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Michael Kamen Appreciation Thread

TimCox

Senior Member
So while he was fairly highly regarded in his time it seems like Michael Kamen has sort of drifted away from people's consciousnesses. Do you have a favorite of his?

Personally I have to give it up to Band of Brothers which is one of the key scores to throttle me towards composing. Some of his action writing got some (fair) criticism which I think was more representative of trying not to go with the status quo.

Any opinions? Love him, hate him?
 
Absolutely love his score for The Iron Giant. What stands out is the 'classical' quality of it, in contrast to 1999's other big animated films, Toy Story 2 and Tarzan, which leant a lot more on popular music-style tracks amidst underscore. This might be because Kamen didn't record it to picture and conducted it more like a symphony recording, or because he was harking back to a bygone era of film music, but either way I absolutely love it. Iron Giant and Band of Brothers are the two Kamen scores I probably come back to most.
 
my intro to Mr. Kamen, and one of the things that reignited my interest in film music was "Edge of Darkness", a collaboration with Eric Clapton (or so the story goes?)


Acoustic Piano and Electric Guitar is one of my favorite combinations. When I was in 7th grade (you'll never get the exact year out of me) one of the teachers showed us a movie to get us excited about ski club. It worked, on a couple of levels. That was the first time I recognized the effect the music had on the image (there were no spoken words, it was just gorgeous footage of some great skiing and the music - I can't imagine how dated it would look today, I can't really imagine how they shot it<G>!)

This does not diminish any of his other work, and especially his concert work, but every time I hear this I stop and listen.
 
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