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New Opportunities in Film: Korngold and Warner Bros.

Ben Winters

in Korngold and His World

This chapter sketches an overview of Erich Korngold's film output that draws attention to the variety of scenarios for which he provided music. It also discusses the kinds of musical gestures and ... More

This chapter sketches an overview of Erich Korngold's film output that draws attention to the variety of scenarios for which he provided music. It also discusses the kinds of musical gestures and techniques he used to help him meet their dramatic demands. In many ways these techniques represent a significant expansion from the range demonstrated by his operatic output; in that sense Korngold's Hollywood career was not a regression from the culturally engaged world of opera but represented an opportunity to develop his gifts as a musical dramatist. After a brief summary of Korngold's working practices, the chapter explores the sound of his scores—including his use of particular orchestral colors—and his ability to score a variety of narrative scenarios. It then outlines some aspects of his approach to scoring, including his thematic technique.Less

“The caverns of the human mind are full of strange shadows”: Disability Representation, Henry Bellamann, and Korngold’s Musical Subtexts in the Score for Kings Row

Neil Lerner

in Korngold and His World

This chapter explores Erich Korngold's score in the 1942 black and white Hollywood film, King's Row. This Warner Bros. production was based on a bestselling 1940 novel by Henry Bellamann, a writer ... More

This chapter explores Erich Korngold's score in the 1942 black and white Hollywood film, King's Row. This Warner Bros. production was based on a bestselling 1940 novel by Henry Bellamann, a writer whose career began not as a literary creator but as a music teacher. Much remains to be examined regarding Korngold's score in this film's legendary history. Still more remains to be uncovered regarding the way this music mediates the unsettling and sometimes horrific (and horrifically ableist) narrative. Kings Row's main character, Parris Mitchell, observes near the end of the film that “the caverns of the human mind are full of strange shadows,” and in the film those strange shadows have the power of being accompanied by Korngold's remarkably sumptuous, complex, and effective music.Less

The Herrmann–Hitchcock murder mysteries: post-mortem¹

William H. Rosar

in Partners in Suspense: Critical Essays on Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Hitchcock

This chapter’s ‘post-mortem’ of the Herrmann-Hitchcock collaboration focusses on what occurred between the two men during the fateful sessions in which Hitchcock fired Herrmann when he was ... More

This chapter’s ‘post-mortem’ of the Herrmann-Hitchcock collaboration focusses on what occurred between the two men during the fateful sessions in which Hitchcock fired Herrmann when he was dissatisfied with what the composer was developing for the film. However, the chapter searches more broadly for reasons why the partnership broke down, including Hitchcock’s philosophies about film scoring and exploring the history of the working relationship between the two men, looking in particular at the process of spotting and scoring Psycho that caused such friction and created a precedent for what happened on Torn Curtain, albeit with a very different outcome.Less

Epilogue

Sally Bick

in Unsettled Scores: Politics, Hollywood, and the Film Music of Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler

The conclusion presents a summation of Copland’s and Eisler’s political music and their contributions in both their writings and their film scores to the history of the Hollywood industry and ... More

The conclusion presents a summation of Copland’s and Eisler’s political music and their contributions in both their writings and their film scores to the history of the Hollywood industry and American music and film scores. As modernist composers and outsiders to Hollywood, they were able simultaneously to challenge and assimilate Hollywood’s expectations while producing work that coincided with their own political agendas.Less

Off to See the World

John Caps

in Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music

This chapter details events following Mancini's break with Blake Edwards. While the break was a private event that seemed to put his future career into a state of flux, Mancini sensed a chance to ... More

This chapter details events following Mancini's break with Blake Edwards. While the break was a private event that seemed to put his future career into a state of flux, Mancini sensed a chance to advance, an opportunity in the making, when a phone call reached him at that songwriting contest in Rio. It was Paramount Studios calling. They had been bankrolling a gritty film about the 1876 Irish coal miners' strike in Pennsylvania called The Molly Maguires (1970), and the project was in trouble. The film was being judged too monotone and grim, while the music was deemed too little, too light, casting the drama into doubt. The studio' thought was that with a little more color in the score, and especially a firmer sense of musical drama, the whole momentum of the film might be lifted. And from Mancini's point of view this was just the breath of fresh air that this composer-in-transition had wanted. Almost immediately on finishing The Molly Maguires, Mancini would receive another surprise call from even further afield, announcing that the great Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica and the great producer Carlo Ponti wanted to work with him in the film I Girasoli (1970), soon to take the American title Sunflower.Less

