FILM SCORE FRIDAY 8/02/02

Intrada has announced the latest in their Special Collection series, pairing two scores by Elmer Bernstein. THE STORY ON PAGE ONE is a courtroom drama directed by the acclaimed playwright Clifford Odets, and THE REWARD is a Western starring Max Von Sydow (probably the only Western starring Max Von Sydow). The disc should be available sometime this month.

The most eagerly awaited is almost certainly Jerry Goldsmith's score to Robert Wise's epic 1966 Best Picture nominee THE SAND PEBBLES. Previously available only on a 34 minute LP and a 42 minute re-recording for Varese conducted by Goldsmith, this new edition presents over 76 minutes of the original recording, conducted for the film by Lionel Newman, including cues unused in the final version. Sand Pebbles is one of Goldsmith's many Asian-themed scores -- others include The Spiral Road, The Chairman, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Inchon, The Challenge, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Mulan -- which form an especially satisfying subset of his remarkable career.

THE FURY: THE DELUXE EDITION is a two-disc set featuring two versions of John Williams' elegant horror score, one of his greatest and most underrated -- the original scoring session tapes and the rerecording Williams conducted for the LP, newly remastered.

ROMANCING THE STONE presents the first of Alan Silvestri's ten feature length collaborations with director Robert Zemeckis, for the smash hit 1984 romantic adventure comedy. (An irrelevant personal note -- Romancing the Stone and Greystoke opened on the same day in '84, and I chose to see Romancing that day because of the wonderful music featured in the TV commercials. It was only years later that I learned the music was actually Bernard Herrmann's King of the Khyber Rifles.)

The fourth score, THE BRIDE, is one of Maurice Jarre's finest and most romantic, from an especially creative period when he worked with the late, great orchestrator Christopher Palmer (Crossed Swords, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome). The 1985 film is a reworking of Bride of Frankenstein, featuring Clancy Brown as the monster, Sting as the doctor, and Jennifer Beals as the bride. The disc features the same contents as the original Varese LP.

Later this year, the regular Varese label will release James Newton Howard's score to THE EMPERORS' CLUB (formerly The Palace Thief), a comedy-drama in the vein of Dead Poets Society, starring Kevin Kline and directed by frequent Howard collaborator Michael Hoffman.

This weekend, Film Score Monthly's Lukas Kendall and Jeff Bond will be at the San Diego Comic Con, selling CDs and magazines and sharing a booth with Percepto's Taylor White and Mindfire Entertainment, producers of Free Enterprise and the upcoming movie version of House of the Dead. For more information on the convention, go to www.comic-con.org. And remember, ladies, tempting as it may seem, this is not a kissing booth.

Film score fans who see the film should look for a glimpse of Jerry Goldsmith, next to Faye Dunaway at the 1975 Golden Globes as Evans accepts the award for Best Motion Picture Drama for Chinatown (it beat Earthquake!). And definitely stay for the end credits, featuring a memorable Dustin Hoffman "outtake" on the set of Marathon Man.

On Friday August 16th, the Ahn trio will perform the U.S. premiere of "Engadiner Suite," a new work by Maurice Jarre "celebrating the four seasons of the valley in Switzerland where he lives" written especially for the Ahn Trio. Also included in the program are works by Satie, Haydn, Michael Nyman, David Bowie, and the Doors

All concerts are at 8:00 pm. Single tickets are $20; full-time students and children 12 and under, $12. Tickets for all three concerts in the series (the first concert features Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting Stravinsky's A Soldier's Tale and his own Five Images After Sappho, on Mon. August 12) are $48.

For tickets, call 323 461-3673, or go to www.tickets.com. The Ford Amphitheatre is just off the 101 (Hollywood) across the freeway from Hollywood Bowl and south of Universal Studios. For more information, go to www.fordamphitheatre.org.

Oscar® nominated composer Norman D. "Buddy" Baker died of natural causes on Friday, July 26th at his Sherman Oaks home, at the age of 84.

Baker was born in Springfield, MO, and was a professional trumpeter and big band arranger in the thirties and forties, for such greats as Stan Kenton and Harry James. Moving to Los Angeles in 1938, he wrote arrangements for radio programs and taught arranging and orchestration at Los Angeles City College. George Bruns', a former student, sought Baker's help in orchestrating episodes of Disney's "Davy Crockett," which led to a job as musical director of "The Mickey Mouse Club."

