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Posted: |
May 3, 2015 - 5:55 PM
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By: |
Ray Worley
(Member)
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"Exodus", "King of Kings", "El Cid", "Spartacus", "To Kill A Mockingbird", "Mutiny on the Bounty", "Summer and Smoke", "Breakfast at Tiffany's", "55 Days at Peking", "Cleopatra", "How the West Was Won", et.al.
This.
Along with THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.
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Just bumped the similar thread about Golden Age scores, so had to bump this one as well.
In case anyone in the intervening six years would like to step forward....
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My formative big-screen experience was my parents taking us to see The Poseidon Adventure in 1972. The main and end titles, and every interior reference to the theme, completely enthralled me. From there on, I started paying attention to the music in movies.
The only big-screen music I remember before that was seeing Goldfinger and Dr. No in a double-feature at the drive-in. I was four or five years old at the time, so I slept through most of Dr. No, which played second. But I remember the theme song from Goldfinger was electrifying.
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Star Wars, Superman, Bond - those films imprinted on my 8-year old life to seek out the scores which then made me seek out more scores and made me fall in love with this art form.
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I was just turning into a teenager when From Russia With Love, Goldfinger and Thunderball hit, so that was a game changer. The Beatles had just come to America, but Barry's music seemed more adult, more sinister, more cool, and even sexier. Plus, seeing these films in theaters with spectacular color added to the experience. Black and white TV westerns, my primary form of media entertainment up to this point, slipped down the scale considerably.
My interest grew from there to other spy scores, and as already mentioned, the Great Movie Sounds of John Barry was an eye opener. There he was, on the cover, photos, and information on the back. Suddenly, he became somebody more than just a name on soundtrack covers.
Plus, in general, I think each teenage generation gravitates towards things that are new and not part of your parents' world. My mom had some Mancini albums, which I later came to enjoy, but the Barry/Bond stuff seemed very new and exciting.
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Ooh, I'm so excited that we've got more people spilling their stories on this thread and the companion Golden Age thread.
However, I notice that the Silver Age thread has fewer posts and views than GA - I thought Silver Age did better with fans these days. where IS everybody? 
Frankly reposted this in honor of The Eiger Sanction. It must have been about my tenth Williams score, after Jaws & Star Wars & Close Encounters & The Fury & Jaws 2 & Superman & Dracula & 1942 & Empire. I distinctly remember buying it as a cutout 8-track tape around 1980 - I mean it was a score for a Clint Eastwood film, what did I care (or know)!?
I've been spending more time with the Intrada since it arrived than anything I've added in the last couple of years. Talk about a Silver Age classic.
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It's pretty hard to delineate because the beginning love of film music was an all-encompassing thing that spanned multiple scores.
But certain scores stood out to me, and I think what defines the 60's orchestral music is that it's really having a lot of FUN. It seems more self-aware than the Golden Age scores and so any datedness is offset by its generally jovial approach:
From Russia With Love - Exciting and highly creative music - in particular Barry's stuff for the train moving was very creative - old-fashioned on the one hand but it had an edge of modernism and danger that made it so captivating to listen and watch. At the same time you could laugh at the cheesy end title song sung by Matt Munro.
Goldfinger - Ridiculously bold and over-the-top, this score is having complete fun and so is the movie. Unlike so many of the "spy" music copycats that followed and overdid the bongos and brass sections to the point of cheese, this was legitimate big-band-style orchestral music that invited you along for the ride and the main title was clearly pure joy for the songwriters.
Jason And The Argonauts - Over-the-top and theatrical to match the out-of-date performances, this is also music that is having fun with the material. How Herrmann chooses his instrumentation to match all the scenes is part of the fun and while part of you laughs at the obvious matching of registers to the size of the monsters on-screen, it's wonderfully complementary to Harryhausen's knockout effects.
The exception:
Lawrence of Arabia - A sweeping theme that simultaneously draws you into the romance of the story while also connecting to its melancholy character struggle. Spielberg talks about having been knocked out emotionally by the film and I think a large part of it is the music - it pulls you into the theatrical scope of the film, much like Lawrence, and by the end it has hollowed you out as it did for Lawrence - his theatrical playing met the harsh realities of politics and war and he didn't quite make it out unscathed.
A classical & modern masterpiece:
Star Wars - Totally mind-blowing in its simultaneously old-fashioned AND modern boldness. From beginning to end the music tells a story even by itself and hits every emotional beat. The "force theme" and instrumentation tap into this wonderfully primeval sense of yearning beyond the physical and spiritual horizon that etches itself into your brain.
The Empire Strikes Back - It has wonderful moments of the most creative action writing you'll ever hear ("Battle of Hoth", "Asteroid Chase", "Escape To Hyperspace") while the ever-trusty "force theme" is woven into that same classical-yet-modern tapestry (thanks to some superb sequences of atonality) that further tap into that unexplainable sense of a mystical/spiritual plane that we feel when we think of history past and the stars overhead.
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Jurassic Park, I liked your comments regarding the early Bond scores, but I'll add that Barry's approach also didn't overdo it with electric guitars (reserving that for the Bond theme), cheesy organs, and other 60s pop elements, like so many other spy scores. He clearly was thinking dramatically and using the tools he was comfortable with. He wasn't thinking he had to reach the youth market. That's one of the reasons they have aged so well.
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while at the age of 9 I fell in love with Day the Earth Stood Still and LP technology was new (I had albums of 78 RPM records) it was Close Encounters that got me into collecting film scores.
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I still think it is interesting that this thread has 25% fewer posts than the analogous Golden Age thread, even though scores in this period are more recent and seem to still be good sellers when released.
I mean just the past few months we've had Somewhere in Time, Time Tunnel 2, The Eiger Sanction, Shamus, Caboblanco, Rio Conchos - just for starters.
Of course, even just that selection is quite a bit more diverse from score to score than any random set of Golden Age scores, which were generally more consistent in their approach.
So it may just be the ongoing variety (or lack of definition) of what constitutes a Silver Age score.
Or maybe what motivates people here to add to a thread like this - maybe the Golden Age thread is more appealing to more people.
Whatever, I'm still fascinated.
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who started it for you?
Dominic Frontiere.
When I had started to watch re-runs of THE OUTER LIMITS on my local UHF channel at the age of 12, I received my earliest exposure to dissonance and 'modern' music with Frontiere's stings, his somewhat nebulous end credits sequence (which to my young mind did not follow the A-B-A patterns of song melodies) and his episode scores.
Around this time, I was also intrigued by the music I heard whilst watching THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. It wasn't until later onwards that I learnt that Stanley Myers wrote the music for this TV mini-series, so I'm unable to state that Myers was a known quantity to me at that time as Frontiere was.
While I had seen movies in theaters during the '70s as a youngster, I was not yet receptive towards their music scores. I think the repetition of music within episodic television shows was a more significant factor in my remembrances of them.
One of the programs picked-up by AIP for television syndication in the '70s was the Japanese Giant Robot - which was dubbed into English and rechristened as Johnny Sokko & his flying Robot - and the music heard in this show might well be the earliest to imbed into my subconscious. Found out much later - in 2019, actually - that it was Takeo Yamashita who did the music for this. It must have been between '75 & '77 when I saw this at around ages 8 & 9.
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