# Listening recommendations — preferably not film scores — for a Nicholas-Hooper-like sound.



## OneOverZero (May 23, 2021)

One piece of advice I keep hearing: don't listen exclusively to film scores.
This makes sense to me — the wider your experience, the more original your own creations become. What you listen to bleeds into your head and changes what you write. Everyone's style evolves as they assimilate new musical ideas.
Not to mention film scores, while very complex, often lack certain types of complexity that other genres demand.

The hard part is: there's a flavor I'd really like to blend into my own work, but I've only encountered it in a tiny handful of movies, and never outside film scoring. The _Half-Blood Prince_ score hits that spot perfectly, and _Order of the Phoenix_ hits it well. However, two films are not enough to understand a style. Nicholas Hooper isn't exactly prolific, so it's difficult to pick apart the composer's style and the director's artistic choices. However, if I compare them to _Harry Potter_ scores by other composers, I can isolate Hooper's fingerprint.

I'd like to study that flavor to figure out how it works, but I need examples of the style from other artists and from outside the franchise. For those unfamiliar with Hooper, he's a bit like a less-caffeinated-sounding Desplat. There's a focus and definition to everything that has nothing to do with the orchestration or the room; it's from further upstream, detectable even when I play the music on a badly-tuned piano.

Outside of the film scoring world, which artist(s) or genre(s) should I listen to for that kind of flavor?


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