“George Gershwin Accepts $100,000 Movietone Offer; Fox to Pay that Sum for Film Version of Musical Comedy—Composer Gets Bid of $50,000 for Rhapsody in Blue Rights” (1928)

Robert Wyatt and John Andrew Johnson

in The George Gershwin Reader

This chapter presents the text of the report about George and Ira Gershwin's signing of a contract worth $100,000 to write a musical comedy for Fox Movietone Co.'s motion pictures Delicious and Blah, ... More

This chapter presents the text of the report about George and Ira Gershwin's signing of a contract worth $100,000 to write a musical comedy for Fox Movietone Co.'s motion pictures Delicious and Blah, Blah, Blah, which was published in the August 1928 issue of the New York Evening Post. The size of the contract indicated the star power of the Gershwins. However, George found their first Hollywood experience distasteful because upon completion of the requisite songs he played such a small role in fashioning the final musical score.Less

Music and memory in film and other multimedia: The Casablanca effect

Berthold Hoeckner and Howard C. Nusbaum

in The Psychology of Music in Multimedia

This chapter explores the artistic representation and empirical study of audiovisual memory in cinema, with a specific focus on memory induced by music. The first section reviews how flashbacks have ... More

This chapter explores the artistic representation and empirical study of audiovisual memory in cinema, with a specific focus on memory induced by music. The first section reviews how flashbacks have been used by directors to structure filmic narration and to visualize the recollection of characters. The second section examines how different types of visual memory are cued by music in movies. In cinematic representations of episodic memory, for example, characters may associate music with past events (as in the film Casablanca). Based on musical schemas formed by cultural conventions, musical underscoring relies on semantic and implicit memory to help audiences in the perception and understanding of screen content. The third section surveys empirical studies of musical memory effects in film and multimedia, showing how affective priming through musical underscoring affects the remembrance of film events, product recall in advertisement, the comprehension of the narrative, or character perception.Less

Curtailing a Song: Toward the Classical Background Score

Katherine Spring

in Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema

Chapter 5 accounts for the emergence of the plausible integration of songs, an approach that developed in tandem with the diminished use of the popular song and the rise of the orchestral background ... More

Chapter 5 accounts for the emergence of the plausible integration of songs, an approach that developed in tandem with the diminished use of the popular song and the rise of the orchestral background film score. The chapter recounts the debates in the trade press over the perceived problem that the motion picture song posed: songs threatened narrative coherence and continuity. As the vogue for motion picture songs diminished, the studios cut their branch publishing offices, reduced the staffs of music departments, and employed in-house composers who attempted to cultivate a musical aesthetic based on the Romantic traditions of orchestral scoring. Case studies of In Old Arizona (1929) and Safe in Hell (1931) illustrate some of the practices enacted for the plausible incorporation of songs. These analyses also reveal the use of intermittent scoring that is typically associated with the classical Hollywood film score in subsequent years.Less

The Curse of the Pink Panther

John Caps

in Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music

This chapter describes how one chance meeting on the beach with Blake Edwards brought about a sea change in his career and, as a direct result, a return to the famous world of the Pink Panther. ... More

This chapter describes how one chance meeting on the beach with Blake Edwards brought about a sea change in his career and, as a direct result, a return to the famous world of the Pink Panther. Return of the Pink Panther was planned for distribution in 1975, and the public was so very ready to be amused all over again by the Sellers/Clouseau character that the success of that sequel was followed the very next year by The Pink Panther Strikes Again. For Mancini, the task of scoring a Pink Panther movie had changed, too—the first film scored with that sly, sneaking sax theme and a lot of beguiling, equally sly cocktail music; the second film scored a bit more like a cartoon where the clever, plodding, main mystery theme on that wavering pump organ represented Clouseau's dysfunctional focus on the case at hand. Now with large-scale visual jokes taking up more screen space than the character comedy of Clouseau, the scoring needed to serve two masters: it needed scene-setting background tunes for clubs, discos, and resorts, and, more than ever, it needed bigger descriptive music to bolster the increasingly unrealistic and aggressive plot devices.Less

