Film Score Friday 11/30/01

If you ordered our new release of The World of Henry Orient, thanks for your patience. We only got the CD in stock on Monday and have been hard at work sending out all the orders this week. So, if you ordered, your copy should arrive soon. Thanks again for waiting.

We had a special visitor to our office this week: Olivia Tiomkin Douglas, widow of Dimitri Tiomkin, who autographed around two dozen copies of Dimitri Tiomkin: A Portrait, the fine book on the composer we have for sale. So if you order now, you'll get an autographed copy. Follow this link for more information; go here for an order form of everything on the site.

LOW QUANTITIES ALERT: First The Towering Inferno sold out. Now we're down to our last 120 or so copies of The Omega Man. You have been warned. At this rate it will probably be all gone in two to three months, but maybe much sooner if there's a "run" on the last copies.

Finally, as a reminder, our CD of All About Eve is discounted this holiday season to $14.95. It's a great gift not just for soundrack fans, but for the cinephile in your family.

Thanks everyone!

Sony Classical is releasing the soundtrack to Iris by James Horner, with violin solos by Joshua Bell. See their page: http://www.sonyclassical.com/music/89806

Percepto Records' upcoming releases are due next month: The Boy Who Could Fly (Bruce Broughton) and the long-awaited score to the horror film The Changeling. See the new and improved www.percepto.com.

Intrada will release Hugo Friedhofer's score to The Barbarian and the Geisha (1958) in January.

There will be a reissue of the E.T. soundtrack next year to accompany Universal's theatrical release of a slightly retooled version of the film. The studio will also revise its logo for the occasion; the new one will reportedly feature E.T. and Eliot flying in a bicycle over the globe accompanied by Williams's score from the picture.

Saving Egyptian Film Classics is a new CD release by Mark Wolfram on Wrightwood records, featuring members of the Hollywood Studio Symphony -- in other words, it's orchestral. See http://www.markwolfram.com/SEFC-Flyer.html.

Here's another find sent to us by newspaper archivist Gary Hamann. This is from 76 years ago!

10/25/1925 (Los Angeles Examiner) Patterson Green

Fresh enthusiasm and novelty of approach are brought to the motion picture story by Harry Behn. This young writer has leaped into prominence as a result of his adaptation of The Big Parade for Metro-Goldwyn. He also prepared the script of La Boheme for Lillian Gish, and is now at work on Brown of Harvard.

To this last picture he can give the authenticity of personal experience, for he himself was graduated from Harvard in 1922. He is not a New Englander, however. He was brought up in Arizona, and he knows how the cactus sticks and the Hopis hop. In fact, that famous exponent of Hopi Indian melodies, Homer Grunn, once attempted to give him music lessons and--according to Behn's account--gave him up in despair.

Oddly enough, it is terms of music that Behn now conceives his stories. Perhaps both the movie-going public and the neighbors can be thankful that he was diverted from trying to thump out his musical urges on the piano keyboard! In the cinema he has found an instrument more pliant to his purposes.

CLOSELY RELATED

He doesn't write his scenarios--he "orchestrates" them. He establishes effects of fast and slow movements, of drum beats, of muted strings, of short and extended rhythms. Music and motion pictures, he says, are very closely related. Pictures and the spoken drama are hardly related at all.

He not only has original ideas--he has the ability to impart his convictions to others, and to get his thories translated into realization. It is his good fortune at such a director as King Vidor has caught his point of view and sympathized with it.

MARCHING FORCES

In The Big Parade, Vidor's skill and experience have crystalized these ideas made practicable their expressiion on the screen.

Examples of this "musical" treatment are numerous in this sensational picture. The reiterated tread of advancing soldiers is a continuous motive throughout the picture. Marching men fill the backgrounds, marching feet are shown in close-ups. These scenes were filmed to the beating of a drum.

The conclusion of the culinating "parade" scene is an example of a musical diminuendo. A great mass of troops has gone by. Then four men scurry across the screen in quick succession. A pause, and two men together. Again a pause, and a single straggler hurries past. When he is gone there remains only the huddled figure of a girl in the foreground.

It would be preferable, Behn thinks, to fit the action of a picture to a musical score rather than to fit a musical score to the completed picture, as is now done. Associated with music will, he hopes, win the screen's independence from the spoken drama and establish its individual.

From: David Coscina <dcoscina@sympatico.ca>

I have had a chance to listen through the soundtrack to "Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring" and "WOW" is the first word that comes to mind.  Doug Adams' review of this score by Howard Shore was right on the money, especially the mention of how horizontal some of the writing is. While Williams' Harry Potter music is brighter (on the whole) and more contrapuntal, Shore's work is dense and BIG with an emphasis on homophonic textures. Some theme groups even exist solely as slow harmonic progressions. It reminds me of Wagner's "Parsifal" music, being more sacred in its harmonic treatment than The Ring cycle which is steeped in chromaticism. The soundtrack also unfolds much like a book. Much of the initial material seems almost elemental, but throughout the course of the CD, themes arise and take shape, much like the literary opus this music was written for.

Howard Shore has always approached films with a slightly different perspective than others in the field of film composition and I know that the music will have even more significance once it is given a context. That said, a word of warning to those thinking this is the next Star Wars Trilogy: its themes are much less obvious and less varied than Williams' but by the same token, the choral writing is far superior and more ominous than just about anything I've heard written since Orff's Carmina Burana. Part of me still wishes there was a little more animation in the string writing, but that's a personal preference and one that I don't  against Shore one bit.

Oh, and as a post script to those who allege Williams' "Harry Potter" score is "hackwork"- it really mystifies me how alleged fans of film music can be so ruthless and quick to judge music that has a lot more depth and subtlety than it appears on the surface.  Oh well....

Reader Dennis Schmidt sends us this link to a review of the Harry Potter soundtrack in the Kansas City Star. The review is somewhat negative, but it is rare for a symphonic film score to be reviewed in the paper: http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/fyi.pat,fyi/3acd231d.b14,.html

If you read French, visit Traxzone.com for part three of Pierre Andre's interview with Cliff Eidelman: http://www.traxzone.com/content/index.asp?section=itvs&num=47

Finally, Jeff Eldridge at www.johnwilliams.org sends us two links to articles from Salt Lake City newspapers about John Williams recording his new Olympic theme with the Utah Symphony and Mormon Tabneracle Choir:

http://www.sltrib.com/2001/nov/11282001/utah/152795.htm

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,355008899,00.html

Happy holidays everyone!

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