Musical Geniuses Of The Last Decade - your choices?

[Muncey]

Forgot about man like Hans Zimmer.

[Shum]

I would imagine most of the genuine musical geniuses of the last decade are actually writing and performing a more classical form of music. Certainly not electronic music...

Didn't orchestra music etc end sometime in the 60's practically tho?

[wolf89]

Forgot about man like Hans Zimmer.

Who is constantly in trouble for plagarism, who writes the most cliched music for a long time and who basically writes small segments of music that is handed to a team that assemble the soundtracks like an assembly line.

He is the worst commercial cheesy hack and just the thought of him being considered a genius at anything apart from making money is ludicrous.

This isn't one of those times that I'm saying "oh you're wrong" jokingly because it's not to my taste or I think it's the case like with a lot of stuff on here. I genuinely believe that he is the most over rate composer of all time based on my knowledge of how he works.

[wub]

This isn't one of those times that I'm saying "oh you're wrong" jokingly because it's not to my taste or I think it's the case like with a lot of stuff on here. I genuinely believe that he is the most over rate composer of all time based on my knowledge of how he works.

Yeah but the Going For Gold theme tune is peng.

[wub]

Seriously though, can understand the Zimmer hate. The man plagiarizes himself;

That's from the 1989 film Black Rain with Michael Douglas. Listen to the strings around 2m16s and how they are used pretty much note for note in his Batman work.

[jrkhnds]

Hans Zimmer is the Duskies and Dislcoures of modern classic music.

[hubb]

I would imagine most of the genuine musical geniuses of the last decade are actually writing and performing a more classical form of music. Certainly not electronic music...

the absolute opposite is more probable, certainly.

Oh and wolf89, I thought you took yourself out of the discussion?. It certainly seemed that way

[wolf89]

Hans Zimmer is the Duskies and Dislcoures of modern classic music.

Yeah, if it turned out that disclosure happened to lift their basslines from 80s house tunes thinking people wouldn't realize. Oh and if they literally would make just a sequence a bassline and then have a team of people do all the sound design and musical arrangement for them

He is everything wrong with mainstream movie soundtracks at the moment. He could make any new film sound like a plastic cheesy Hollywood blockbuster regardless of it's content.

[hubb]

[wolf89]

Whatever dude. It's a fact that he works like that. I'm not making it up.

Everyone I know who works doing film soundtracks hates him too. It's not just me. He's viewed as the shallowest most obviously in it for the money composer.

[hubb]

No, no you are absolutely right with hans zimmer and his horrible crap.

I'm still waiting for a response on the Dilla/Burial discussion we had a page or so ago though and then thought why, talk about how bad some shit 'composer' is in thread where we try to define genious?

[wolf89]

I'm still fairly sure that Burial making stuff in soundforge is not the revolutionary thing you're making it out to be.

[hubb]

Fair enough I'll get off your back now.

[nousd]

I wonder
how many actual geniuses are there?
Seems the term is used pretty loosely
as if there's a Rembrandt, Newton, da Vinci, Beethoven, Einstein or Plato
in every fifth basement.
I've got a sense that we might only get one or two (in anything)
every century.
Or are we including idiot savants & the focused talents of aspergers?
Does anybody personally know a real genius...
like, someone that'll radically add to human understanding through a prodigious & unique insight?

Or are we talking musos that can knock out a good tune?

[hubb]

Yeah.. it's annoying because it would be nicer if we lived in a time where there were space and patience for it, if there actually where any. It's not difficult to accept someone like Kubric being a genious, eventhough the really influential and important side to his work, is way more the craftmanship than any type of inherent message or dialogue. Flair. But then again, if the fact that Kubric could imagine and make all these amazing lenses, the lighting techniques to go with them, for example being able to cram two unrelated situation into a scene (in the way its framed) and have enough style and references in his work to pad you on the head along the way and if that is enough to warrant the term genious, then someone like Stevie Wonder who beat up gospel, soul and imagined and built all those synths, is at least similar.

[hugh]

I would imagine most of the genuine musical geniuses of the last decade are actually writing and performing a more classical form of music. Certainly not electronic music...

the absolute opposite is more probable, certainly.

Oh and wolf89, I thought you took yourself out of the discussion?. It certainly seemed that way

how? sitting in front of a computer and being able to literally manipulate the sounds and to have everything on a constant loop with the changes and effects of your "writing" becoming apparent right in front of your eyes (ears), all in a constant time signature with an almost mathematically formulaic routine of build ups and drops and breaks....

compared to some dude sitting in front of a piano and trying to transmorph the sounds he is making into something that is orchestral, will not be easily editable, will certainly change time signatures, that will certainly contain greater musical complexity in every possible sense....

I just can't see where you are coming from I am afraid! Not having a go, I just genuinely can't.

[Pedro Sánchez]

Composers didn't write stuff blind in a day, they all had musicians around to try things and change them and some on the most well know symphonies took years to complete, it was trial and error on top of theory.

[hubb]

It's the crux of my existence having to explain this, however pretentious that sounds. I have three uncles that think they are bob dylan.
Look at it this way, an instrument is which ever way you look at it - an almost completely contained structure of possibility
-except if you record it or put it through fx and then it's a daw in the right hands.
I'm personally not going to 'bother' with instruments in my music
because they sound like instruments and people would know them already.
So in that sence I think regular composition throws away a potential to surprise.
I would also argue that referencing other music by the fact that it's the same sound is 'cheaper' than the psychological effect of a surprise even in music.

The idea that expression or texture or something like that, is 'wider' in instrument music, is not true ether because sound is physics, so you could just set up similar conditions that are as rich. There's also the fact that instruments lend themselves more to notes than just a sound would by itself, so a sound can still be in harmony and serve a melodic purpose, but it won't necessarilly have to relate to or reference direct notes. To me instruments have become both silly walls and
limiting in the way that they fit so perfectly with already told stories and I would have step over them.

Having said all that, sounds that are sequenced and do a melody often become something so similar to an already existing instrument - that it really takes attitude
to be able to show it in the work and that's where the compositional skills that I assume we judge these works on, should come into play and that's why I believe someone out there doing this is 'ahead'. Autotune and melodyne are very liberating concepts in the context of new sounds that could be a melody.

[forbidden]

Probably an uneducated decision but I'm going to go with animal collective

[DiegoSapiens]

Forgot about man like Hans Zimmer.

Who is constantly in trouble for plagarism, who writes the most cliched music for a long time and who basically writes small segments of music that is handed to a team that assemble the soundtracks like an assembly line.

He is the worst commercial cheesy hack and just the thought of him being considered a genius at anything apart from making money is ludicrous.

This isn't one of those times that I'm saying "oh you're wrong" jokingly because it's not to my taste or I think it's the case like with a lot of stuff on here. I genuinely believe that he is the most over rate composer of all time based on my knowledge of how he works.

For me coki is the greatest genious of rhythm.