Is the music in Troy homage or theft?

[Musicologist]

To my ears, a lot of the music at the end (burning of Troy, in slow motion) stole a passage directly from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis,” used recently (and to great effect) in Master and Commander.

I went to see this movie with another Musicologist, and we both thought this was the worst movie score we’d ever heard. It was all loud High Points, and as you’ve all been posting, most of it is far too easily identified as … borrowed.

[GuanoLad]

@Kizarvexius

As far as recognizing composers’ styles, I was quite certain on the first viewing of the movie that the score for Pirates of the Carribbean was by Hans Zimmer, as it sounded as if it were lifted right out of Gladiator. I was surprised to see in the closing credits that someone else was listed as the composer. But I was vindicated after all – Hans Zimmer was the producer for the score.

The Pirates score is another example of what went on with Troy - the original composer (in this case Alan Silvestri) was kicked off and they had to scramble around to write a new score really quickly, so they got Hans Zimmer to coordinate several other composers and conductors to cobble something together. It’s not an awful score, but it is somewhat repetitious in places.

[Kamino_Neko]

@Chairman Pow

I doubt that anyone’s going to admit to swiping, especially someone as big as Horner, but then again it looks like he did video games and a comic book adaptation cartoon, so who knows. You find all sorts of odd things on commentary tracks these days.

OK, this bugs me every time I open this thread, but I’ve kept quiet on the assumption that maybe I’m misinterpretting, but I can’t think of any other meaning…

What exactly do these two points have to do with eachother? (BTW, the only video game he has music for is the Titanic video game, which probably used his Titanic movie score.)

[yosemite]

I think a lot of IMDb entries for video game scores are simply adaptations of the film scores. I believe that Jerry Goldsmith (a particular favorite of mine) has some video game or simple video credits that are from Rambo or some other score he did way back when. I don’t believe that he’s had time to score original scores for these things; I just think they used his Rambo themes and gave him credit.

So I’m not sure what the mention of video games has to do with anything either. I don’t know if James Horner ever did any original video game scores (not that I follow his career that carefully), but I’d think not. He’s also quite in demand, as far as I can tell, for regular feature films, and has been for about 20 years.