Here Was Something Fresh

John Caps

in Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music

This introductory chapter traces the path of Henry Mancini's career, highlighting the reasons why he became the first publicly successful and personally recognizable film composer in history. It ... More

This introductory chapter traces the path of Henry Mancini's career, highlighting the reasons why he became the first publicly successful and personally recognizable film composer in history. It suggests that Mancini was perfectly placed, by time and temperament, to be a bridge between the traditions of the big band period of World War II and the eclectic impatience of the baby boomer generation that followed, between the big formal orchestral film scores of Hollywood's so-called Golden Years and a modern American minimalist approach. On the one hand, his respect for pre-wartime pop and movie music represented continuity, even advocacy, of tradition. On the other hand, for many young postwar families, the Mancini sound seemed to represent the bright, confident, welcoming voice of a new middle-class life: interested in pop songs and jazz, in movies and television, in outreach politics but also conventional stay-at-home comfort.Less

Stolen Moments

John Caps

in Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music

This chapter details Mancini's career in the late 1980s. The 1980s was another transitional period in the whole field of film scoring. The intrepid John Williams still ruled with one prestigious ... More

This chapter details Mancini's career in the late 1980s. The 1980s was another transitional period in the whole field of film scoring. The intrepid John Williams still ruled with one prestigious assignment after another, prodded by but not dependent on his associations with directors Spielberg and Lucas. Other veterans enjoyed renewed success during these years: John Barry's Oscar win for Dances with Wolves and Dave Grusin's scores for The Fabulous Baker Boys and The Firm. The new breed was beginning to take over, though; James Horner wrote blandly but appropriately for Field of Dreams, Hans Zimmer similarly for Rain Man. Meanwhile, Mancini was scoring three limited-release films: Physical Evidence, Fear, and Welcome Home.Less

Adaptation, Authenticity, and Ethics in Carl Davis’s Score to the Thief of Bagdad

Geoffrey Wilson

Allen H. Redmon and Allen H. Redmon (eds)

in Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process

Contributor Geoffrey Wilson notes Davis’s self-proclaimed practice of reviving the score the films might have had in their original release but he faults the leading composer in the silent film ... More

Contributor Geoffrey Wilson notes Davis’s self-proclaimed practice of reviving the score the films might have had in their original release but he faults the leading composer in the silent film revival movement for failing to realize his aim. Wilson cautions that a number of contemporary practices mark Davis’s scores, including his use of leitmotivs to denote characters, a willingness to allow those leitmotivs to shape the overall narrative, and his readiness to adopt a unified musical style for the film. Each practice belongs to a more contemporary period of film scoring. Wilson contends that one of the only aspects of silent scoring Davis keeps is a willingness to create musical cues that present non-Western characters and settings in essentialist if not outright racist ways. The choice makes Davis’s claim to authenticity misleading. While Davis’s scores may make a historical film more accessible to modern audiences, they do so by promoting reductive stereotypical constructs.Less

First Cadence

John Caps

in Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music

This chapter details the start of Mancini's musical evolution in the 1960s. If the word cadence can be defined as the notes or chords that resolve a melody, or at least lead to a new development, ... More

This chapter details the start of Mancini's musical evolution in the 1960s. If the word cadence can be defined as the notes or chords that resolve a melody, or at least lead to a new development, then this next transitional period in Mancini's career can be seen as his first cadence. It was the first sign of real evolution since he had come into his own as a jazz-pop film composer, demonstrating not only a contemporary enrichment of the harmonies and instrumental blends he had learned in the big band era, but also a broadening of the dramatic architecture of his orchestral writing into scores that were not just collections of admirable tunes and isolated film scenes but more cohesive compositions as well. Something was stirring. It is only speculative to connect this maturity in Mancini's writing to any one event in his personal life. Nevertheless, it was also at this time that his father, Quinto, died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of nearly seventy.Less

Back to Television?

