Sometimes the ideas that come to you while you're sitting in a recording session waiting for the engineers to fix a broken patch bay are less musical and more apocryphal (in the Biblical sense):
The Film Composer's Prayer
Oh John Williams,[1]
Who art in Hollywood,
Hallowed be thy fame.
Our sessions come,
Our scores be done,
For film as they are for television.
Give us this day a killer earworm,
And forgive us our transposition errors,[2]
As we forgive those who ask us to check their transposition errors for them,
And lead us not into derivative imitation,
But deliver us from writer’s block.
For thine be the Fiddler,
The Jaws, the Star Wars, the E.T. and the Schindler,
For ever and ever.[3]
AMEN.[4]
Variations
- Heretics invoke the name of a false deity (e.g. "Randy Newman") and omit/adapt the doxology accordingly (i.e. "For thine be...").
- Since the Digital Reformation it has become common practice to substitute "tempo maps" for "transposition errors", but this older style is still considered canonical due to the powerful influence of the Holy Order of Orchestrators.
- An alternative, simpler doxology, made popular after the Council of Trent Reznor, is: "For thine be five Oscars, seven BAFTAs and three Emmys, for ever and ever." (prior to this the doxology was officially referred to as the 'doscarology').
- Members of the Confraternity of Zimmer conclude with an Inception "BWAH-men".