Intrada Soundtrack Forum

I fear this one is liable to get lost in the holiday loopiness, but I hope not. If this one does well, perhaps someone might take a flyer on Goodwin's "One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing"?

Reading about a brass band playing the whole score brought a confused puppydog head-tilt out of me, but I should've had faith in Goodwin. A lot of his great World War II adventure scores contain marvelously textured passages for a lot of brass players. I wonder if Goodwin ever hooked up with Alex North to have a chat about the awesomeness of the low brass instruments? Seems like Bernard Herrmann might've appreciated this one as well, even if he'd have wanted to do with twenty tubas and thirty-five French horns, or something. I wonder if Doug has caught up with this one yet?

The score reminds me of years ago Jerry Goldsmith ran a composing master class out of UCLA. Among the assignments he gave his students was the scoring of a romantic scene from "Star Trek: Insurrection", the film he himself was scoring at the time. The deal was, the students would sit in on spotting, working with the filmmakers, all the way to recording Goldsmith's music for the film - the students would learn all about the technical side of composing music for film and television as well as compose their own music for the scene, recording it in a professional setting, and viewing their music to playback in a nice cinema-type setting with dialogue and everything else mixed in. Halfway along, it transpired that for logistical reasons Goldsmith's kids weren't going to be able to have their stuff played by the student orchestra, as was the intention, but only by the symphonic band. The expectation was that Goldsmith would be miffed about this but on the contrary, he apparently said that this was precisely the sort of thing that happened to him all the time, especially during his early live TV days, so he passed on the brass-only requirement to the composition students and on they went. Unfortunately, the final result was not available for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to hear, but Goldsmith said they came up with some fascinating music and it was a far better learning exercise for them as things turned out than if they'd had the full orchestra to play with.

_________________
Karl Morton IV

"Enjoy every sandwich."
-- Warren Zevon

Interesting post. Yes, I grew up with the LP so I know it well. And though I don't recall talking to Jerry about this score or even Ron Goodwin for that matter, I recall conversations with him where the orchestrations for bands in comparison to orchestras came up.

Of course, just for clarification, a brass band - such as what Goodwin features - is a legitimate group that really does consist primarily of brass instruments covering all registers from top to bottom, though it pretty much eschews all the other colors. Brass bands often play in ceremonial functions or participate in competitions. (Bruce Broughton had a lot of experience with this medium.)

A symphonic band is entirely different with a vast universe of colors due to it featuring all the sounds of the orchestra except for strings, but in their place adding much more variety in the woodwinds with parts for instruments not as common in the orchestra (alto clarinets, contra-bass clarinets, Eb clarinets, alto sax, tenor sax, baritone-sax) as well as typically having larger percussion sections and baritone horns as standard parts of the group. A lot of "classic" concert band music also required three separate cornet parts as well as trumpet parts, which today are often just melded into a lot of trumpet parts. Many composers find it a great challenge to write for symphonic band not because of the lack of strings but because of the dramatically wide array of instrumental combinations and colors actually possible.

Anyway, I digress. Goodwin did write a really cool score here. His military scores certainly used brass prominently, and often playing rhythmically almost like a drum section with bursts of staccato ideas. Escape From The Dark has always been a score I admired.
--Doug

_________________
Karl Morton IV

"Enjoy every sandwich."
-- Warren Zevon

This score is one of my absolute favorite releases of 2013, certainly in the top 5.