SW: You mentioned having to take special care when adapting the music of West Side Story for this particular movie iteration. Are those same principles of care important when you’re conducting a live concert of someone else’s music, and not necessarily West Side Story?
DN: Every situation is different and every hall is different. A live performance is a different animal than what we were doing on this movie. With this film, we were recording. If it’s done live, then we’re not necessarily going to reorchestrate it or rearrange it. There’s none of that, but live performance is live performance. It’s going to change. And West Side Story, as I said, is a unique artistic endeavor. There’s nothing like this. But when I do the 1961 movie, there are things that are accented. It’s not easy to play. You have to rehearse it and emphasize certain things.
SW: Bernstein’s original score has so many different idioms within it, from jazz to Puerto Rican rhythms. That must be very exciting to tackle.
DN: It is. The score is difficult, but not as difficult as it was when it first came out. The orchestras are much better at playing it now than when the film first came out. You can hear a lot of struggling in the 1961 movie. But 60 years later, we’ve also come so far in terms of technology. That’s why we were adamant about making this as perfect as possible, and I don’t just mean the notes being played. I mean the feel of the whole thing—the phrasing, the feel, the jazz, without being ostentatious about it.
When there’s pizzicato bass in “Cool” for example, we had a stand-up jazz player on it. That’s the feel. Things like that. We did a lot of stuff, but much of it isn’t noticeable. That’s the whole point. It’s just to make it feel right. Playing “Cool” with a bassist who’s not a jazz bassist is hard, you know? There are other things, like the dance at the end of the gym, which is called “Jump.” It’s a little jazz piece, which contains an incredibly intricate jazz bass part. It’s different performing it live compared to what we were doing on the movie. We could get players to do certain things.
SW: One final question, David, but it’s a big one, and it pertains to your father, Alfred, who was one of the founding fathers of film music. Did he impart any particular philosophy to you about how to gauge the effectiveness of soundtrack music?
DN: It’s a very interesting question. There were five of us in the family. I was born in 1954 and my father was born in 1900. So, I was 14 when he passed away. That’s why one of my most cherished memories is the time we spent listening to the West Side Story Broadway cast album together. However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve made a study of Alfred Newman. I’ve read a lot about him.
I am utterly fascinated by the 1930s when talking films started. Alfred came to Hollywood in 1930, very close to when Max Steiner came. Arguably, him, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Dimitri Tiomkin created film music. One of my father’s very first scores was for a film called Street Scene. It’s a 1931 RKO picture, and there’s an overture with the Street Scene melody. There’s an interlude in the middle of the movie. There’s no music for about an hour and then there’s an interlude when the city wakes up. Then there’s something at the end with the end title.
That’s one way of scoring a movie. Then, he did a film called Mr. Robinson Crusoe, which was a vanity project of Douglas Fairbanks’. He went to an island and wanted to shoot a movie so it would pay for a vacation. He’s just on an island doing stuff like Robinson Crusoe. My father wrote music for that film from beginning to end. It’s like a silent film. The music doesn’t really say anything—it’s fast and slow by turns, just not what we would think of as a film score.
That particular score looks towards models such as the 19th-century melodrama, Beethoven, perhaps, or the incidental music from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. These classical canonic composers often created incidental music, so after a scene was over in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, the orchestra would play some music. But they would never play in real time while the play was going on. Little by little, they came upon this concept that they termed “commentative music.” What we think of as film music today has its origins in so-called “commentative” scoring. What that means is one writes music [that] is going along during the scene, not in-between scenes to get from one scene to another. One is commenting on what’s going on in an abstract musical way.
I learned this over the last 10 years when I discovered that a film composer named Fred Steiner had written a biography of my father. Very little is written about Alfred Newman, generally. He was kind of shy and not one to talk himself up, really. I don’t think his legacy has quite gotten the attention it deserves. I learned a lot about him via Steiner’s biography. But Alfred Newman’s philosophy of music has a lot to do with this idea of writing music that comments—thematic music, using a Wagnerian model with maybe an Italianate vocal sensibility, at least when you think of the Golden Age of film music. The music is very pretty and song-like, Italianate, but it’s also Wagnerian in the sense that there are themes and motifs used to delineate characters or ideas or feelings. In Wagner, a leitmotif could represent a feeling or a person or an object. It could represent a sword in the Ring Cycle, or Valhalla, or Wotan or whatever it is.
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