Jóhanns Jóhannssonar tónskálds er minnst víða um heim í kjölfar andláts hans s.l. föstudag. Tvær greinar, í Variety annarsvegar og The Guardian hinsvegar, vekja sérstaka athygli þar sem fjallað er ítarlega um tónlist hans og það sem hún stóð fyrir.
Í The Guardian skrifar Joe Muggs um músikferil Jóhanns og greinilegt að Muggs þekkir vel til hans. Hann skrifar meðal annars:
After hearing of his death, I found my notes from when I saw him at the Barbican in 2012: “He makes music for endings, shut-down mines, obsolete mainframe computers and failed utopias … the notes fade away, the stories have already finished, everything ends.”
Og ennfremur:
Jóhannsson has been appreciated more recently not only as a film composer, but as a forerunner of the post-classical or neoclassical movement, which has turned the likes of Nils Frahm into stars. He didn’t seem shy of the association, and rightly so.
For all that this has led us to a lot of bland minimalist piano and orchestra pieces designed for nothing but “relaxation” playlists, it’s also led to a place for orchestral composers who are neither reacting against nor pastiching the classical tradition, but for better and worse creating their own spaces.
Jóhannsson has been the epitome of the composer who understood how to incorporate guitar and underground electronica, to reach mass audiences, to not kowtow to the classical establishment, yet never to compromise in the way that many clumsy attempts at fusion can. The comparison between him and Hans Zimmer, who usurped him as Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack composer, is stark indeed.
Despite the undeniable darkness and existential horror in his work, Jóhannsson was a complex musician, and the beauty that surrounds that darkness is important. Arrival, after all, is overwhelmingly a film about hope, and his soundtrack reflected that.
Peter Debruge skrifar í Variety að kvikmyndatónlist Jóhanns hafi boðið áhorfendum að hugsa í stað þess að segja þeim hvernig þeim á að líða. Debruge skrifar meðal annars:
Over the span of just a handful of film scores, Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson expanded our idea of what film music can be, earning Oscar nominations for “Sicario’s” sinister, evil-incarnate soundscape to the relatively upbeat, mind-racing energy that drove the Stephen Hawking biopic “The Theory of Everything.” Now, at age 48, this exciting young virtuoso has died, and though that tragically means a career cut short, expect to hear the echoes of his influence for years to come.
Þá hefur Spotify sett saman spilunarlista með úrvali af verkum Jóhanns:
