Then there was the issue of spotting that Alfred talked a lot about. Where does music start, where does it stop and where do you decide not to use music? He and Steiner talked a lot about that. That is an immensely important aspect of film scoring because when you start music, it almost doesn’t matter what the music is. The start point itself is meaningful. And the point at which you end music is also meaningful. While the music’s going on, the music in and of itself is meaningful. But where you start it and end it is also meaningful. That’s part of the art form as well.

Alfred Newman also had a huge research department. They started off in the 1930s using lots of source music. They developed these libraries of sheet music so they could do Irish or African or any other kind of ethnic music, even if lots of it was probably wildly inaccurate by today’s standards. When they did source music, they thought of it as scoring. My dad did a movie in 1935 called Rain. It’s an early Joan Crawford movie, a bizarre one, but all done with source music, dance music. The music doesn’t happen unless she’s playing a record. They’re all stuck on this island because it’s raining and a weird love triangle ensues. It’s a very dark noir movie. Crawford plays a hoofer, a dancer, and she keeps putting on records of different music. She’s either walking around with her quintessential black hair or dancing.

The use of source music was very important to Alfred. Also, if you look at his score for The Diary of Anne Frank—that was 1959, and you can sense his thoughts about spotting. As they’re waiting in the attic in the middle of the day. What he chose to score for Anne’s character, for her view of life. The main title has it, but particularly the end as she’s being taken away by ambulance. One can also look at his score for All About Eve, which is arguably his masterpiece. All About Eve only has 30 minutes of music in a two- hour-and-10-minute movie. The end cues of All About Eve are some of the finest film scoring of the 20th century. There’s also quite a bit of source music used, but thoughtfully.

All About Al: Newman, and Eve.

At the time, the composers themselves did all the source music. In contemporary films, there are music supervisors, there are songs used, but in Alfred Newman’s era, it was all the music department that did it. The score for How Green Was My Valley was all based on Welsh folk music, but it was used as score. It’s used to give a sense of timelessness to the village in the story. But at the end of All About Eve, in the last five minutes, a brand new character is brought in that is instrumental to the story. You could arguably say that she is a main character, despite only being in it for five minutes. Without that scene, the story is completely different. And the music, if you go from the beginning, you see the way in which Alfred Newman sets up the world of the theater and Broadway. There’s a scene in which all the characters are introduced by Addison DeWitt, George Sanders’ character, and it’s a tour de force in leitmotif technique. The way he introduces it, and the way Alfred introduces the main character Eve, and the way the music falls into Eve—there’s much intellectual grist for the mill if one is enthusiastic about analyzing music. The intervals, the harmonies—it’s fascinating, and, in my opinion, if not his greatest score then one of his greatest accomplishments.

—FSMO

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