What makes a movie or song epic? So many times, I've heard and seen movies and soundtracks that are epic. But what makes them that way? I mean soundtracks like "Trinity", "Preliator", and "Lux Aeterna".
A a new subcategory of a movie/song...a new invention of conveyance of thought/new sort of idea that has an ability to be the root for other movies/songs to follow. Sort of like the first sci-fi movie becoming the movie that opends doors to sci-fiction category of movies.
You've likely heard them, but have never been told the title of the piece. Link to Preliator, set to the Final Fantasy movie, Advent Children. The singing you here is chanting in some form of Arabic.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb1XPtMYkzY Lux Aeterna, one of the more famous ones. You've likely heard it.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKLpJtvzlEI Trinity, in one of the only things on youtube I could find it in. The space battle goes very well with it.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIsuhAWVj6o Those are the songs I was talking about. Preliator was made by group called Globus. They specialize in trailer music for movies, hence why "Preliator" is so addictive.
"Epic" originally referred only to a style of ancient poetry like "The Odyssey." Long, complicated, full of drama and adventure. It was one of the first artifacts of the era of written language. Of course the stories that made up the Odyssey had been handed down orally, but each telling had to be largely a creation of the narrator because something that long simply can't be remembered verbatim, so the quality of the story as well as the story itself varied over time. Homer's turning the Odyssey into a written piece made it one of the best-known works of art in the western world. Modern poems of the same type like "Inferno" and "Paradise Lost" are also called epics. "Epic" came to be applied to movies in the 1950s, when the postwar era gave birth to rich, colorful costume dramas like "Quo Vadis" and "Ben Hur." They had some of the qualities of epic poetry but the name was apt more for the fact that their stories tended to be set in ancient times, like epic poetry. Eventually epic films embraced more contemporary long adventure stories like "Lawrence of Arabia." A particular style of orchestral music was scored for these movies, full of dramatic chord progressions, military-sounding brass sections, syrupy romantic backgrounds, etc. Listen to a sound track from any of them and you'll instantly recognize it. Naturally this came to be called "epic music." The "progressive rock" movement of the early 1970s yielded many long, complex songs that seemed to echo the spirit and even some of the sounds of epic film soundtracks. So songs like "Carry On Wayward Son" by Kansas, "Aqualung" by Jethro Tull, "School" by Supertramp, and almost anything by Yes or Renaissance were quickly labeled "epics." Like all superlatives, the word has lost its impact and is now often applied to music that is only somewhat longer and more complex than the average pop ditty.
Though the songs I put up are considered epic music, all designed for movies that are supposed to have a dramatic impact. All of those are far more complex then any pop song. What I consider epic music is music that makes you imagine huge events if you listen to it. For example, one can easily imagine a nuclear war when listening to "Lux Aeterna" Or the rise and fall of an empire when listening to "Preliator". You can also easily imagine a huge battle when listening to "Trinity", ending in a nuclear blast. All those events just sort of fall into place when you listen to them.
