James Horner's music for Avatar

So far little is known.

He will be collaborating again with Tony Hinnigan, ethnic instruments player, and more interestingly he has been consulting with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist from UCLA's Department of Ethnomusicology.

Wanda has been tasked with helping to create a music culture for a race of aliens from the ground up: timbres, textures, tonalities, song forms, musical instruments, the works! Wanda says it should be a fascinating and interesting challenge.

Are you interested? Do you know anything more?

Interesting idea. Would be worthwhile when it comes out to see their working notes, jsut to see how they went about merging the two.

I want to see it.

More info can be found here.

I. Can't. Wait.

One of my most anticipated scores of the year, I really hope it's as good as they're hyping it up to be...

Eager to hear the score, not so eager to see the movie.

The movie looks pretty enticing too. The soundtrack to the trailer doesn't seem that exotic, however. It sounds like another epic orchestral track not some created-from-the-ground-up exotic music. Perhaps they didn't late the Navi theme.

I think they have done a brilliant job advertising this movie. I think one of the most effective strategies in advertising is instead of having something right out there in your face always screaming at you and being painfully obvious as to what it is that they are advertising to hide what it is that you are advertising. I mean, you keep the consumer guessing. You make them really interested in trying to find out what it is that you are making or selling. In order to do tha there has to be something about your product that "catches the eye" something that sparks the interest.

This movie has a very different and unique world. The special effects and cgi look to be top of the line. They look to be in the next level of excellence. They look like Lord of the Rings and King Kong and Star Wars standard cgi and special effects or even better. And the amazing thing aboutt he advertising is that it just gives you a taste or a hint of the world and the cgi. It leaves you guessing about what the movie is really about and what this world is really about. So, you then have to see the movie to figure it all out. You are so interested in figuring it out that you get excited for the arrival of the release so that you can go figure it all out.

I think the movie is going to do extremely well at the box office. It is James Cameron and James Horner which are two extremely qualified and well decorated filmsters. Cameron has a history with high grossing movies (Titanic is #1 grosser of all time). And the hype that is building around the movie keeps growing. I am really wanting to see it. I think it is going to be good.

I will be waiting james horner is music for avatar. I like it. His music is my inspiration.

Well... It looks fun (The Matrix meets Braveheart meets, um, Starship Troopers?), and Cameron is one of the greatest and most successful directors of all time, and I'm sure he has a vision for this movie.

The problem is the CGI. I'll withhold judgment until seeing the actual movie, but I have a strong suspicion this is going to be like Star Wars where the director waited forever to make his movie, thought "finally the technology is here!" but it wasn't. Lucas was about 5 years too early for photorealistic CGI monsters/animals (compared Phantom Menace's camel-creatures with Lord of the Rings oliphaunts) and I think 2009 is about five years too early for photorealistic humans (which is what these blue creatures really are anyway; they're more human than Jar Jar Binks).

Exclusive 20-sec clips:

http://www.exlibris.ch/musik/OSTVARIOUS/Avatarthe_Score/PHO/8505-7567895761.aspx

Those were some -interesting- clips. Unfortunately, about half of them sounded like they were in the same key. Some of them felt like the same track even, just maybe different points. Not to alarm anyone, but this is not exactly what I had in mind when I heard, "We're creating a whole new sound for the Na'vi society..."

But a brighter moment occurred to me midway through listening to those tracks. I did here some interesting vocal glissandi type figures. I was hoping the War track might blow me away, but it hasn't yet. Guess I'll have to see the movie to be able to render any kind of judgment one way or the other. I still can't wait to see the movie, though. The Na'vi are going to kick human donkey... it'll be great.

Here are 1-minute clips:

http://soundcloud.com/user2753116/sets/avatar_ost_samples

There's a neat article in December's Wired that makes me a bit more excited for this movie.

Apparently the movie uses a "motion capture camera" - that is, the computer recognizes the position and orientation of the camera in the scene, just like the actors. This allows you to do the camera motions "organically" instead of steering a virtual camera on the computer. The second big innovation of this movie is the CGI is available in real-time visualization - that is, you can look through the new camera's viewfinder and see, not the blue-dotted actors on a blank soundstage, but rough visualizations of the CGI characters in the CGI environment.

Here's a neat making-of video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKFbI6p-L04

I must admit that I'm wary of this score. Not that the score won't be good, Horner rarely puts out bad scores, but that it's just not going to live up to the hype.

He has an interview in The Times:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6936869.ece

Pay attention to this: The industry doesn’t score films the way I score films or John Williams scores films.

First puts himself, then Williams. Very Horner, I'd say. <_<

It makes sense to me. Some directors coming out into their own are quite determined in their vision, and it's their careers on the line if the film flops. So, they have every reason to nitpick just about anything, whether they know anything about music or not. I imagine this can be very frustrating to deal with is a composer collaborating with a director, especially for those who limit their knowledge to JUST music. Too much thinking "in the box" and not enough "vision" or "perspective" of the grand perspective of the film itself. This likely leads to adversarial tendencies (like Horner pointed out in his interview) where two artistic worlds collide and never find a middle-ground from which to work.

And I seriously doubt directors even realize that pulling in multiple composers to work different cues often creates more challenges than solutions, especially if they want a fluid musical experience to result. But budgeting restrictions and funding in general is probably more to blame for this than anything else. I'm actually impressed that Horner has been working on this project since March and has made so much headway already. The man is really a credit to our art form for being so deeply integrated into film as he is. Williams is as well. But it all comes down to having a solid working relationship with your director. It appears both Cameron and Horner walk a very thin line between the two of them.

And also in Los Angeles Times (part 1):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2009/11/james-horner-searches-for-the-sound-of-pandora-.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnC8KZ2bOik

So, has anyone heard it? What do you think?

It's pretty good. I liked the music. Not anything TOOOOO special, but definitely not your average Hans Zimmer score. ;)

Horner's scoring was pretty interesting the way he molded styles together.

Tribal Rhythms + Titanic + Enemy at the Gates = the score for Avatar.

Well done, but incredibly recycled.

Yeah, I thought the score was typical film genre-esque. It didn't break through the mold enough for me to say it lived up to the hype.

Like the music, the story was awfully recycled as well. Didn't we see the same story in Dances with Wolves?

Avatar Script - Spoiler Warning

Humans colonize a planet to take its resources and, in the process, battle the indigenous population. A wounded military veteran comes closer than any other human to the culture of the indigenous group, then becomes one of them and fights on their side.

Dances with Wolves Script - Spoiler Warning, for those who haven't seen Dances with Wolves

Americans colonize the western frontier for its resources and, in the process, battle the indigenous population. A wounded civil war veteran comes closer than any other American to the culture of the indigenous group, then becomes one of them and fights on their side.

I thought the music in Dances with Wolves was more compelling than that of Avatar, in my opinion. Avatar was good and definitely worth seeing in the theaters, so don't get me wrong. I liked the visuals and the overall film was put together very well. I don't think the music or the story lived up to Cameron's concept, though. Hell, I wanted to at least hear a recorder or pan flute at some point. I didn't even hear a change of instrumentation, much less a change in musical substance. Too bad.

I thought the music in Dances with Wolves was more compelling than that of Avatar, in my opinion.

That's because John Barry > James Horner.

The least he could have done, especially after hyping that he was working with an ethnomusicologist on the score, would have been to go out and find an instrument that nobody had ever heard before outside of a small village somewhere, and base the sound of the Na'vi off of that. Come on Horner, it's time to start walking the walk.

Also, every time I heard the Na'vi/Pandora death motif I kept expecting Ed Harris to pop out in a Nazi uniform.