John Williams & the issue of originality

Aaron H

Moderator Emeritus
Topic derail

I can be as hard as I want on Red 5
a) Because I am a moderator
b) He was banned
c) He was a "zombie"
d) He was a jerk
e) Because I want to

Back on topic...
 

Stoo

Well-known member
Well, Hallelujah...

Mariah, brilliant post and welcome to The Raven! :) You wouldn't happen
to know the Salieri piece, would you? It appears that Red5 was banished
before revealing which one (and not challenged until now). I'll have to
check out your Erich Wolfgang Korngold bit.

Thanks for the support, Aaron, everything you've said is true.
I trust your rebuttal was aimed at Red5's general claim of plagarism
and not my frivolant usage of the term, "ripped-off"! :cool:

Regardless, I'd still like to hear this *march* in question...
 

Stoo

Well-known member
temple of john said:
I was never upset. I just think that JW has had a great career and instead of trying to find reasons why he is a fraud, find reasons why he is great. Stoo, relax. I wasn't targeting you but rather the topic. You can talk about it all you want. I just had to say my piece on this one.
With all due respect - Bollocks! You like to back-peddle...
Better quit while you're ahead (or behind). :cool:

As far as Red5 goes, the guy is a fraud. He is a banned member who came back under a different name just so that he could get his shots in on those members that he didn't like.
I trust you on that - but extreme as his statements were, they were worthy of
investigation. Let me explain where I'm coming from and maybe you'll understand.

"Indiana Jones" pays tribute to classic serials, B-movies & adventure tales.
Seek them out/check them out...They are the originals and inspirations!
Now, if someone says "Raiders March" sounds similar to an older composition,
don't you think people on this board would be slightly curious?

You don't have to be so quick on the draw...
 

Stoo

Well-known member
Topic Derail 2

ToJ, you're obviously not getting it. I don't want to argue with you
over something this trivial because I think it would be pointless...
If you're so hell-bent on talking about Iraq, why don't you sign up at
some political discussion group? Seriously.

Let's just try and not to get at each other's throats. Stay cool...:cool:
 

sarah navarro

New member
if you listen to some of Gustav Holst's planet music its definitly refrenced from there,but i've heard that Jw based some of the Star Wars music from it.:)
 

No Ticket

New member
My my my my my...

Such hostility in this thread? Over this Red 5 dude and the accusation that John Williams rips other pieces of music off.

First of all. In music, most any composer of any kind of music takes his ideas from some other work that has inspired him or intrigued him. You can take a chord progression from another song but change it to your liking to make something new and unique. It will however, still be the same chord progression... but that doesn't mean it's a rip off. It's only a rip off if it's EXACTLY the same or so much so that you can tell they were TRYING to sound just like it, like when they play a song in a movie or tv show or something and they change a few notes to make it "different" so they don't have to pay royalty fees or get permission to use it.

Many bands (outside the realm of classical composition) borrow from other bands and songs because they want to write something similar themselves. But they put their own self into the music to make something of their own. I do believe Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams has a chord progression almost exactly like that of an Oasis song. Intentional, probably not, but possibly inspired by or borrowed from.

Williams may borrow ideas or unintentionally sound like a piece of music that he liked before and has inspired him. That doesn't mean he is ripping it off. And there is so much music out there, something is bound to sound like something else. And then there's the whole level of paying "homage" to an artist/composer/whatever that you like by copying traits that they used in their work.

So get over it. Williams pieces are not direct copies and they stand on their own and I doubt he would put as much energy and effort into just copying other's work. Any serious artist strives to create something that is their own that they can be proud of and have other's admire too. You could never get the kind of grand music as the Star Wars theme if you didn't put all your creative effort into it, a piece of yourself. And that's what he does. Like his music or not, you can feel the emotion in the music and the passion that went into it's creation.

Secondly. What exactly did Red 5 do wrong in posting this topic? I found it somewhat interesting.
 

Aaron H

Moderator Emeritus
A bit of history, for those who simply do not know, red5 was a "zombie" member who was nothing more than an alias of someone who was banned from the Raven. That is why there was such a negative response to his original post.
 

Barty

New member
"A good composer does not imitate; he steals."

-Igor Stravinsky

That said, whenever I hear the accusation of stealing leveled at Williams, or other composers, I almost always find they are stretching to find direct copying. Williams music may have similar structure to classical music, or he may write in the same form that Korngold did, but when you honestly listen to his music it almost always evokes a different atmosphere, tone, and it certainly isn't note for note the same by any stretch of the imagination.

