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Six Scores & One Zimmer Ago

Greetings from The Music Bowl! I’m The Wonderfish.

This past summer, it was announced that Hans Zimmer would release Live In Prague, an album he recorded with a live orchestra, in November. I waited patiently. I restrained myself from posting about it each week even though I was counting down the days until its release. I am still waiting for the DVD to be delivered this week, but as of this posting it will be in my hands and while you’re reading this I will be watching that. If you want to get a visual for what I’m talking about, it’s here!


Is it incidental how artists connect and interact? Fortuitous? I think it’s magical. Upon examination, I learned that my favorite films (I pay close attention to this and keep a list in my Evernote for just such an occasion) are films in which the story, the editing, and the film score/soundtrack resonate strongly with me. It must be all three factors or the film doesn’t make the cut. As you can imagine, it may or may not be agonizing to watch movies with me. Either way, I also realized that many of my favorite movies happen to have the same people behind the scenes composing the film scores and/or in the music department.  

Obviously, this list includes Zimmer. It also includes Philip Glass, Danny Elfman, the Sherman Brothers (Robert and Richard), Thomas Newman, and T Bone Burnett among 24 others. If we examine my personal top 30 favorite films of all time, the most common score composers on this list are Howard Shore (3), Hans Zimmer (6), John Williams (2), Danny Elfman (3), and Thomas Newman (2). This means that over half of my favorite films are scored by the same five people! The directors of these 30 films only repeat twice at most. And now I’m having a creative crisis.

Do I love these films because of the music or do I love the music because of these films?

And what is it with Mr. Zimmer!? For the record, these are the six films that I speak of: Interstellar, The Last Samurai, The Dark Knight Rises, As Good As It Gets, Gladiator, and A League of Their Own.

This is Hans Zimmer - you can view his IMDB page, which is where this photo is from, here.

I am going to watch the Prague DVD this weekend and find out what’s going on here! I can tell by the minor 2nd interval of the bass line (hats off to you, Mr. Williams AND to you, Mr. Spielberg) that the shark's in the water! See you next week.
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