Favorite movie/tv soundtracks/composers

[DrMckay]

Just looking for some new music recommendations and figured that since a thread about favorite music in general is already up, I would ask people what their favorite movie/tv soundtracks/composers are, as I get a lot of my music choices from those. Here are mine:

Hans Zimmer: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, The Dark Knight.

Brian Herbert: Children of Dune (Worth it for Inama Nushif alone)

John Williams: Star Wars, The Patriot, etc.

Bear McCreary: Battlestar galactica Soundtracks Season 1-4 (Wander My friends, Passacaglia, etc,) Eureka Soundtrack.

any other movie soundtracks/songs/composers I should be aware of? What do you all like?

Thank you.

[JME2]

You've got Williams on the list; good, good.

I might as well name a couple of my own in addition to Maestro Williams:

1. David Arnold (Stargate, James Bond, etc.)

2. James Horner (The Mask of Zorro, The Legend of Zorro, etc)

3. Alan Menken (Enchanted, Aladdin, etc.)

And, for the heck of it, a couple from across the Pacific and from the realm of animation:

1. Yoko Kano (Escaflowne, Cobwboy Bebop)

2. Shiro Sagisu (Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Neon Genesis Evangelion)

[Thanas]

- Ennio Morricone
- Clint Mansell - requiem for a dream
- Murray Gould - Doctor Who

[Old Plympto]

I agree with all of 'em and I would like to throw Michael Giacchino's name into the hat.

He did good work on The Incredibles, Mission Impossible 3 and the closing score for Cloverfield. I am now awaiting his Star Trek score eagerly.

Also, I am gonna get me Bear McCreary's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles soundtrack to be released which should have been released on December 2nd.

[Havok]

Danny Elfman- Batman, Spider-Man, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetle Juice, Pee-wee's Big Adventure etc.

Edit: And the Simpsons theme to boot.

[phred]

Yoko Kanno
Danny Elfman
Kenji Kawai - Ghost in the Shell
Basil Poledouris - Hunt for Red October

[YT300000]

Okay, here we go. I'll probably miss a bunch of people, though. I used to be quite a Hans Zimmer fan, but especially after Gladiator, his stuff became way too repetitive, and very over-compressed. Though I do really enjoy the Last Samurai soundtrack.

Old and current favourites have to be John Williams, Ennio Moriconne, Jerry Goldsmith, Danny Elfman, Michael Kamen, Dimitri Tiomkin, Alfred Newman, John Barry, Bernard Hermann, James Horner (although he can rip off others quite a bit more than most), Howard Shore, Alan Silvestri, Brad Fiedel...

A few others that people may not have heard of, so I'll give some details to possibly spread a bit of interest:

Cliff Eidelman - probably most famously wrote the score to Star Trek VI, brilliantly combining the existing motifs and pseduo-Soviet elements to keep the Cold War atmosphere, whilst creating a truly original soundtrack. One of my favourites.

Basil Poledouris - you'll probably best recognize him from The Hunt for Red October or Starship Troopers, but his greatest work was Conan the Barbarian. Huge influences from Beethoven, Holst (including ripping off the Jupiter theme during the orgy scene, oh well) and Wagner make him one of my utter favourite contemporary composers.

David Arnold - I think he's become fairly famous since doing Bond scores, but often I talk to people who haven't heard of him. Stargate was pretty nice, and Independence Day is very nicely done as well.

Vangelis - If you haven't heard of him, you really should. Amazing artist, amongst the best users of a synthesizer ever. He wrote Alexander, Blade Runner and 1492, to name a few.

[Simplicius]

My 'new' favorite film composer is Thomas Newman (Road to Perdition, Cinderella Man, Wall-E). He's got a signature sound in the form of these big, deep chords that move like waves, or bison herds, or something. No tunes you can whistle, but the man can write a good film score.

One composer who absolutely deserves to be on this list is Erich Korngold; he is one of if not the definitive writer of swashbuckling music during the golden age of pirate movies, and also one of the originators of the 'Hollywood Sound.'

[RogueIce]

I agree with all of 'em and I would like to throw Michael Giacchino's name into the hat.

He did good work on The Incredibles, Mission Impossible 3 and the closing score for Cloverfield. I am now awaiting his Star Trek score eagerly.

He also did the soundtrack (well, co-did I suppose) to Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction which was damned good. So good I went and bought the soundtrack.

[Rye]

Steve Jablonsky - Transformers (man, that bit around 50s and 2m40s in... fucking superb), The Island, some others. I think he learned from Zimmerman directly, but all in all I prefer his work, the way he constructs his songs is personally more satisfying than any other modern composer I know of. He also sometimes mixes a bit of industrial electronics/bass in there, which gets extra points from me. Also, he uses the rhythm from the terminator theme in a few of the songs on the Transformers soundtrack (check out around 30s in). I thought that was ace postmodernism right there. Megatron was a robot trying to terminate Sam, duh-duh-dun-du-dun.

Speaking of which, Brad Fiedel - Terminator 2 theme. I think Terminator 3 might have felt like an actual terminator film had they hired him for the music.

John Murphy - Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor) - the song is slow genius. Fucking epic.

As for pure synth greatness, I don't think the Assault on Precinct 13 theme can be topped.

[El Moose Monstero]

Zuul, you're awesome. I didn't know the sunshine OST was finally out... have now downloaded it and it is indeed excellent. And also just found the old techno remixes of Jeff Wayne's war of the worlds, a couple that were used in the game were quite palatable.

I can recommend the first (Season 1 and 2 of New Who) Murray Gold album, as after that the music got rather samey to match the episodes. Ennio Morricone goes without saying, and surprisingly, the 3rd Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack gets a lot of playing. The movie was shite, but Hans Zimmer did a great job with the soundtrack.

[Thanas]

Well,with regards to Murray Gold, Season 3 has the beautiful "This is Gallifrey, our childhood, our home" and of course Season 4 has the Oodsong.

[Shroom Man 777]

Underworld - those guys who did the soundtrack for 28 Days Later, working with that guy Rye mentioned who made the Sunshine soundtrack.

Klaus Badelt - the dude who made the Equilibrium soundtrack.

[NetKnight]

An emphatic second to the composers previously poster. In addition to them, I'd submit Christopher Franke of Babylon 5 fame, as well as James Horner.

Do the 'team' of composers behind 2001 count?

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Jerry Goldsmith (especially Star Trek: the Motion Picture, Alien, The Omen, and Total Recall)
My favorite bits by far are all the V'ger related music from Star Trek, the Second Coming theme from The Omen, and this video set to music from Total Recall. An amazingly prolific composer, looking at his biography.

Anything by Elliot Goldenthal (Frida, Sphere, Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within, Alien 3, Interview With The Vampire, etc.) His orchestration is so modern and subtly dissonant, yet so Wagnerian in its drama, I just love it. The Alien 3 soundtrack is so depressingly dark it never fails to cheer me up a bit.

John Williams is good too, and surprisingly versatile. His orchestral style is just a little conventional for my taste, as much as I love the Imperial March and all themes associated with it. Schindler's List also has a very powerful soundtrack.

Although I'm not aware of any of his other work, William Stromberg and his associates for their work onTrinity and Beyond.