LOL, Red.
I'll try to write it up again...
First, addressing the issue of plagiarism vs. inspiration... in listening to Bartok and Stravinsky I found dozens of consecutive measures lifted directly from the music into Star Wars fame. I think that's about as close as it gets to plagiarism. Even if Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarizes, it's still plagiarism.
That said, I'm not only willing to "forgive" John Williams for this lack of honest creativity but I applaud his efforts to a degree. Whether or not the originals he lifted are his music, the score could still be said to be his -- though he's composer of only part of it, he did arrange the whole thing. And I must say, as I said before, I'm happy with the scores of the Trilogy. As I also said, I'd rather have him arrange the works of geniuses -- especially geniuses whose work I love -- than drop his own attempt at music on the movies which were greatly enhanced by a complementary soundtrack.
Now, Joe -- please try to listen to these composers for yourself! You can't really consider this an "exposure" as it is really still a butchering of the music, even if you do come out with a nice roast at the end (perhaps bouillabaisse would be closer?). Stravinsky and Bartok both have plenty of very accessible music -- try to listen to Stravinsky's famed Rite of Spring. If not that, go for Firebird. Both have many elements of classical modernism, but I think they're very accessible if you try hard enough. It's worth the effort.
Bartok has a lot of music based on Hungarian themes -- his concerto is like this and sounds wonderful. Check it out at your library (I don't know if you guys in HK have CDs for check-out in libraries, though).
Oh yeah, the other thing I mentioned in the original post was how you could compare the use of linked lists in a computer program with music. In music, the use of an established form is well accepted, just like it's accepted that one can write an original sonnet of fourteen lines or an original
In memoriam style poem using Tennyson's ABBA meter.
It all comes down to where originality is expected. In computer programming, as my folks always tell me (both are programmers), a program can be written almost like a work of art -- efficient, small, clean, precise, and original. But it doesn't have to be, and what people are looking for is functionality. Case in point: Microsoft programs. Works of art? Puh-lease...
But in music, what is functionality? In the case of John Williams writing a score, functionality is complementing the action of the movie with the score he arranges. In Hitchkock's
Psycho, the budget only allowed the use of strings. The composer worked within this framework to create a score that is famous the world over and has seen derivatives in countless movie scores.
My point, though, is that when you take the music of John Williams out of the context of the Star Wars films, what is the functionality? It falls into the realm of
l'art pour l'art -- art for the sake of art. It either sounds good or it doesn't. Taking from one composer, then another, then another, and then adding in one's own transitions may be fine for a movie where the music is secondary to the visual action on the screen. But off the screen, it would be difficult to arrange something better than any one of those great works.
That's why I contend that John Williams's work was great on the movie, but the music itself as independent and self-sufficient art does not stand up to the rigors of close examination. It becomes pop-classical. It's no wonder that the Boston Pops' favorite conductor is John Williams -- that's the kind of music they play. But I'd be surprised to see it played on a regular basis by the BSO -- which, incidentally, they do not. In fact, the BSO plays a lot of modern crap, sometimes worse than John Williams's arrangements. But that stuff is experimental, it's new, it's original... and frankly, if I want to hear Bartok and Stravinsky -- and even Holst -- I'll listen to them. But it would take some genius to make the combination of these parts be lesser than one whole arrangement. And, unfortunately, I don't think John Williams is that genius.
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