Like a lot of kids my age, I would occasionally turn on Transformers for the cartoon du jour. I mean, c’mon - what can top the combination of cool cars, trucks, and planes AND evil robots bent on world domination fighting noble robots dedicated to saving humankind from their clutches? It’s a perfect combo! I even had a few of the toys, and yes, I will admit to making that cool swooshing noise as I unfolded a Lamborghini Diablo into a good guy robot. So imagine my surprise when one of my favorite composers, Steve Jablonsky, teamed up with producer Michael Bay to score a live-action remake of the timeless animated classic. The result: Transformers, which landed the spot of the action movie of the summer. Not bad for a kid’s cartoon show.
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Today’s Independence Day! Unless you’re not from the USA, in which case you’re probably a smidge annoyed by the fact that we get to take the day off, shove pig parts cooked a dozen different ways down our throats all day, then watch enough explosions to turn the Swiss Alps into The Flattest Place on Earth go off overhead, then go home and blow our neighbor’s lawns up, all because we’re American and we can! This, by the way, is a somewhat disturbing trend in this country, doing things because we can. But I’ll leave the nepotism out of it if you promise not to start a political flame war in the comments. Please do not feed the trolls.
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mounty’s corner would like to officially extend birthday greetings to John Williams, American film score composer and noted conductor. Mr. Williams is 75 years old today! In honor of his life and work, I suggest you find a good film score or Boston Pops recording and listen to it. Some suggestions:

• The Patriot (which is what I have going right now)
• Any Star Wars soundtrack
• Hook
• Saving Private Ryan
• John Williams: By Request (some of the best themes performed by the Boston Pops)

Feel free to leave your favorite JW score in the comments section, too!

A friend at lunch told me about two excellent articles over at The Escapist that soundtrack lovers, gamers, and symphonic classical buffs alike should really read. The first article (the one he sent me) is entitled Sephiroth Saves the Symphony - you Final Fantasy geeks out there might pick up on that name; for the rest of us who didn’t immediately recognize it (yes, I said “us”), Sephiroth is (one of?) the main antagonist(s) in FF VII; for more info, feel free to educate yourselves on Wikipedia. Click for more…

For a while now a great deal of my background music listening has come from movie soundtracks. When you think about it, this kinda makes sense. After all, soundtracks were composed with the specific intent of being background music for a film, so it makes sense that it would be good background music for other things, too. Shifting gears: one of the things I enjoy most about grad school is the flexibility I get when choosing assignments and lines of study. Undergrad was a lot of “write about this, research that, etc.”, whereas grad school is more “give me something that vaguely has to do with Romantic-era music.” One of my courses last semester might as well have been entitled “Intro to Musicology” - it’s real title was “Research and Writing in Music” - and was structured to teach us grad students how to properly research, format, and present a music critique in front of a scholarly audience. (Insert gratuitous link to Dial “M” for Musicology here, where you can read the mind of real live musicologists.)
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