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Thanks Elfboy

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Hi TJ,

Thank you so much for taking time to review these videos. I’m always happy to hear opinions, critics and advices. And your comments are really constructive!

About the context of the concert… Well, I’ve been playing concerts of my own music and songs in Geneva for 12 years now (I started when I was 17). I always wanted to do a concert dedicated to the music and songs of Danny Elfman, but I never thought there would be enough people that would be interested. Last year, I did a John Williams concert that really attracted a big audience. With time, more and more people started to come to my concerts, and I realized that a lot of people kept asking me about my inspirations. So, I thought maybe it was time to organize this dream concert I had in mind since I was 12.
Hopefully, a lot of people showed up, and almost all of them left the concert with the decision of buying a few Elfman and Boingo albums, which really made me happy! I take that as a success!

I’m happy you like the selection. I had prepared other pieces, like Sleepy Hollow, Mars Attacks, Dick Tracy and others, but the program was way too long…
You’re totally right, I must admit I cut the BeetleJuice theme, mainly because there were too many wrong notes in my opinion. I made two MAJOR mistakes during the concert : the first one was to hide behind the pedal. As you noticed, I keep it down too long, and it made everything sound a little to heavy, and nonchalent. The second mistake is that I played all the main themes Up Tempo. Everything was too fast, maybe because I was worried the concert would be to long for the audience… I don’t know… But it ended up being too fast, and too hard to keep precise without wrong notes…
It’s always a lot easier to play my own music and songs… But the stress and pressure is higher when you play someone else’s music, specially when you respect that artist that much!

I adapted all the pieces myself for the piano. I refused to use the available piano sheet music, because they’re so simplified that you can’t hear more than two seperate melodic lines.
So, I decided to adapt sometimes 3 to 4 seperate orchestral lines, it ended up being pretty hard to play and maybe I didn’t have enough time to practice it properly.

Anyway, I think a lot of your commentaries are right, maybe the sound quality doesn’t help either… The rehearsals were more precise, with less pedal and better tempos…
Hopefully, I will do this concert again in another hall, and I will have the opportunity to progress, and correct these few issues

Thank You so much for your comments, I really appreciate that.

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Thank You Ryan

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Ok, so maybe Elfman had come up with the main theme before that… You don’t need to have a finished movie to compose a theme… I remember his story about being on an airplane when he got the idea… Maybe that was before Scandalous…

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Well, actually, if you really listen closely, the 5 notes motif of Prince’s Scandalous theme IS Elfman’s Batman’s theme. The only difference is that the second note is one semi-tone lower. Instead of being : A – B – C – F – E (Elfman’s theme), it’s : A – Bflat – C – F – E !!!
These are the same notes !

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Oh my God, Danny brought back that Sommersby-sound I loved so much, with guitar and beautiful string arrangements!!!!

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Wow, it really sounds fantastic. I never thought it would be so thematic! I know these are very short samples, but I can already identify TWO very distinct themes, which is amazing.

It’s like a mixture of the percussive and electronic Planet of the Apes, with the melodic sensitivity of a Nightbreed, or a Hellboy 2.

Can’t wait to hear the whole thing !

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I think the concert is going to be filmed and recorded but I’m not sure yet.
If it’s not the case, I will try to record it myself but the sound quality might not be very good.

Anyway, I’ll try to upload some videos of the rehearsals on youtube next week.

Thank you so much for the interest.

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I don’t know if that’s the score or not… But I know for sure that the score has been composed AND recorded. Deborah Lurie finished the recording sessions a few weeks ago…

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I don’t know… I don’t have any other info…

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Yes, it would, obviously, be easier, but it’s far from being original. The fact that we’re sending a Batman card, with his music in it, that travelled all around the world, and that he can actually have in his hands is very different from electronic birthday wishes. Then, who has Danny’s e-mail adress??? It’s way more complicated. With the mail, we can just simply contact his agency, or we could send it to Richard and ask if he can give it to him…

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We should do it.

Maybe we should start a new topic : Add your name and adress if you want to sign Elfman’s Birthday card.
And then, we can decide in which order we have to send each other the card, so that it doesn’t travel from one side of the wolrd to the other, everyday…

Oh, and we have to be carefull not to write too much, and leave space for the next persons to come.

Now, we have to see who’s buying the card!

