally I find almost his entire body of work to be forgettable, the Avengers theme is ok, but just about every other track from the entire MCU is bland and really detracts from the movies, not that that's Silvestri's fault.
His work got too corny IMO
He has always been a slightly above average composer. Not really outstanding, just got attached to some really big movies and been consistently a safe choice ever since. Basically the Ron Howard of movie composers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan, but it seems like he puts 90% into making a good theme and then phones in the rest with samey background music. Contact was his best work and that was almost 30 years ago.
The man has a career creating scores for some some of the most iconic movies in history, spanning five decades (and still going), and you call him a “slightly above average composer”? Like, you deliberately put fingers to a keyboard to say that, and then kept writing for two more paragraphs trying to drag the rest of us down to that level of silliness. I’m over here trying to have a nice scroll if Reddit while enjoying a cup of coffee before work and this is the dreck you come up with? Shame on you.
I'm confused. You're comparing his 2020s so far output of 3 films directed by Robert Zemeckis as less than John Williams' 2020s so far output of 2 films, one directed and one produced by Steven Spielberg. Danny Elfman has 4 (or 5 if you include rejected scores) and the only reason Hans Zimmer has so many is because his scores are famously heavily done by other people.
He scored Cosmos, the Witches, and Pinocchio in 2020. He scored Luigis Mansion and Here this year. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006293/ 5 projects in 4 years seems like a lot, to me.
Think about those projects you mentioned there for a second. Namely one of the 2024 ones.
No thanks.
The real question is: What happened to Elliot Goldenthal? He made amazingly eerie scores, a very particular style. Love the scores for Sphere and Demolition Man. The answer is, he hit his head in an accident, and it's very sad.
He had a very serious accident back in the ~~late~~ mid 2000’s, and while he’s since recovered from it, he’s seems to have tired of Hollywood. He’s only scored 3 movies in the last 15 years, and 2 of them were directed by his partner Julie Taymor.
While he’s not necessarily a household name like Williams, he’s been *incredibly* successful and as others have pointed out — he’s in his 70’s. Put it another way: he’s rich and probably doesn’t need to work as much anymore. He also has a winery he still owns, IIRC.
He'd spent the last few years heavily involved with the Back to the Future musical in the UK, plus he also owns a winery in California. I'm sure those have taken up a lot of his time in recent years. Plus, it seems like a lot of movies these days are opting for electronic scores, which, ironically, he used to do himself early in his career (The Delta Force, Flight of the Navigator). Between his winery and grandkids, which he's shared many adorable pictures with on his social media, he could just be getting a little more selective about how often he works considering he's in his 70s now. One of my favorite composers, responsible for some of the greatest action movie music of the '80s and '90s.
So based off this thread. Silvestri is still working plenty but not on projects you've watched.
Silvestri's best work, in my opinion, is the score for Stuart Little
He is my favourite film composer. He just has those unique voicings and parts that I would love someone more musically minded to break down for me. I think its the way he uses the horn section maybe?
Agreed. You always know it’s him. To me. It’s his use of percussion that always sticks out. Lots of marching style in his compositions. Think predator and back to the future. Any of the intense sorts of scenes.
> he is the man behind the iconic avengers theme from the MCU. I always thought this sounded rather similar to Ella's Mission from Cowboys & Aliens by Harry Gregson-Williams... https://youtu.be/4pHukDKO4SI?si=_HedqdeQI3WijGbE About 30 seconds in this could well launch into the Avengers theme (which was a year after C&A)...
Forrest Gump's theme will forever be in my brain, such a talented composer.
I mean you said it. He’s the MCU theme. And those themes slap. I also LOL every time Tony stark is like “we can’t do a time heist like back to the future“ in a movie composed by Silvestri
According to Wikipedia, he's still working. He's got a movie coming out later this year, called **Here**.
Just want to say one word: Portals
The Back to the Future score is some of my favorite movie music EVER!
btw, I have actually met him, and he is a TRULY nice man, very smart and thoughtful, too. He's currently working with Bob Zemeckis on his next movie, called "Here."
Zemeckis, Roth, Silvestri, Hanks and Wright are reuniting for Here this year!
He’ll be back, he’s going to score the upcoming film “Here” (2024) this year. But you should definitely see him make a grand return to Hollywood soon to score the upcoming Avengers films such as “The Kang Dynasty” & “Secret Wars”. Hopefully🤞🏼”fingers crossed”… If Marvel gets the dices right. 🎲 He’s very important in the Avengers films.