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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Classic movie music seems to be doing well - like the Star Wars music, and the Lord of the Rings music. The Game of Thrones theme music is very good, too.

What I complain about is the decline of the trumpet. Modern music has completely abandoned it in favor of terrible synthesized horns.

If you want to hear how incredibly good horn playing can be, Maurice Andre and Herb Alpert's horn playing are just sublime.

Chicago was a horn band, and I like their tunes, but the horn skill was rather pedestrian.

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Indeed, and enjoyed regularly by packed concert hall audiences with a full live orchestra. Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Ennio Morricone etc. are arguably the great classical composers of the late 20th century.

Classical purists might argue that it's made for visual entertainment and for that reason doesn't count. But if music written for opera and ballet are a legitimate part of the classical canon - and indeed religious music, Bach's masses etc., which equally had a function beyond just existing for their own sake - excluding music from the movies on those grounds feels like little more than snobbery.

The same can be said even of the best video game soundtracks. Not really my world, but I can see the love, skill and artistry that goes in to it.

If you're looking for horns, Mark Ronson's band are worth a listen, they don't have the solo skill of the great jazz players but they hang together well as a band. Solo trumpet wise, Erik Truffaz is worth listening to. Still going strong AFAIK.

NieR soundtracks embody greatness. They are superb. And much more approchable than fil classical works.

Thanks for the tips, will check them out.

> Classic movie music seems to be doing well

Yeah, probably because it's more bound to follow popular tastes than classical music meant to be played only in concert halls. I also like mostly anything by John Williams (Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park etc.), but I'm sure that would be too "pedestrian" for many classic music aficionados (quote from the article "Some of them, such as Korngold and Franz Waxman, were writing film music in Hollywood—a sure way to be dismissed by the anointed"). If you like the Game of Thrones soundtrack, you should also check out the Westworld soundtrack, which is also by Ramin Djawadi - because it's set on Earth, he got to play with reinterpreting pop/rock songs with classical instruments, e.g. "Black Hole Sun" on a (slightly out of tune) player piano or "Seven Nation Army" played with Indian instruments.

The original Star Wars soundtrack, although enjoyable, seems to borrow an embarrassing amount from Gustav Holst's The Planets. I suppose this is partly the problem current composers have - why would a modern Orchestra play something akin to a well established favourite instead of just playing the favourite itself.

It borrows heavily from a number of sources. The main theme is a thinly modified reworking of Korngold's Kings Row.

It's why movie music is a relatively mediocre artform. It's mostly reheated 19th/early 20th century cliches and borrowings with none of the fluency or genius of the originals.

People forget that being able to write for an orchestra isn't proof of genius. The bar is higher than that.

Ravel, Wagner, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Rachmaninov - and others - absolutely kill all of the Hollywood guys.

More interesting are recent TV scores that have been all-electronic and abstract. Chernobyl seems to have broken the trend into the mainstream, but I'm hearing examples on shows like The Mandalorian and Dr Who. They sound a lot fresher than the orchestral blobbery that's more usual, because they're more about evocative sound design than trad synth/sampler sounds.

Thanks for the pointer to Korngold's work, yes can certainly see the resemblance!

The arrangements are much the same, right. But the Star Wars tune is much, much better.

I love The Planets so much I have several versions of it, including Tomita's electronic interpretation of it. I've never noticed a similarity to the Star Wars theme, I'll have to listen again with that in mind!

One thing I think about a lot is that in a lot of artistic fields, there's often a niche for "art loved by artists". Poetry that mostly people who write poetry like. Architecture that mostly architects like. Painters that most people dislike but other painters love. And I think this is somewhat of a recent thing as well (recent as in last 100-200 years or so).

For classical music, I have a theory that instead of splitting into two, it split into three. To overly generalize, there's the mainstream classical music everybody loves to listen to, mostly game/movie/tv soundtracks. There's the classical music that fans and critics of classical music loves (the subject of the article, the avante garde, the neoclassical, etc.). And then the classical music that classical musicians like, which is mostly stuff written by the old great composers (my impression is that classical musicians aspire to play famous old pieces more than they get excited over new pieces).

Once you get below a certain level of success for popular music, you'll find that 75% of the audience is musicians

Trailer music is a thing aswell. Two Steps From Hell has been doing well enough to start releasing their music as regular albums.

> Modern music has completely abandoned it in favor of terrible synthesized horns.

Depends what style of music you are listening to I guess. Natural instruments will always retain their space, but not in pop music. Also there is really, really good synthie guys as well, but they do typically more than just imitate a horn like in the 80s.

Huh, I've never heard any synthetic horns that could "talk" like Herb Alpert. I played a trumpet as a kid, failed miserably at it, but came away with a great appreciation for people who could do it well. And Alpert is as good as it gets. He does far, far more than just play notes. He did pop music - chart toppers for all his albums.

> What I complain about is the decline of the trumpet.

The problem is that the larger the band, the less chance they have of actually earning enough money to be worthwhile.

Consequently, anything that requires multiple musicians is out: string sections, horn sections, etc.

I don’t think the typical horn skill in general is world beating, but a good horn section is my favorite thing about ska bands.

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