If you REALLY want an example of direct copying, listen to the beginning of "The Fight" from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet Ballet, and then listen to the beginning of, "Stealing the Enterprise" from Horner's Search for Spock score. Now that's direct copying.
 
Barty said:
"A good composer does not imitate; he steals."

-Igor Stravinsky

?It?s not where you take things from - it?s where you take them to.? Jean-Luc Godard

?Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.? T.S. Eliot

Man...LOT of Guests in this Thread!
 
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I.M.J.

New member
There's always a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism. It's harder to discern than calling pass interference in a football game....
:whip:
 

LeHah

New member
Just bumping this thread for a half-witted joke that's a bit of history too.

Musicologists concede the last original idea in music was the Tristan Chord, for introducing dissonance as an idea into music. Everything since then (1865) has been conceptually bankrupt and unoriginal because it's all based on something else.

Which rules out everything minor like Skrilex to everything major like jazz, modern blues, rock, neoclassical, neoromanticism! Elvis, the Beatles, Shostakovitch, Mahler and, yes, John Williams.

The trick of it is that the people who concede this point are highly educated people... and take the statement as an amusing thought, and not some holy crux like the Internet would. Context is paramount, after all.

So if you're going to say "John Williams is plagiarism" you should throw out the baby, the bathwater and the kitchen sink with "The last 150 years of music is equally worthless". ;)
 

Randolph Carter

New member
sarah navarro said:
if you listen to some of Gustav Holst's planet music its definitly refrenced from there,but i've heard that Jw based some of the Star Wars music from it.:)

Indeed he did. And JW has openly acknowledged the fact over the years.

Holst's "Mars The Bringer of War" is a particularly noticeable influence on certain parts of the Star Wars score.

I certainly wouldn't call any of it plagiarism, though.

Many film score composers borrow from classical sources.
A more recent example is Hans Zimmer, and how he appropriated a large chunk of Wagner for the Gladiator score.
 

russds

New member
Sorry if this has already been mentioned (haven't read through the whole thread), but another thing to keep in mind is often the director will tell the composer in so many words, "look, i want it to sound exactly like Holst The Planets Neptune, The Mystic". Sometimes the composer's back is up against a wall.
 

Randolph Carter

New member
russds said:
Sorry if this has already been mentioned (haven't read through the whole thread), but another thing to keep in mind is often the director will tell the composer in so many words, "look, i want it to sound exactly like Holst The Planets Neptune, The Mystic". Sometimes the composer's back is up against a wall.

True.

Often, movies have temp tracks containing the kind of music the director has in mind before a composer is even hired to write the score.

In the case of Star Wars, Lucas had a temp track that included material by Stravinsky, Dvorak, Bruckner and Holst.
As well as segments from film scores by Alex North, Rózsa, and Bernard Hermann.
And he specifically wanted something reminiscent of Korngold's work.

Williams found all that info very useful when he started to compose the SW score.
 

Stoo

Well-known member
A Crazy Discovery

Mariah said:
Star Wars Main Title --> King's Row Main Title (Erich Wolfgang Korngold)
9 years later...:eek: This influence was discussed in the 2013 BBC4 series, “Sound of Cinema - The Music That Made the Movies”. While the “King’s Row” theme definitely does sound similar, it’s nowhere near as jaw-dropping as something else I discovered recently…

---
While watching a DVD of the “The Banana Splits” (don’t ask why), I noticed that one of the cartoon segments, “The Three Musketeers”, featured a repeating piece of music which sounds almost identical to John Williams’ theme for “Superman”! It was a shock at first, considering that it’s from 1968, but I chalked it up to being a mere coincidence…until seeing the shows’s credits. Turns out that none other than Richard Donner (the director of “Superman”) was heavily involved in “The Banana Splits”, sometimes directing segments or sometimes the entire show. Yes, it’s the same man so the connection is too large to ignore.

BananaSplits_01_zpsaldy1gs0.jpg


A quick check on YouTube reveals that the theme in question was used numerous times in each episode. Here’s just one example:

2:16 - 2:25
4:40 - 4:50
6:19 - 6:55
7:55 - 8:05
8:34 - etc.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zbJGyUY-F2I" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I know that Williams wrote for various, late ’60s TV series but the music for “The Banana Splits” is credited to these guys: Ted Nichols and David Mook.

Could it be that Mr. Donner played this “Three Musketeers” tune to John Williams for inspiration? I certainly think so. :)
 
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