September 2021 - Wrap Up

I know I'm a bit early for a wrap-up this month but there's a reason for this and it's something that hasn't happened since I started this Patreon: I'm going on vacation. So for the next 2 weeks, there's probably going to be a bit of radio silence on here. 

However, looking at the access statistics, I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of you who still might want to do some catching up with the content on here, so maybe these two weeks will give you some time to do so. If you only use this Patreon on your mobile, you might indeed have never seen the Table of Content as in some mobile app versions this pinned post doesn't show up first in the list, so it might be worth digging through this. It does show up first when you access this on a desktop.

In other news, after our Orchestra Discovery Session early September, all composers have finished working on their pieces and some have released them already. Here's a video of Lukas Lindner's DANCE OF THE GOBLINS (out also on all streaming platforms) and here's Boris Bruchhaus' AOTEAROA. I posted my piece A SIMPLE ACT OF KINDNESS in another post. The posts for the composition walkthrough including the feedback rounds that we had on all the pieces will follow soon.

I really like the Poll of the Week that we're having here and while they of course are far from representative, it's very interesting to have a vote on a few topics that I always wondered about.

For instance, it seems like Covid has impacted you guys very differently. With most people feeling no noticeable impact, the votes for considerably better AND considerably worse got a lot of votes as well, so it seems like the pandemic has shifted the work for some people quite heavily. Also, most of you are most creative in the morning hours and in the late evening so the myth of the artists working late in the night and having their creative peak at these times is debunked... at least for the people on this Patreon. Interestingly, most of you come from a family without any musical background which I found really fascinating, only a few had some hobby musicans as relatives and even less professional musicians as parents or grandparents. This is a quite fascinating result that I wouldn't have expected like this.  And with my question about a plan B for your career, there is a tie between people following a plan B besides music and people not having any plan B. So again, quite fascinating results on this.

I was watching DUNE yesterday evening (and made sure to watch it on one of the largest screens in the city with a Dolby Atmos setup) and besides really liking the movie, I have to admit that I feel that Hans Zimmer did an amazing job serving the picture with the music. It is definitely no music that I would like to listen to out of context but the way it works in the movie is really great and the production values are insane. Of course Zimmer used a lot of the typical desert movie clichees like the vocals, or the harmony with the flattened 2nd degree but he recombined them into a quite fresh approach. 

This movie (and score) once more at least for me made it clear that I don't think that there will be a traditional orchestral renaissance in the movie scores anytime soon. Of course I was thinking about whether this movie would have worked with a traditional score but I really feel like it wouldn't have. The reduction of musical elements to " trivial" sounds like the "chaotic percussion motif" serves the movie incredibly well, more than any "academically structured music" would do. And we have to give it to HZ that he really puts his own composer ego to the side to do what is best for the movie, even if that means to be a drone rather than "some cool music". This is of course a fundamental discussion that goes far deeper but for instance I see some truth in critics of JW saying that his writing sometimes holds the movie hostage with the music by becoming its own entity outside of the images. I don't agree on this in full extent as I feel that music can serve the movie well and be great on its own but in my opinion, there is at least some truth to the fact that JW's music is more "composer ego" driven compared to HZ's music. But I digress and should probably cover a topic like this in a dedicated post where I invest some more time into researching so I can support my standpoint better :)

Lastly, a while ago I was posting my piece NOCTURNAL ADVENTURES which was a score for a commercial campaign. I recorded the entire process of writing this piece and announced that I will start making the walkthrough available as soon as the campaign is released. It actually has been released a few days ago and you can watch the video here. To be honest, I'm not extremely happy with the finished result with particularly the sound being problematic but nevertheless it is nice to have an example of scoring to picture that we can use here for further. So when I'm back I will start posting composition screencasts for this piece.

Until then, I will probably be lurking on the Discord server every now and then and join the talks there. (In case you want to join, just connect your Patreon account to your Discord account and you will automatically be added to the server)

Again, thank you for being here and supporting this Patreon, see you all back in about two weeks!

Robin