Baker worked nearly forty years for the Disney studio, scoring features, TV shows and theme park attractions. His feature scores include The Gnome-Mobile, The Fox and the Hound, Summer Magic (an Oscar® finalist for Best Score) and Napoleon and Samantha, a 1972 Oscar® nominee for Best Score starring Jodie Foster and Michael Douglas. In 1998, the studio honored Baker as a "Disney Legend," and a year later the ASCAP Foundation gave him their Lifetime Achievement award.

In 1985, Baker began teaching animation scoring at USC, and in 88 became director of the school's Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television program, which he headed until his death. Among the students who passed through this program were our own Jon and Al Kaplan.

I would like to thank Jon Burlingame, a real film music journalist, whose obituary of Baker for Variety provided most of the information for this item.

The Bride - Maurice Jarre - Varese Sarabande CD Club
The Fury: The Deluxe Edition - John Williams - Varese Sarabande CD Club
Miami Vice: The Complete Collection - Jan Hammer - One Way
Romancing the Stone - Alan Silvestri - Varese Sarabande CD Club
The Sand Pebbles: The Deluxe Edition - Jerry Goldsmith - Varese Sarabande CD Club
Signs - James Newton Howard - Hollywood Records
The Stalking Moon - Fred Karlin - RMDU

Full Frontal - no composer
The Master of Disguise - Marc Ellis - Song Album on Sony
Signs - James Newton Howard - Score Album on Hollywood Records

None of the reviews I hunted down of Austin Powers in Goldmember or The Country Bears commented on those films' scores, so the answer this week to the question "Did They Mention the Music?" is -- No. They didn't.

Stay With Me: The Cardinal (Main Theme)
Lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, Music by Jerome Moross

Should my heart not be humble
Should my eyes fail to see
Should my feet sometime stumble
On the way, stay with me

Like the lamb that in springtime
Wandered far from the fold
Comes the darkness and the frost
I get lost, I grow cold

Originally published by Chappell& Co., Inc.

This week's pair of peers are two composers from the British cinema, specializing in adventure and fantasy, and known for their unashamedly bold orchestral scores -- John Scott and Trevor Jones.

Antony and Cleopatra - Cleopatra
Billy Two Hats - The Last of the Mohicans
Craze - Hideaway
England Made Me - Dr. Fischer of Geneva
King Kong Lives - Loch Ness
Man on Fire - Desperate Measures
The People That Time Forgot - Dinotopia
A Prayer For the Dying - In the Name of the Father
Ruby - Thirteen Days
Shoot to Kill - Cliffhanger
A Study in Terror - From Hell
To the Ends of the Earth - The Last Place on Earth
Yor: The Hunter From the Future - Freejack

From: " Jeff Commings" <Jeffswim@aol.com

I agree with your [Dan Hobgood's] article from a scholarly standpoint. Your example of playing "Jaws" without music is an example I have used endlessly to tell people how important film music can be.

One other thing: your article came just after I had a discussion about how entertainment has changed in the past 1000 years. Back in the day, the masses only had operettas and vaudevilles. Surely those relied intensely on music to convey emotion.

Then, when movies gained sound, the musical was extremely popular for at least 30 years. Why? Music often does what words can never do. I could give hundreds of examples, but we can all think of such instances (as you invited us to do).

I think your "friend" is right in saying that a composer's job is mainly to add comedy, drama, fear or suspense to a scene that needs music. But, as you said, the best transcend that. Imagine if Mozart just wrote notes, put a libretto on top, and called it a day? Then imagine if Williams did the same for "Jaws." The film would have flopped.

