Alexandre Desplat wins Best Score at Golden Globes

Winners are listed here.

Alexandre Desplat won for "The Painted Veil", the score features Lang Lang playing piano.

And Prince won best song for "The Song of the Heart" in "Happy Feet". Very old school, it's Prince being Prince while playing it very safe...check out this dancing penguin music video using footage from the movie.

Brian Eno & Will Wright Talk the Score for "Spore"

Spore is a highly anticipated video game from Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, The Sims, and other Sim-games. Brian Eno is creating the score for the game.

Spore will let players create microbes which evolve into interplanetary civilizations (check out the Flash intro at the official Spore site or the Google Video of a demo by Will Wright...it's cool).

Eno's score for Spore will reflect the algorithmic nature of Sim worlds, where simple rules give rise to complex, elegant systems. Eno is using software to generate ambient clips which plan to never repeat during your lifetime (much less during gameplay).

There's a Brian Eno / Rob Wright podcast talking about all this at recent a Long Now Foundation seminar (down street here in San Francisco). Start 4 minutes 50 seconds in, where they start speaking.

Eno talks about the experience of "generating" the music from the bottom up, using simple rule-based models to explore ideas rather accidentally. "It's making seeds rather than forests", says Eno. He cites wind chimes as perhaps the simplest example of such a "generative" musical system.

WWMNA wrote about the event:

(Eno) went on to demonstrate a simple software called "The Shuffler" which he uses to create fragments for the soundtrack of Spore and which even with a simple combination of samples possibly would never create the same composition twice within a lifetime.

All rather opposite from traditional top-down method of having an idea in your head and sculpting it in the studio. I found it an interesting discussion for composers, they're brilliant guys to listen to.

(Also you can check out some of Eno's ambient albums here...)

Hat tip: Eno to generate Spore soundtrack - Joystiq

Composers Commonly Collaborate on Compostitions

Jeff Bond has a nice feature article in the Hollywood Reporter on the increasing number of collaborations in film scores in recent years. It seems that technology is making it easier for composers to pass tracks back and forth on their Macs. Says Andrew Gross, who collaborated with John King (of Dust Brothers fame) for "Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny":

When we work together, we both use Apple's Logic Pro. Even though he's in New York and I'm in L.A., it's very simple. We can transfer our files to each other over the Internet and then double click on the session, and we're off and running. I can immediately open his files and start tweaking.

Guess I better switch from Digital Performer to Logic Audio and soon.
However not everyone loves collaborating. Says James Newton Howard, on doing "Batman Begins" with Hans Zimmer:

In most multiple composer situations, you find it because someone got nervous about the music and insisted that somebody else come in and help. 'Batman' could have been a disaster, but the kind of schizophrenic nature of Bruce Wayne and the Batman character lent itself to a wide interpretation musically. And even though we did collaborate on almost every cue, there are areas I worked on more than Hans and areas Hans worked on more than I did. I think we'll repeat it hopefully many times in the future, but overall, I don't know anyone who wouldn't feel hemmed in and restricted by having to compromise with another composer

Well, I love the "Batman Begins" soundtrack, and I don't think it sounds schizophrenic at all.

Anyway, the good news is if every film has 2 composers, there will be twice as much work out there! ;-) Read the whole thing.