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Posted: |
Mar 15, 2008 - 6:35 AM
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By: |
Dana Wilcox
(Member)
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Every time I hear an Alex North work I can't help but think this guy is the brightest film music composer in history. Thanks for the heads up on those tracks, I'm not yet that intimate with North.
The more you hear, the stronger that impression will grow. One of his strong suits was picking up on the emotional tone of a film and focusing on that rather than the ongoing action. A great example of that is his score for WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? -- I frankly cannot think of another composer who could have tackled that film and gotten it right, as North did. And no one can communicate abject sorrow musically as effectively as North did, in WAOVW? and CLEOPATRA and other scores. If I use the "g" word to describe him, people here will get their knickers all in a twist. But that's how I think of him...
I might add that North was an acquired taste for me. When I first began collecting, in the early 60s, I liked some of North's melodic themes (Love Theme from SPARTACUS for example) but was quite put off by his more modernistic pieces. It has taken me a long time to finally "get" North a bit and recognize the ingeniousness of his approach. Still, there are some of his scores which I don't enjoy listening to -- DRAGONSLAYER, CHEYENNE AUTUMN and AFRICA come to mind.
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I received ZAPATA that I found really good and I immediatly linked this score with another good one: "The Wonderful Country". Both scores foreshadow the Mexican leaning of Jerry Fielding's "The Wild Bunch": incredible!
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It's a terrific score. The thing that concerns me is that nobody on this board seemed to think so or wanted to discuss an historic release like this.
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It's a terrific score. The thing that concerns me is that nobody on this board seems to think so or want to discuss an historic release like this.
The score works perfectly as a great piece of dramatic music, tracks like "Zapata" and "Gathering Forces" are examplary. I repeat North paved the way for Fielding's "The Wild Bunch".
In the liner notes, Julie Kirgo wrote that the love theme announced "Spartacus".
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Posted: |
Mar 15, 2008 - 5:13 PM
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By: |
manderley
(Member)
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.....It's a terrific score. The thing that concerns me is that nobody on this board seemed to think so or wanted to discuss an historic release like this.....
STEVENJ.....I think you have an example here of the serious lack of interest on the part of the younger filmmusic fans on this Board for Golden Age scores which are not iconic in the most general and commercial and genre sense.
Many of us older fans who post here tend to be talking to ourselves much of the time when, or if, we even bother to discuss these releases, I find. It's often disheartening to read endless threads about extremely minor horror film scores and their composers, and nothing much about Alex North or any of the other Golden Agers.
The VIVA ZAPATA / THIRTEENTH LETTER cd is absolutely marvelous. We knew, of course, that the ZAPATA score was a classic, but who knew (or remembered) how good the THIRTEENTH LETTER score is. (I've never even been able to see the film, itself. It had a very limited release back in the early '50s and if you missed it one week it was gone forever, apparently to be tied up in underlying rights problems.)
Nick Redman has done a fine job putting two scores together for these kinds of releases, one famous, and one to be discovered. He's done it before.....it's a wonderful concept.....and one I heartily applaud.
The release itself sounds wonderful---in stereo---and is a great addition to the Fox soundtrack canon.
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.....It's a terrific score. The thing that concerns me is that nobody on this board seemed to think so or wanted to discuss an historic release like this.....
STEVENJ.....I think you have an example here of the serious lack of interest on the part of the younger filmmusic fans on this Board for Golden Age scores which are not iconic in the most general and commercial and genre sense.
Many of us older fans who post here tend to be talking to ourselves much of the time when, or if, we even bother to discuss these releases, I find. It's often disheartening to read endless threads about extremely minor horror film scores and their composers, and nothing much about Alex North or any of the other Golden Agers.
The VIVA ZAPATA / THIRTEENTH LETTER cd is absolutely marvelous. We knew, of course, that the ZAPATA score was a classic, but who knew (or remembered) how good the THIRTEENTH LETTER score is. (I've never even been able to see the film, itself. It had a very limited release back in the early '50s and if you missed it one week it was gone forever, apparently to be tied up in underlying rights problems.)
Nick Redman has done a fine job putting two scores together for these kinds of releases, one famous, and one to be discovered. He's done it before.....it's a wonderful concept.....and one I heartily applaud.
The release itself sounds wonderful---in stereo---and is a great addition to the Fox soundtrack canon.
Absolutely! Alfred Newman conducting ZAPATA equals NIHRVANA....
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Like Manderly, I've never seen "The 13th Letter", although I've been trying to track it down for years. I bought the CD for the "Zapata" tracks, figuring "The 13th Letter" would be a nice bonus. I've listened to "Zapata" once (great score, and it will be played often), but so far it's "The 13th Letter" that has been getting the bulk of airplay. What a treat to have this released for us to discover. I hope more people who wouldn't normally buy a Golden Age score will take a chance on this one. It deserves to be a sell-out for Varese.
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My wife and I just got back into our house after ten days of having a wooden floor installed, sanded, stained and finished and while I had a few boxes of cd's waiting for me, the Varese Saraband one was the one I opened first.
VIVA ZAPATA! is some kind of great score that both Bernstein and Goldsmith wanted to record it. No question about it, this latest release is the definitive one, under the baton of Alfred Newman, no less.
The music is alive with fresh ideas that will find their way into many future scores by North: the cue "Zapata" is every bit as brutal and exciting as anything in SPARTACUS while it reminds me of the gladitorial school training montage.
This may have been a score I would have hoped to see released by FSM, but I'm glad VS put it out. A true gem if there ever was.
So where's the thread about THE CARETAKERS?
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Posted: |
Mar 16, 2008 - 12:22 PM
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By: |
Thor
(Member)
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Many of us older fans who post here tend to be talking to ourselves much of the time when, or if, we even bother to discuss these releases, I find. It's often disheartening to read endless threads about extremely minor horror film scores and their composers, and nothing much about Alex North or any of the other Golden Agers.
Oh COME ON, manderley! If there's ANY film music messageboard out there that dedicates lots of space and talk to Golden Age cinema and scores, it's THIS ONE! It seems to have a good balance of young and old, niche and mainstream.
If you visit, say, maintitles.net, you will hardly find any discussion of that AT ALL.
If you type in "alex north" in the search engine, you get two pages full of Alex North threads. And that's not taking into consideration all the threads that have merely his surname in the heading or just the title of the film/score (such as the massive SPARTACUS thread with what? 20 friggin' pages?!?).
I think if you would want even MORE discussion of this, you would have to create a specific Golden Age Film Music board somewhere, where discussion of anything created after 1950 is forbidden. 
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What most distinguishes the scores of great composers from those of the also-rans is the high degree to which they hold up to repeated listening. What distinguishes the scores by Alex North from those of the other great movie music composers is that, no matter how often you listen to them, you will always notice something new or different during each hearing. Like great classical music, they are inexhaustible. North is almost unique among movie music composers in this regard.
Now that we have "Zapata" and "Letter," let's have "Spartacus," three discs worth, absolutely complete in every regard.
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