Ah, so you're one of those then....
I guess I'm an Arnold sceptic.
And I pose the standard question: When you picture in your mind, "ideal" Bond music - what exactly do you hear? And if the answer is anything remotely resembling John Barry's approach, then a subsequent question is necessary: How exactly does Arnold differ so greatly and what, exactly, makes his work such an atrocity?
My ideal Bond music would be a cross between Barry and Stravinsky/Moussorgsky/Debussy/Shostakovitch/Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel. Sort of early 20th Century to late 19th Century classical. Raw, barbaric, sensual, erotic, mysterious and powerful. Basically an amalgamation of that with John Barry's brand of cool jazz which took hold in the mid 20th Century. Barry himself was greatly influenced by many of these composers through his orchestration and technique, so it's not much of a stretch, along with Jazz which owed a great debt to classical modernism.
All in all would be almost entirely orchestral based, with practically no synthesisers (maybe with the occasional one here and there). No synth beats for percussion, just 1 Bass Drum, 5 Timpani, gong, tam tam, cymbals, snare drum, bongos, glockenspiel etc... Very large orchestra, lots of rare instruments - i.e. contrabass clarinets, alto flutes, conch shells etc....
Where Arnold falls short considerably is that the synth beats most often don't work, and it almost feels like he programs the beat first then writes traces of repetitive string ostinatos and brass stabs around it. A sort of laziness of scoring, where one sits at a MIDI keyboard within seriously planning ahead on the overall conception, as one does when writing on sheet music.
This leads to derivative melodies, and obligatory harmonies that seem taken from various better composed sources from the past that he probably doesn't even know their history).
Personally I think Arnold should do a Vangelis and stick mainly to synthesisers, since that's where his natural talent is. When he tries to compose a mainly orchestral Bond score the electronics come back, and often their better thought out than his orchestral stuff.
His scores are far from atrocities even if I might talk about them as they were. They're mostly workmanlike and efficient scores, but then that is all the film industry really cares about film composition these days. I'm more irritating by someone saying Arnold needs to stay. What about some new talent and imagination? What's wrong with thinking outside of the box?
Cheers
The Shark.
