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Maybe the 'lesser liights' were not as hands on as some and were happy to let Big Al take care of things.
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I caught up with THE HOUSE ON TELEGRAPH HILL (1951) in Criterion's Noir series. It has an effective score with a distinctive Newman sound. The credit card has "Musical Direction / Alfred Newman" above "Music / Sol Kaplan." So did Newman actually compose some of it? Cliff McCarty does not suggest that Newman wrote any cues.
Musical Direction just means that Newman conducted. (He loved conducting more than composing, and is generally regarded as the greatest conductor to regularly work in Hollywood.)
https://www.discogs.com/release/3511177-Sol-Kaplan-Leigh-Harline-Alfred-Newman-The-House-On-Telegraph-Hill-10-North-Frederick
The excellent Intrada release of the score doesn't seem to indicate Newman writing any music for this score, as he sometimes would do uncredited during a time crunch at the studio. (For example, my favorite single cue in the excellent 1950 score Broken Arrow is the four minute "Tucson and Cochise", one written not by Hugo Friedhofer the main composer but by Alfred Newman, who got cue sheet credit and credit on the album.)
Alfred Newman is rightly credited with developing a distinctive orchestral sound and studio acoustic during his long tenure at Fox. Still, I find it interesting that Fox scores by such major figures as Herrmann, Raksin, and North always reflect the composer's own style, whereas scores by lesser lights like Kaplan, Cyril Mockridge, and maybe David Buttolph frequently sound like Newman.
Well, I do think those composers could sound like Newman at times, achieving a sort of Fox "house style" perhaps. Buttolph's The Foxes of Harrow sounds very Newmanesque to me in particular, and I know Mockridge on a few occasions (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance?) outright recycled themes by Alfred Newman (no doubt with his permission/approval during a time crunch or something). But I'll vehemently disagree with you that Sol Kaplan in particular was a "lesser light", even if he could also occasionally do a great job of approximating the "Newman sound", as on his great score for Way of a Gaucho. I see him as akin to John Powell being able to sound like Hans Zimmer when necessary, but being a distinct great composer in his own right. I absolutely consider him the equal of David Raksin, who could also be a chameleon at times. Or how about that most respected of Hollywood composers Hugo Friedhofer, who contributed cues to Newman scores on multiple occasions without screen credit, and his music fit in just fine?
And interestingly, when even Bernard Herrmann stepped in to complete the score to The Egyptian which his friend and colleague Newman had begun (and written most but not all of the thematic material for), he did *such* a good job (at times) of sounding like Newman when using his established themes that for many years people thought certain cues were composed by Newman when in fact they had been written by Bernard Herrmann in Newman's style and using his themes. (Actually I think Herrmann got closer to Newman in sound than Franz Waxman did on his excellent sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators, which did re-use some of Newman's themes from The Robe.)
Yavar
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Posted: |
Nov 8, 2023 - 12:50 PM
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By: |
Rozsaphile
(Member)
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Musical Direction just means that Newman conducted. (He loved conducting more than composing, and is generally regarded as the greatest conductor to regularly work in Hollywood.)
"Musical Direction" can mean many things, but in Newman's case it involved far more than just conducting. He was doubtless involved in composer assignments, budgeting, scheduling, spotting, instrumentation, orchestral personnel, late-stage editing, etc. But, yes, he was known to enjoy studio conducting and was obviously very good at it.
Agree that THE EGYPTIAN is a very special case of true composer collaboration in which Herrmann acknowledgedly used Newman's thematic material.
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"Musical Direction" can mean many things, but in Newman's case it involved far more than just conducting. He was doubtless involved in composer assignments, budgeting, scheduling, spotting, instrumentation, orchestral personnel, late-stage editing, etc. But, yes, he was known to enjoy studio conducting and was obviously very good at it.
Well yes, as head of music at 20th Century Fox for decades, Newman had a huge impact beyond just his conducting. But conducting was something he still did a surprising amount of for his colleagues like Alex North, Hugo Friedhofer, etc., considering he also had all that administration work to do as well as composing his own film scores. (No wonder he needed help from people like Friedhofer sometimes!)
I'm pretty sure I've seen the "Musical Direction" credit used in old Hollywood films to credit the conductor, in multiple cases besides Alfred Newman.
Agree that THE EGYPTIAN is a very special case of true composer collaboration in which Herrmann acknowledgedly used Newman's thematic material.
But not just the thematic material; he also did a fine job imitating Newman's actual style, just as Sol Kaplan or David Buttolph did sometimes.
Yavar
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How he finds the time to write so many posts is beyond me.
I believe it is because he's got a very plush basement. 
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Agree that THE EGYPTIAN is a very special case of true composer collaboration in which Herrmann acknowledgedly used Newman's thematic material.
Just reading through this thread makes want to listen to THE EGYPTIAN again; what a fantastic score that is, by two stylistically very different composers, yet somehow it fits.
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Just to add a suggestion...most of the scores at Fox had the same orchestrator, and the main guy at Fox was Edward B. Powell, as ZardozSpeaks mentioned above.
I do hear distinct differences among the composers at Fox, but there are also similarities in how they sound.
There are a lot of scores to Fox films that start with Newman's "Street Scene"...mostly B films and noirs, many credited to Cyril Mockridge or Emil Newman. That isn't to say they didn't write original music for the films, but they also used cues already written by Newman from other films. It save a lot of time when the studio was putting out 30 or 40 films a year.
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Thanks for the kind words. I think I’m likely to stick around, however bad people’s behavior can get here sometimes. 
Yavar
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. It's really interesting to follow your comments and we need to keep Golden Age film music as much alive as possible