Favourite Composers

Any fans of video game, movie or general classical composers?  I've been listening to the sountrack to "The Fountain" by Clint Mansell all day and I have never heard such beautiful music.  I also love Harry Gregson-Williams (Metal Gear Solid, Man on Fire, Chronciles of Narnia), Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy, Lost Odyssey), Inon Zur (Dragon Age), Jack Wall (Mass Effect), Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings) and John Williams (too many to name!).  So far as classical goes I love Bach, Erik Satie, Mozart, Edvard Greig and Carl Orff.

Good call on Grieg! My favs are Monteverdi, Machaut, Josquin, Orlando, Bach, and Britten.

I really dig Aaron Copeland.

Danny Elfman!

Howard shore is WAY up there, along with John Williams.

For video games, I love the Menu music on Gran Turismo 3, it's composed by some japanese jazz-dudess whose name escapes me, it's proper cool and chilled

Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, of course.

Also Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Smetana, Mahler, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Mendelssohn, Grieg, Elgar, Vaughan-Wiliams, etc. etc. etc.

Morricone, Stravinsky, Ligeti, Penderecki, Xenakis, etc.

someone forgot Zappa.. ;-)

I have a thing for minimalism, so Glass, Reich, etc.  "Weather" by Micheal Gordon is a must have.

Not mentioned yet whom I like: Bartok.

Stravinsky
Chopin
Beethoven
Debussy
Rachmaninoff
Prokofiev
Bartok
Sondheim
Zappa

WilliamMunny


Danny Elfman!

True, true.

For movies, Hans Zimmer (Last Samurai).

For games, David Wise (Donkey Kong Country) and whoever was responsible for the genesis era of Sonic games. I also loved the Okami soundtrack.

And of course Bach.

Matt Bellamy







*hides*

Harry Gregson-Williams's soundtrack to Kingdom of Heaven is great, in my opinion.  Songs like Ibelin keep me uplifted.  

tombojombo


Matt Bellamy







*hides*

I especially love the arrangements on Origin of Symmetry. In fact, that album should be in everyone's collection, it has such a wide appeal, IMO

Chopin
Van Dyke Parks
Michael Giacchino

Metal Gear Solid, Halo, Primal, Bioshock, Final Fantasy. The list goes on. All of those get heavy rotation in my playlist, for sure.

So Harry Gregson-Williams, Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori, Bob & Barn, Garry Schyman, Nobuo Uematsu etc.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Frederic Chopin

How could I have forgotten Tuomas Holopainen from Nightwish?  Their orchestral stuff is mind blowing!

Bear McCreary is incredible.  His work on the new Battlestar Galactica was mind-blowing.  

Ennio Morricone and Igor Stravinsky

as for modern day composers:
Danny Elfman is up there
Howard Shore for sure
and Nobuo Uetmatsu too

David Lang
Michael Gordon
Steven Mackey
John Adams
Claude Debussy
Louis Andriessen
Per Norgard
Bach, Haydn, Beethoven
George Crumb
Gyorgi Ligeti
William Byrd

Film: James Newton Howard, Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Harry Gregson Williams etc

Orchestral: Vaughan-Williams, Beethoven, Dvorak, Shostakovitch, Tchaikovsky

Game: Matt Uleman, Jeremy Soule

Nobou Uematsu is the FUCKING SHIT MAN OF MAGIC to me.  And again, I will use this to plug the underrated Jun Senoue (responsible for early Sonic Music, and new Sonic music, and is a kick ass guitarist ontop of that.)

PeiProgRocker


Bear McCreary is incredible.  His work on the new Battlestar Galactica was mind-blowing.  

+ 1

I love the version of "All Along the Watchtower" he did in the final seasons.

Video Game Composer: Akira Yamaoka - Silent Hill Series

movies
John Williams
Jerry Goldsmith
Philip Glass
Shirley Walker
Trevor Rabin
Alan Silvestri
Mark Isham
Danny Elfman
Henry Mancini
Hans Zimmer
James Horner
Howard Shore
Johnny Mandel
Bernard Herrmann
Elmer Bernstein
Nino Rota
Brian May
Clint Mansell
James Newton Howard
Michael Kamen


videogame
Too many to list. There are lots of videogames with sweet music, but few programmers manage to establish lengthy careers making it. They tend to burn out after a few years at best. Uematsu is a freak of nature.


classical
Mussorgsky
Tchaikovsky
Rachmaninov
Stravinsky
Gerschwin
Bach
Strauss
Beethoven
Mozart
Liszt
Bartók
Mahler
Rossini
Chopin
Debussy
Varèse
Orff

Frank Ticheli is a phenomenal a wind band composer (loads of percussion in there). I think of him as the Prog of Wind Bands.  I highly recommend checking out Vesuvius: http://www.manhattanbeachmusic.com/audio/vesuvius-vhs.mp3 - lots of cool time signatures. He's got a heap of other cool stuff at http://www.manhattanbeachmusic.com/html/mp3.html

DoctorX


movies
...
Henry Mancini
...
 

Televison also for me.  That theme to the tv series Hotel, for example, is the untimate in coolness.

Martin O'Donnell.

Mussorgsky
Isao Tomita (kinda cheating, but wtvr)

Stanley Kubrick

Beethoven, Stravinsky, Berlioz

Fyrus


Stanley Kubrick

wow, did he actually compose music?


by chance, do anyone ever check out any of the modern classical blogs or sites? A lot of them are really entertaining to read as well as extremely informational about current musical trends and techniques. The discussions are pretty lively and productive, but pretentious enough to make even the most die hard prog rock fan humble and modest.I totally recommend checking a few out:

sequenza21
nico muhly
john adams
blognoggle

Bach (due to the easy spelling lol)

and that performance artist who composed the worlds longest symphony (goes for like 500 years or something) true!!!

ahhh Bach *nods thoughtfully*

Favorites:

Beethoven - Classical
Wagner - Opera

I should listen more to classical music as I love it but unfortunately time and resources are limited.

One swedish composer that I love is Hugo Alfvén.

Beethoven's probably my favourite classical composer, but I will admit that I'm pretty clueless when it comes to classical music... 

Soundtracks are right up my street though!  Greg Edmonson is probably best known for the soundtrack to Joss Whedon's doomed (and TOTALLY AWESOME) TV series Firefly, which is great and all, but the music in the Uncharted videogames is absolute perfection, particularly in Uncharted 2.  Since I'm on the subject of videogames, Nobuo Uematsu is an obvious one to bring up; he has such a great ear for melody and his battle themes are the best in the business.  I will admit that I know none of Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's music outside of Shenmue, but it's a great soundtrack so I thought I'd give it a mention (in fact, with that, Richard Jacques' score for Headhunter and Yutaka Minobe & Tatsuyuki Maeda's score for Skies of Arcadia, did the Dreamcast have the best videogame soundtracks ever?!).