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Not Paramount, not Fox. Great score, albeit a short score. A composer new to Kritzerland but one of my all-time favorites. Thrilled to finally do something by this person.
Is it, at long last, a mutual favorite score: "Agatha", by a mutual favorite composer Johnny Mandel?
I don't recall how much music is in the film, having not seen it since I was twelve, but I recall it being pretty carefully spotted.
If not "Agatha", could it be another Mandel score? I'll always welcome more of his music into my collection!
Not Agatha, but the composer is correct.
Huzzah! We've been long overdue for more Mandel, and I'm glad to see that Kritzerland has finally been able to release some of his material!
My two guesses at the moment would be "That Cold Day in the Park" (from which the gorgeous song "I Never Told You" came), or "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea," a score I know little about, but everyone's told me it's beautiful -- and both titles seem well in Kritzerland's area of expertise.
If it's neither of those, I'll still look forward to it with tremendous anticipation. Thanks for putting more Mandel out there!
(And to keep this mildly on topic, I'm looking forward to receiving my copy of the Glenn Miller double-bill, too!)
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Not Paramount, not Fox. Great score, albeit a short score. A composer new to Kritzerland but one of my all-time favorites. Thrilled to finally do something by this person.
Is it, at long last, a mutual favorite score: "Agatha", by a mutual favorite composer Johnny Mandel?
I don't recall how much music is in the film, having not seen it since I was twelve, but I recall it being pretty carefully spotted.
If not "Agatha", could it be another Mandel score? I'll always welcome more of his music into my collection!
Not Agatha, but the composer is correct.
Huzzah! We've been long overdue for more Mandel, and I'm glad to see that Kritzerland has finally been able to release some of his material!
My two guesses at the moment would be "That Cold Day in the Park" (from which the gorgeous song "I Never Told You" came), or "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea," a score I know little about, but everyone's told me it's beautiful -- and both titles seem well in Kritzerland's area of expertise.
If it's neither of those, I'll still look forward to it with tremendous anticipation. Thanks for putting more Mandel out there!
(And to keep this mildly on topic, I'm looking forward to receiving my copy of the Glenn Miller double-bill, too!)
It's one of those 
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Posted: |
Apr 24, 2016 - 3:14 AM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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We have not actually had those push/pull elements for titles as early as this. It's the late '40s through '53 that we find them.
Mike M.
Can you describe how "push/pull" differs from multiple stems? There are plenty of those that exist, starting in the mid-30s.
Mark M.
I don't know how Mike M. will want to answer this, but here is the story that I've encountered:
At the dawn of sound in films, theaters had large, but very poor single-speaker systems behind the screen.
By their nature they had to reproduce both highs and lows in one unit, and were thus compromised from the start.
Very soon, in the late 1920s-early 1930s, Douglas Shearer, Supervising Director of Sound at MGM attempted to get things moving on an idea of multiple horn speakers to improve the theater sound. At some point in this, then early '30s process, James B. Lansing became involved with the MGM experiments, and the result was the large Altec-Lansing Theatre Speaker systems which became one of the major suppliers to the theatrical film business.
But, if you now have multiple speakers reproducing highs and lows, then Shearer realized you must also have the facilities to actually record the highs and lows, and thus, the push-pull system was developed at MGM.
I'm certainly not a sound technician, but I believe that push-pull recording is ACTUALLY multi-channels, but instead of aiming for stereo effects from different position, push-pull simply aims to record highs [probably strings, etc] and lows [probably percussion and lower timbre instruments] on separate channels and these were used in the final mixes of the film. (Since there was no need for stereo at the time, I'm guessing it never dawned on anyone to develop it for the film industry this early by using these push-pull tracks.)
I've never been able to research the issue, but several things I've read in ancient issues of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers journals, implies that the optical soundtracks on the side of the prints that utilized push-pull tracks in their release printing may have actually had two optical tracks side by side, one feeding highs of the final mixed track, and one feeding lows. There ARE variable area prints in this period which actually DO have what appears to be two identical tracks side-by-side in the same area occupied by a normal track. (I doubt if this process could be applied to a variable density track, however.)
The earliest MGM multi-tracks I've ever heard are from MEET THE BARON and HOLLYWOOD PARTY, coming in 1933.
Let's now get to Alfred Newman for a moment. During this early-to-late 1930s period, Newman is working steadily, but primarily, for the various producers at the United Artists/Goldwyn Studio on Santa Monica Boulevard and Formosa Avenue. The production companies berthed there in this '30s period include the major independents like Samuel Goldwyn Productions, Darryl Zanuck's 20th Century Productions, and Walter Wanger Productions, among others. Newman has not yet gone over to 20th Century-Fox, since the merger between Zanuck's 20th Century Productions and the bankrupt Willam Fox Pictures has only been accomplished in 1935.
But, in addition to his UA work, Newman has also picked up a few odd jobs at other studios. One of these is MGM, where he supervises the music scoring and conducting for the 1935 MGM film, BORN TO DANCE, with much of its music recorded in 1934. We now have a Turner/Rhino CD of BORN TO DANCE, released about 15 years ago. Guess what? Most of this CD is in the early 1933 Douglas Shearer multi-channel push-pull system, but now mastered to stereo for modern CD audiences.
The earliest Newman use of multi-channels at Fox that we've heard so far is HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY in 1941. But guess what's happened again? In 1940, Newman has gone back to MGM and has recorded (based on the CD of this score as well) most of BROADWAY MELODY OF 1940 in multi-channel push-pull, now also re-mixed to stereo.
As has been pointed out in the post I'm replying to, we now have quite a lot of music from the 1930s MGM available to us in re-mixed stereo from multi-channel push-pull tracks including material from scores as varied as THE GOOD EARTH (1937), THE WIZARD OF OZ and THE WOMEN (1939), and various musicals like ROSALIE and TWO GIRLS ON BROADWAY and quite a number of cuts of Judy Garland 1930s songs. If they've survived, there are probably quite a number of orchestral scores from the major MGM films of this period, too.
It's my theory that although Newman may have done some fine-tuning of the push-pull system with his engineers at Fox during the 40s, he really first encountered it through Douglas Shearer's developments of the process at MGM in the early 30s when he first recorded several scores there.
I am boundless in my love for Alfred Newman's work, and let's congratulate him on the Fox sound, but let's at least give proper credit where it's due to the usually much-maligned Douglas Shearer.
I'm actually supported in my arguments by the Motion Picture Academy. They sometimes take awhile to get around to giving awards for technical things, because they want to get the full documentation before they go out on a limb to reward a development, but here was their answer about 8 decades ago:
1936 ACADEMY AWARDS,
Scientific or Technical Award (Class I).....ACADEMY AWARD OF MERIT
"To Douglas Shearer and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Sound Department for their development of a practical two-way horn system and a biased Class-A push-pull recording system."
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