Due to a conflicting post-production schedule with The Post (2017), director Steven Spielberg’s longtime collaborator—John Williams—was unavailable to contribute a score for Ready Player One. In his stead, Spielberg chose Alan Silvestri, a composer with whom he had never worked directly. Considering the film’s futuristic setting and Silvestri’s oeuvre of early-career, synth-heavy scores, it was not difficult to imagine Spielberg requesting musical nostalgia in the vein of Daft Punk’s score for the successful Tron: Legacy (2010)—a primarily electronic offering. Instead, Spielberg tasked Silvestri with crafting a score inspired by now-classic adventure films of the 80s and 90s, almost all of which leaned heavily on the orchestra.

Utilizing a dizzying array of techniques, musical devices, and direct quotations, Silvestri references some of his most iconic scores of that era: Back to the Future, The Predator, Contact, The Abyss, and Forrest Gump, among others. The result is a score anachronistic to current practice, a nostalgia-generating artifact that perfectly complements the film’s nostalgia-laden setting—a task few contemporary composers likely could have convincingly achieved. This paper examines the orchestration, musical devices, techniques, and quotations that directly contribute to the nostalgic success of Silvestri’s score for Ready Player One, contextualizing contemporary practice through the lens of past convention.

—Paper Presented at the annual Music and the Moving Image Conference in Spring 2019.

It is often assumed in discussions surrounding film and film music that film is always the dominant structural element—music is always subordinate. However, I don't think that's necessarily always the case, and rather, film and film music draw structure from each other in ways that often leave them on equal footing. This video essay discusses several examples meant to illuminate my point.

The accompanying video extracts my graphical representation of the reconstructed sequence from The Phantom Menace, and displays it with and without the dialogue and effects audio.

If you've heard it, you'll recognize it almost immediately. James Horner's danger theme is ubiquitous to film music, and helped earn Horner a reputation for reusing music between scores. Of course, Horner is not the only film composer to have reused music between scores.

This video essay analyzes and contextualizes this phenomenon in film music. Part one defines self-plagiarism, and provides examples to both support that definition and display its universality among film composers. Part two examines why self-plagiarism occurs in the industry, and discusses some of the ramifications of reusing music between film scores.

These four videos are standalone versions of sequences from my video essay on self-plagiarism in film music.

Included videos:

James Horner's Danger Theme

James Horner's Self Plagiarisms

Self-Plagiarism in Hollywood Film Music

Self(?)-Plagiarism in The Curse of the Black Pearl and Remote Control Productions