From: Steve Halfyard <Steve.Halfyard@uce.ac.uk>

I generally agree with most of the points made here, although Claudia Gorbman's comments about music and three-dimensionality are slightly misrepresented: the article makes it seem that she was discussing the role of music in modern cinema, whereas Gorbman was discussing the role of music in silent film and the fact that music is heard in three dimensional space which, in a cinema with no integral soundtrack, "gave back, or at least compensated for the lack of, the spatial dimension of the reality so uncannily depicted in the new medium" (Gorbman 1987, p37). One other point that I would take issue with is the comment that "unlike the visual image, a score's music is not representative; it is actually -well, music". Whilst I wouldn't suggest that music is representational in the way that a painting of a bowl of fruit is, can we genuinely say that music is not representative of anything? If it were not representational on some level, how would we be able to understand what it is saying to us in the context of the visual image? The sound of the harpsichord as used, for example, in Goldenthal's score for Interview with Vampire is representational on several levels simultaneously: it represents the character Lestat but at the same time it represents the 18th century (he being an 18th century vampire) and also represents the Machiavellian side of Lestat, largely through association with other uses of the harpsichord in film (most notably Addison's score for Sleuth). Our understanding of how film music works, what it makes us feel, how it interprets the narrative for us, relies on it being representational at a culturally understood level - this is another important part of Gorbman's reading of film music, what she calls 'cultural musical codes', film music utilizing, exploiting and adding to the cultural associations we have with various types and aspects of music. One might argue that talking about what music means and what it represents are two different things: music may mean things without representing anything (the philosophical idea from Schopenhauer that music is 'the thing in its self' rather than representing something). Yet this does not explain why we know what century or geographical location music is describing in films from Quo Vadis to Braveheart. There is nothing desperately 13th century or even Scottish about the score of Braveheart, but we understand that this is what it represents because we understand the codes in the music that say this is the rural, Celtic past. Certainly there is an emotional and emotive level to the music which operates on a somewhat different level from these more specific kinds of representational meanings (although the way particular melodic, harmonic and timbral ideas can evoke particular (culturally determined) emotional responses could also be argued as representational) but there are too many examples of music being obviously representational to ignore: use of particular instruments and particular musical styles to indicate not just when and where we are but what kind of person a character is and what type of a situation we are in are all forms of musical representation. Just so it doesn't sound like I'm trying to trash what Dan was saying, I enjoyed the article, and it's always good to see someone battling away with the theory on this site!

Apart from the obvious fact that Ms. Gorbman doesn't write very well, nor does she (or whoever transferred the original article from print to FSM's database) seem to understand where the apostrophe key is located on the keyboard, her recounting of the events surrounding the scoring of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett's THE LOST WEEKEND is wildly inaccurate.

According to Miklos Rozsa's autobiography, Double Life, the mocking reaction of preview audiences to the picture was the result of an inappropriate, jazzy temporary score, that led audiences to believe they were about to see a comedy, and which was never meant to accompany the film beyond the preview stage. This was -- and still is, in many cases -- common practice in the editing and previewing of a studio film.

Miklos Rozsa was, emphatically, not "hired by Brackett at the eleventh hour" to save the film; Rozsa, who had greatly pleased Brackett and Wilder with his forceful, lyrical score to Wilder's first directorial effort, 1943's FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO (after Wilder could not obtain the services of his old Berlin pal, Franz Waxman) had been slated to score the film from its inception. Rozsa did save the picture, in a sense, in that he had to convince studio executives -- who were on the verge of shelving the picture due to its terribly disappointing previews -- that a proper, well-thought-out score would put the film's dramatic elements in the desired emotional context. Fortunately -- and unsurprisingly -- he managed to do just that -- though not before having to wage yet another battle with Paramount's music director, whose obstructionist tendencies and disdain for progressive film music (he derided Rozsa's work as "Carnegie Hall stuff") were a thorn in the composer's side during the entire period.

Thoughts related to the current article "So Why Film Music?"

A good composer of movie music is as much a dramatist as the screen writer. The music should help the dramatic development of the film by evoking emotions in the audience, by explaining the inner feelings of the characters, and by pointing out what is important. Music can prepare the audience for what will happen, or recapitulate what has happened, or deliberately mislead the audience to set them up for a shock. Horror flics make use of that. Sometimes the score emphasizes parody by using music exactly in the style of the genre that is being parodied. Or the music can emphasize that a comedy is a retro homage by using judicial mickey-mouse hits.

Movie music is a kind of language that talks to the audience. That language has been evolving since the days of the piano in the pit of the silent screen theatres. Every genre, including teen horror, has its own version of the syntax and vocabulary. Great movie composers help refine the syntax and add to the vocabulary, so that communication with the audience keeps getting better.

These two paragraphs are from a long Web page of excerpts from the fictionalized story of a composer of movie music, which is part of the Ariane trilogy of novels.