A new Facets DVD called THE ANIMATION OF ALEXEIEFF showcases this filmmaker who worked in France with his wife Claire Parker.
His films made with a pinscreen are basically classical music videos, especially for the music of Mussourgsky (with pianist Alfred Brendel on "Pictures at an Exhibition" and "Three Moods").
Alexeieff's colorful advertising films, whose abstractions often have little direct relation to the function of the product in question, are often presented with titles and a music credit. The disc comes with a long technical booklet explaining the animation techniques but says nothing about the music, so I'm filling in a few blanks here.
No less than Francis Poulenc did the score and played clavecin for "Sleeping Beauty," which is actually a wine commercial! It's playful and rhythmic, now courtly and flutey and now with dashes of exotic color.
Francis Seyrig, brother to Delphine and composer of the organ score to LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, composed several of these ads. One soap commercial ("Pure Beauty") uses a humming childlike voice accompanied by discreet, concrete sounds of splashing water before bursting into a fugue of horns. He provides circus-like, oompah horns for Bendix Detergent. A later ad uses harpsichord (unless it's clavichord) and drums, and another harpsichord and woman's vocal. Did he also do the church bell score for the Esso ad?
Someone named Van Thienen contributes delightfully odd (electronic?) music to several. His robotic, futuristic music for Renault celebrates an invisible assembly line. Over what sounds like grinding rubber bands and icicles, there's a ghostly whistling. Vivid and spooky. He also does weird percussion on a cigarette ad, and he provides the very modern, experimental, arhythmic percussion and what certainly sound like electronic noises on the non-narrated documentary on pinscreen illustrations for the novel "Dr. Zhivago."
A bit of vexed Googling leads me to conclude this is probably Marcel Van Thienen (1922-98), who worked in electronic music but is better known for electric mobile sculptures. He has an article in the French Wikipedia.
The uncredited music for Cocinor seems to use a theremin.
A. de Monfred (evidently Avenir de Monfred, who wrote a book on "relative music" or chance music) contributes a choral march to a biscuit ad. He also does the bouncy, lilting violin, piano and percussion for Blizzard Fabrics.
Roland Manuel scores a waltz of cigarettes, though they're really marching in formation. One Enrique Soto plays a Spanish guitar for another smoker. That one employs the floating geometic abstractions that Alexeieff called "totalizations," here masquerading as smoke rings ("the fine flower of tobacco" says the announcer in French). An uncredited Spanish guitar drives the Nescafe ad.
Alas, I don't know who's responsible for slapping that bass, beating those skins, and bursting into wacky, happy, horny, drunken jazz for the piece called "Masques". This joyful, frantic bounce could easily be a jazz hit licensed for the ad. There are birdlike, high-register miniatures for Osram, "the wonderful lamp."
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