John Mauceri has been a strong advocate for classic film music at the Hollywood Bowl and on records. His notable contributions to Decca's landmark Entartete Musik series include the first recording of Korngold's masterpiece, Das Wunder der Heliane. His new book (Yale University Press) addresses a perplexing problem of long standing: Why has the "advanced" music of the serialists and doctrinaire modernists failed to find an audience for more than a century, while much fine music by the supposed "degnerates" has either vanished from the repertory or (in the case of the Hollywood exiles) been treated with contempt by the institutional and critical establishment?
It's a good read, and Mauceri expresses his ideas with the passion of a performer who had had to deal with the ubiquitous institutionalized resistance to "movie music." One of his more arresting ideas is that the modernist orthodoxy was reinforced by the Cold War. if the mandatory accessibility of socialist realism was associated with the enemy, the the West (including the CIA!) would support the modernists as exemplars of our cultural freedoms.