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Wow, I love the wanted theme so much, I can’t wait to hear it. I really hope they release the video game score. Some Game Scores are so amazing, like Fable, of course, but also like the last Harry Potter game…

We should start looking for samples

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It was in 1988. I used to watch the Beetlejuice cartoons and I really loved the theme music. I live in Switzerland, and it was, at that time, pretty hard to find soundtracks on cd… A few years later (1992), I heard the “Birth Of The Pinguin” theme in the Super Nintendo game “Batman Returns”, and I had to finish the game to finally be able to see who was the composer of the soundtrack…

The first cd of Danny Elfman I found was the “Music For A Darkened Theater, vol 1”. At that time, I didn’t speak english, and the only word I remembered from the cd title was “DARKENED”…. I remember I used to talk to my friends about Danny Elfman, by saying : “It’s the DARKENED guy”… Since that time, the words “dark” and “elfman” always seem to get along pretty well… After all this, I found the Forbidden Zone cd in 1995, and I fell in love with Oingo Boingo… Sadly, it was the wrong year to get to know them, since it was the year the stopped playing… That’s how this whole thing started…

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Yeah, I saw that… After the song, there was a big shot of him and you could see him applaude very seriously… He really seemed disappointed… They kind of play with him, like they do with Brad Pitt. The nominations come, but nothing really happens… It muss be depressing… I really thought this was the one, and he seemed like he believed in it too, for once… I was really susprised to see him there…!

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I have an old interview on VHS, that was shot the day of the score release. And Elfman speaks about how his music was recieved compared to the PRINCE album for Batman, and how he thinks it’s gonna be the same with the Madonna album in the case of Dick Tracy. He also comments on how hard it is to work with a director who knows music, and how better it is with Tim Burton.

The interview is pretty funny, because Danny was in the middle of his DARK AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL tour, with Boingo, and everybody know this was the biggest tour ever for Boingo (they even went to Brazil). Danny seems soooo tired and annoyed with the questions. The journalist even says : “how do you do all these concerts, it sounds like it’s gonna turn you into a zombie”, and Elfman answers : “Well, it did!”

I wish I could put this interview on youtube, but it’s pretty hard, since it comes from a VHS…

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Wow, amazing!!!

Now, here’s what I wanna know : where did we get the info that Danny wasn’t doing it in the first place???
Personnally, I still had hope, and I had not heard anything about anyone else or Danny scoring the movie…

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I still had hope Elfman would be scoring the movie…. Is someone else working on it? I had no idea….

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Wow… Thanks Ryan,

I couldn’t identify everything. But here’s what I found : Big Fish, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, Nacho Libre, Darkman, Scrooged (where did you find this?!!??), Sleepy Hollow.

I have no idea what the 1st track is, and the one I loved the most is that beautiful christmassy melody, right after Darkman… What is it ???

-Eric

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Merry Christmas, Scary Christmas, and Haunted New Year everyone

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Well, both men are speaking about total different things… Elfman is talking about the approach, and the way a score can shine when sound effects don’t ruin everything…
On the other hand, Shore is talking about the quality of the recordings…

They’re not talking about the same thing… A score can be AMAZING, even if, sadly, the recording quality is poor. But money and a good recording will never change a crappy score into a wonderfull piece…!

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Ok guys… I have to say I was 100% wrong about that score… I just can’t stop listening to the cd…
I guess your comments helped me to open my eyes and ears and discover this amazing score

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Got my copy today…
The cd leaves me the exact same impression I had when I listened to “A Simple Plan” , “A Civil Action” and “Instinct” exactly 10 years ago… I’m sure the score works perfectly within the movie, and I admire Elfman’s efforts to try new atmospheric scores, but it really isn’t the kind of music I expect when I think of Danny Elfman.
I really loved Big Fish, because the melodies were beautiful. I deeply loved Charlotte’s Web for the same reasons… But, here, except a brief succession of notes, I don’t identify a distinct melody… Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad, it’s pretty interesting, but it’s far from what I had hoped… I’m still hoping for a score that would remind me of “Black Beauty” or “Sommersby”…

I know that most of you guys won’t agree with me, and I understand that, but I can’t get excited with this score the way I felt when I heard the “success montage” from wanted, or even the score for Hellboy 2.
Let’s hope that time will help me appreciate this new score (as it did with Civil Action and SImple Plan)…
Or let’s simply hope history will repeat itself and we’ll experience a “Elfmanish come back” like 1999 with “Sleepy Hollow”, with the 2009 “Wolf Man” score…

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Too bad… Wish at least one of us could get one of the signed copies…

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Come on, guys, Ryan is a finalist, let’s ALL vote for him!!!

“Michael Vick’s Nightmare Before Christmas”

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