Niave about Elfman – Help

[Alethea]

My favorite Elfman Soundtracks are all obveous one’s. Despite my love for Elfman i’m vary niave to his work. Young and niave, your gonna have to help me out. What else does he do? Where do i go to listen to it?
-Alethea age 15

[Mr. Dantz]

Which ones? My favorite of his is Nightmare Before Christmas. You should also check out Sleepy Hollow, Edward Scissorhands, Family Man, and Dolores Claiborne (both Family Man and Dolores Claiborne are rare to find, though).

Of course, you’ll want to hear everything he’s done, because he’s the greatest living composer.

[Spider-Fan]

Good, he’s hooking the fans younger and younger. He got me when I was 13…wow, four years now. Check out “Spider-Man” for it’s sheer originality and gorgeous sound, and definitely check out his action scores like “Mission: Impossible” (the first Tom Cruise movie) “Mars Attacks!” and “Men in Black.” I think that genre is where he really excels above most other composers, although he’s said in the past that it’s not his favorite type of music to write.

[Ryan Keaveney]

Hi Alethea – you made it to the board!

If you have RealPlayer you can listen to a lot of the clips on this site.

http://elfman.filmmusic.com/media.htm

When the site redesign is finally finished all the audio will be redone as MP3 files. That should be fun…

Ryan

[Thor]

Alethea Wrote:

---

> My favorite Elfman Soundtracks are all obveous
> one’s. Despite my love for Elfman i’m vary niave
> to his work. Young and niave, your gonna have to
> help me out. What else does he do? Where do i go
> to listen to it?
> -Alethea age 15

Hey Alethea, and welcome. You’re about the same age I was when I got into Elfman’s music. I think you’d better start with the more “easier” ones that don’t have a lot of the “difficult” music he would compose after MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE. So that would be the PEE WEE scores, BATMAN, EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, BLACK BEAUTY and NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS. Or his two latest scores, which in many ways are throwbacks to his old style, namely CORPSE BRIDE and CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. But perhaps you’re already familiar with these scores.

The best tip I could give you is to seek out the two Elfman compilations out there – MUSIC FOR A DARKENED THEATRE (volumes 1 and 2). They contain lots of themes ouside the most “obvious ones”, as you call them. A great start.

Once you’ve become familiar with Elfman’s film music, there’s also the work he did with 80’s pop band Oingo Boingo which is really cool. But that depends if you’re interested in pop music from the 80’s, of course.

Good luck,

TJ

P.S. the correct spelling of the word “naïve” is, well…”naïve”. And it really means to “take everything for granted” more than it means to don’t know much about something. Just a friendly heads-up

[KWashi]

The “Music for a Darkened Theatre” compilations are great for getting to know Elfman, and they highlight the great parts of the scores represented (atleast the second volume) but I HIGHLY recommend Batman. It’s my absolute favorite CD and, in my opinion, Elfman’s best score.

[Author]

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