John Caps

in Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music

This chapter details Mancini's return to television. Mancini was offered his own TV series, to be called The Mancini Generation, on which he would discuss and demonstrate film music to a syndicated ... More

This chapter details Mancini's return to television. Mancini was offered his own TV series, to be called The Mancini Generation, on which he would discuss and demonstrate film music to a syndicated audience. Undertaking the series was a colossal commitment. The music materials were drawn from his whole backlog of arrangements alongside some new charts, but in addition to the musical rehearsals there were camera rehearsals and host-segment preparations all of which were shot together during one four-week period and then sliced up for insertion into the shows. Unique to each show was a sequence during which Mancini invited one college student enrolled in a film course at some university across the country to take a past Mancini recording and conceive, shoot, and edit an experimental film based on the music. The short films, then, were shown on the program, and Mancini used the opportunity to push support for film and film-scoring study courses in schools of the future. The Mancini Generation was eventually seen on 150 stations nationwide and also led to an RCA album sporting the series title, his first jazz-pop album since the 1960s.Less

Frustration

John Caps

in Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music

This chapter focuses on Mancini's work on the large-scale space alien film Lifeforce (1985). Mancini's handwritten sketches for his score to the film reveals how important the job was to him, coming ... More

This chapter focuses on Mancini's work on the large-scale space alien film Lifeforce (1985). Mancini's handwritten sketches for his score to the film reveals how important the job was to him, coming at this stage of his career. At last someone was offering him the kind of blockbuster science fiction epic that John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and even the young guys like James Horner (Brainstorm [1984]) and Alan Silvestri (The Abyss [1989]) were getting. With Lifeforce he might join the new ruling class of film composers on its own terms. However, the film was being supervised by Cannon Pictures, part of the infamous movie brokerage firm the Cannon Group. They had made their money by funding quick and cheap genre films on a one-time basis, turning a profit by almost immediately handing them over to their video-release branch. It was decided that Lifeforce would be chopped down to a more manageable length and into a form where most of the long reflective or descriptive visual sequences would be truncated. Along with them, their music had to go.Less

Career Crescendos

John Caps

in Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music

This chapter details Mancini's continued success. Mancini's success with Blake Edwards, his bestselling albums, and the growing shelf of his awards meant that now other directors, even famous classic ... More

This chapter details Mancini's continued success. Mancini's success with Blake Edwards, his bestselling albums, and the growing shelf of his awards meant that now other directors, even famous classic veteran directors, the past kings of the cinema, were starting to take notice of his music, trying to get him on the phone to talk about the musical possibilities of their next pictures. Again, he was writing traditionally satisfying music that they could understand, yet it had a modern slant toward the younger audiences they wanted to court. The great Howard Hawks was one of those directors. Hawks was searching for a workable composer for his own new, overlong, under-structured John Wayne adventure film set in Africa about a group of wild game hunters who collect specimens for zoos and circuses around the world, to be called Hatari! Two more veteran director kings from cinema's aristocracy also sought scores from Mancini for their very different romantic tales during this period: Mervyn LeRoy for Moment to Moment (1966) and Delbert Mann for Dear Heart (1964).Less

Maturity, the Second Cadence

John Caps

in Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music

This chapter details Mancini's musical evolution in the late 1970s. It may seem odd to associate “maturity” with the music of Mancini at this stage in his career, when clearly all of his most ... More

This chapter details Mancini's musical evolution in the late 1970s. It may seem odd to associate “maturity” with the music of Mancini at this stage in his career, when clearly all of his most influential work was already past, having been produced between, say, 1958 and 1969. Maturity in this case does not mean a permanent evolution away from jazz-pop and toward exclusively large-scale formal symphonic scoring. Maturity now means that Mancini had learned to deal with all kinds of music: to be able to write, in the same year as those resolute songs for the film 10, an anti-thematic orchestral score for a thriller film set in the American Southwest that mixes Indian tribal lore, modern political intrigue, and the spooky science of vampire bats—and to “mean” them both.Less

A Closing Door That Wasn’t There Before

John Caps

in Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music

This chapter describes four films that made Mancini feel so betrayed that he would wish seriously to have his name removed from being credited at all. These are Blake Edwards' Skin Deep (1989), ... More

This chapter describes four films that made Mancini feel so betrayed that he would wish seriously to have his name removed from being credited at all. These are Blake Edwards' Skin Deep (1989), Sidney Poitier's Ghost Dad (1990), Blake Edwards' Switch (1991), and Arthur Hiller's Married to It (1991). Mancini's yearning for reprieve from that pinched prosaic kind of scoring—having to fight for every thirty-second cue of synthesized filler, working for those New Hollywood committees that made films by compromise and that certainly had no commitment to the value of a narrative music score—can be felt in the last two pop music albums he would record in 1992 under his aforementioned renewed RCA contract: two programs of old, old songs from the so-called Great American Songbook.Less