MTV recently interviewed composer Howard Shore about his involvement in Guillermo del Toro’s and Peter Jackson’s Hobbit prequels to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Shore confirmed that he has indeed started composing – as was the case with Lord of the Rings, a lot of the musical elements is being sketched out even before there is any footage available. Right now, according to Shore, much of the focus is on …

The current #1 movie at the US box office, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, features a hilarious score by Mark Mothersbaugh. The composer recently posted a totally wacked-out scoring session video on YouTube. Well, it doesn’t focus so much on the actual sessions as it deals with the composer’s frustration with the director of the film, Chris Miller. Watch it below!
The Sony Pictures Animation project, which features the voice …

The Wall Street Journal recently published a brief interview with composer Marvin Hamlisch, discussing his recent return to film scoring with Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant. “Steven loved the energy of the music I did for Bananas, the Woody Allen film. So he called me and there was no way I could say no to Steven Soderbergh,” the composer said about the assignment to score the film, which opened in theatres …

BBC Radio 3 currently focuses a series of programmes on Bernard Herrmann, the legendary composer who is best known for his Alfred Hitchcock scores and the music for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (his first film score) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (his last). Donald Macleod explores the life and work of Herrmann in five programmes, from the first focusing on his early years, to the last, which focuses on Herrmann’s …

Legendary film composer Ennio Morricone was recently featured in an interview conducted by Zenit, “a non-profit international news agency comprising a team of professionals and volunteers who are convinced of the extraordinary richness of the Catholic Church’s message, particularly its social doctrine.” His views on contemporary music in the church as oppposed to classical music has garnered some interest in religious circles. The composer, who is of course best known …

Composer Walter Murphy and conductor John Elg are featured in a great little behind-the-scenes video just added to actor Kevin Pollak’s YouTube channel. The footage is from the Sony Scoring Stage and a session where the score for a new Family Guy episode is being recorded. Murphy, who has been one of two composers (Ron Jones being the other) scoring the popular animated Fox show since its launch in 1999, …

In a new featurette published by director F. Gary Gray on YouTube, composer Brian Tyler explains how he got into film music and gives some insight into the scoring process on his and Gray’s new film, Law Abiding Citizen. Among the things discussed are the piano-driven “motor” theme featured in the film, a result of the director wanting a theme that should go beyond genre expectations and have “a certain …

Variety has just published an interersting article about the collborative process that is behind most of today’s A-list Hollywood film scores. Featured in the article is Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino and Andrew Hollander. Zimmer explains how he leads his team, including music editor Bob Badami, composer Lorne Balfe and orchestrator Bruce Fowler, through the scoring process. Among other things, Zimmer explains that he starts each film by creating a suite …

Composer Mark Isham (Crash, The Mist, Blade) recently talked about his approach to film music in a neat multimedia presentation from Flyp Media. The feature includes an interview with several video documentaries where the composer explains how he work and, among other things, gives a recent example from the scoring of Werner Herzog’s new film, Bad Lietuenant: Port of Call New Orleans. The presentation also offers a few music clips …

Some footage from the concerts at the Fimucité festival at Tenerife, Spain, on July 21-25, has been published on YouTube. One features a snippet from Clint Mansell’s concert with music from his score for The Fountain, another one Diego Navarro conducting Jerry Goldsmith’s ‘Main Title’ from The Final Conflict and a third one showing Mark Snow conducting Goldsmith’s famous Rag from Gremlins. More videos will be available at the Fimucité …