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I'm a collector, Jim.
Are you a member of any OTR message boards? Cobalt Clubbers are putting up their Columbia Workshop holdings right now; a quick buzz through them did not net the title you requested. (I can suggest one other with a pretty big population.)
If not, I'd strongly suggest asking there, as folks here have barely expressed interest about even Jerry Goldsmith's radio work, the man EVERYONE seems to froth at the mouth about!
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DavidInBerkeley: I wasn’t able to find Cobalt Clubbers online. I would appreciate any info you might have on them or other sites/organizations/message boards. Either reply here or shoot me an e-mail.
Thanks for the replies, Mark and David. I've been collecting Herrmann in all forms for over 35 years, and I must say that collecting Herrmann-scored radio shows has always required a lot of research and guesswork. In the earlier days of collecting these shows, there wasn’t much info out there about what episodes of which shows Herrmann worked on. So, using informed guesswork based on what little was known at the time, I dropped a lot of cash getting shows on cassettes that I HOPED might be Herrmann. More often than not, it paid off. However, out of Herrmann’s vast output for radio, I would have to say that, percentage-wise, the amount of great music vs. merely functional music is about 30/70. But all the work pays off when you find a really good one. The best Herrmann scores are the ones written for shows written by Norman Corwin, such as ON A NOTE OF TRIUMPH, UNTITLED, and THE AMERICAN TRILOGY (shows about Wolfe, Whitman, and Sandburg), some of the early COLUMBIA WORKSHOPS, and even though they only use 3 or 4 players, the CRIME CLASSICS shows. A classic that Herrmann ghost-wrote in 1951 is for the HALLMARK PLAYHOUSE episode “Rest and Be Thankful”, just a gorgeous score. Another great one is MIND IN THE SHADOW (1949), a special presentation about mental illness. When the scripts were inspired, so was Herrmann. However, on a great majority of shows (especially notoriously down-to-the-airtime-deadline shows such as Orson Welles’ MERCURY THEATRE ON THE AIR and CAMPBELL PLAYHOUSE), Herrmann often just pulled older cues off the shelf and reused them. The Welles’ shows mentioned have a lot of original Herrmann cues in them, but almost all of them come from earlier radio scores, mostly COLUMBIA WORKSHOP.
The point of this long diatribe is basically to point out that you never know when you’re going to find another gem. But those gems are getting harder and harder to mine. I’m particularly interested in finding the MEN AGAINST DEATH shows, a series about early doctors and bacteriologists such as Pasteur. At least some of these contained original scores. The AMERICAN SCHOOL OF THE AIR “Music and Ideas” show should be interesting because part of the show deals with the function of radio and film music. The TRANSATLANTIC CALL shows are also enticing as they were written by Norman Corwin, and if Herrmann’s scores are anywhere near the caliber of his other Corwin scores, they should be quite a treat. The COLUMBIA WORKSHOP episode “Mr. Sycamore” was so highly regarded at the time that printed excerpts were reproduced in a book about the fundamentals of radio production.
So, even as hope begins to dwindle about finding these ultra-rare shows, I still keep trying, hoping to discover another great Herrmann score.
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DavidInBerkeley: I wasn’t able to find Cobalt Clubbers online. I would appreciate any info you might have on them or other sites/organizations/message boards. Either reply here or shoot me an e-mail.
I liked the piece he wrote for the "Suspense" episode about a composer named LeFevre.
I can't find an email address for you. You can get one to me by taking my screen name above, and adding "@ yahoo".
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Updated this post with a longer list.
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Has anyone out there located any of these episodes during the past three years? Also, Jim Doherty, would you please contact me directly via email bluecar91 at hotmail regarding the Nero Wolfe's Cases episodes. If anyone out there has info on these, I'd certainly like to hear from you also. Thanks. Karl
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