So What Are you Reading?: Generations
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My first encounter with REH was around 1978, when I picked up a used copy of The Hour of the Dragon. It was a good time to discover Conan. At the time, there were three Berkley books of unedited Howard Conan stories and twelve volumes of Conan from L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, with occasionally edited Howard Conan stories, Howard stories about other characters rewritten to become Conan stories, and brand new Conan stories by de Camp and/or Carter. One thing de Camp and Carter got right was keeping most of the focus on short stories rather than novels. And then of course there were the Marvel comics. And by 1979 or so Ace put out a couple more novels and then Bantam did a run of six books, and then around 1982 Tor took over. I gave up maybe a dozen books into the Tor run. Got back in when Del Rey did its three volumes of pure REH Conan, and I've read one or two of the new Titan line of novels. Some of Tor's writers, like Robert Jordan, proved it's way too easy to fall into a formula writing Conan, but the new writers seem a bit more interesting.
My condolences for your loss.
There are edited versions of the Conan stories? Does anyone know if the editions that look like this are edited or unedited?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6606301-the-coming-of-conan-the-cimmerian
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6606301-the-coming-of-conan-the-cimmerian
Oh sorry, my mistake.
I'm finishing up Star Wars: The High Republic Phase III with some of the novels and comics I have yet to get to. There are some great bits and characters in this project, but I don't think Marchion Ro and his group were interesting enough to warrant this many titles that deal with defeating him. I hope that Trials of the Jedi puts an end to his villainy one way or the other.
In the world of Trek, I am just starting Lost to Eternity. I'm a big fan of STIV and Gillian, so my hopes are high.
In the world of Trek, I am just starting Lost to Eternity. I'm a big fan of STIV and Gillian, so my hopes are high.
That's one of the Del Rey editions. Those are the good ones. Not only do they stay close to Howard's originals, they sometimes include earlier drafts as bonus features. The de Camp and Carter books reportedly revised Howard's stories to make them better fit the chronology of Conan's life they were building through their series of books. The Del Rey series also has good collections of Howard's Kull, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn stories, as well as collections of some of his less well known characters. Bear in mind that these are not the most enlightened books about sex and race you're likely to read. But neither are Ian Fleming's James Bond books, which were written two or three decades later.
I'm now down to the epilogue of John Williams: A Composer's Life. The last subdivision of the last chapter was pretty much a statement of the same conclusion I'd drawn before Greiving had even begun to write this opus: Williams began his film scoring career at a time when the worst thing a critic could say about a serious concert piece would be to call it "film music," at a time when anything written since the 1930s that was even remotely accessible to the general public was loudly disparaged as hack, and at a time when filmmakers had all but abandoned anything resembling what Korngold, Rozsa, Herrmann, and so forth had been doing. And by calmly scoring films with music that was both artistically valid and completely accessible, as well as being in whatever idiom and genre is best suited to the subject matter, and doing the best work he knows how to do, with profound humility and modesty, he has managed to either convert or outlive the overwhelming majority of his critics, and to pave the way for Goldsmith, Horner, and a good many of the people scoring films today.
A bit of an overstatement, given that Goldsmith's feature film debut was a year before Williams's, and they were about equally prolific in film and TV scoring from the late 1950s onward, though Goldsmith probably had the edge.
But Goldsmith would not have been heard in a concert hall, except possibly on a "pops" program.
Williams paved the way for film music to be taken seriously.
Williams paved the way for film music to be taken seriously.
I did say a bit of an overstatement. Clarifying a specific detail is not an argument against the overall premise. But I would disagree with giving Williams exclusive credit for legitimizing film music. Certainly he played a central part, but his contemporaries deserve some credit too, and Goldsmith was one of the main ones. Every work has a bias, and a biography of Williams is naturally going to center his contribution. But the reality will always be more complex than what a single book chooses to emphasize.
How are you finding it? I started it but couldn’t get through the introduction—it read like somewhat overdone hagiography, and I say this as a huge Williams fan.
See my previous postings on it. It's extremely long, and extremely dense, and it's not a fast read. And Greiving has a tendency to mercilessly pan any film he deems to be unworthy of Williams. But it's worth it.Have you ever been to Hollywood Bowl on John Williams Night?
I have. Many times. Starting sometime in the mid-1980s, when I first began attending live concerts that weren't school field trips, and continuing beyond the last time he conducted even part of a concert at the Bowl. That's roughly four decades. I've also heard at least one or two interviews, most notably on KUSC's Evening Program, before Jim Svejda retired. And in all that, two things quickly became apparent: first, his absolute modesty and humility, and second, his willingness, no, eagerness to acknowledge the giants upon whose shoulders he stands.
I distinctly recall also having attended at least one other film composer's Bowl appearance, either Goldsmith or Horner. There are now very few weekend Bowl concerts that I attend (mainly because weekend programs have been increasingly given over to acts that probably have such Bowl founders as Artie Mason Carter and Christine Wetherill Stevenson spinning in their graves), but I'm always there for the Tchaikovsky Spectacular, and for any John Williams Night where there's a chance he will show up in person, even without actually conducting (and if they decided to have a posthumous Jerry Goldsmith or James Horner tribute night, I'd be there for those as well).
For most of the first two decades of Bowl appearances, he would spend much of the first half of the program conducting cues from other composers' film scores. Mostly Herrmann, Rozsa, and so forth (and yes, I'm pretty sure that Goldsmith occasionally came up, along with Raksin). He wasn't just working to encourage the public (and the critics, and the academics) to take his film scores seriously; he was quietly, humbly, modestly working to encourage them to take all film music seriously.
In a previous post on the subject, I mentioned that a major European orchestra (the Vienna Philharmonic, as I recall), when he already felt he was loading them down with too much of his own stuff, begged him to conduct the Imperial March. Now if I were an orchestral musician, finding myself under his baton, I'd have probably been more interested in Yoda's Theme (and if I'd found myself under Goldsmith's baton, I'd have probably begged for the "TMP Road Show Overture" orchestration of Ilia's Theme. But it was Williams who found himself engaged by major European orchestras to conduct his own stuff, and it was Williams who found the musicians of those orchestras begging for more.
Oh, and speaking of taking film music seriously, did I mention that I have always regarded it as almost criminal that the producers of TRON decided to cut approximately the last half (basically, right after the end of the Royal Albert Hall organ solo) of Wendy's end title music, and replace it with a song from Journey?
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