> Excellent work, especially synthesizing responses from multiple interviews
> and making it all flow! Some thoughts:

Thank you! And thanks for reading!

> - I thought the choice to focus on the 7th interval in the theme was maybe
> the best one they made in this score, so I was glad to hear Fleming's
> perspective on that. It's the most compelling and emotional moment in the
> original theme, and though I haven't seen the film, it sounds like that
> fits perfectly with the emphasis on his humanity.

> - I had to laugh when Murphy mentioned Hendrix. No joke, my first thought
> on hearing the guitar versions of the theme, and then again as I read
> through debates about the 'punk' themes of the story and score, was 'if
> you want to hear how to ACTUALLY make an iconic theme punk rock, look at
> The Star-Spangled Banner.' Like I said in the earlier thread, this score's
> manipulation of the theme, while effective at times, is decidedly not punk
> in any way. I imagine Murphy's initial noodling was much more energetic
> and aggressive than the fairly sanitized final product.

Yeah, that's very fair. I've seen other people latch onto the "guitars = punk" false equivalency in talking about this score, and I give Murphy and Fleming credit for not trying to spin that the final score was punk rock in some way.

> - Fleming offered a really great summary of the last 25 years of film
> scoring trends: 'The sound of a score can be as much of a part of the
> character as the theme itself.' I think that's a super apt description of
> what has been in vogue. Very curious to hear what takes over next.

Oh yeah, and it ties into conversations you and I have had about the big trends shifting from ostinatos to textures as the sort of foundation of a score.

> - Related to the bullet above, I'm surprised to hear they were all so
> worried about the theme manipulations being 'risky.' When talking about
> film score fanatics, sure, there's risk (to say the least!), but I think a
> heavily simplified version of a recognizable bit of music is incredibly
> safe and easy to digest. At this point, I'd say it's almost as safe as an
> old-fashioned blast of the theme as it was originally written.

1. Never underestimate how obsessive superhero fans can get haha. 2. Look at the reaction here to what they did and tell me they were wrong to be worried!

> - I appreciated Murphy's point about not just applying an instrument to a
> character. I think I agree about preferring themes being manipulated in
> all sorts of ways across instruments to identifying themes by the
> instrument they always feature on.

For sure. I think there are cases where it works really well, but it's not a hard and fast rule.