Favorite Musical Composers

David Maslanka! When I was in high school, I was in Wind Ensemble and we played a piece of his called “Give Us This Day” and it gave me chill bumps every time. Listen to it and you’ll probably get the feeling I did.

Leitmotif was a word I never heard of before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitmotif Used by Wagner and John Williams. John Williams is in a league of his own. After all the talk, the Superman theme just popped in my head. John Williams is a legend.

John Williams is in league with Spielberg and George Lucas. He was the other wheel that made it all work.

The critic Theodor W. Adorno, in his book In Search of Wagner (written in the 1930s), expresses the opinion that the entire concept of the leitmotif is flawed. The motif cannot be both the bearer of expression and a musical “gesture”, because that reduces emotional content to a mechanical process. He notes that “even in Wagner’s own day the public made a crude link between the leitmotifs and the persons they characterised” because people’s innate mental processes did not necessarily correspond with Wagner’s subtle intentions or optimistic expectations. He continues:

The degeneration of the leitmotiv is implicit in this … it leads directly to cinema music where the sole function of the leitmotif is to announce heroes or situations so as to allow the audience to orient itself more easily.

Beethoven – moonlight sonata (resident evil! )