David Orea C. wrote:

>Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Alex North, Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann,
>E.W.  Korngold, Victor Young, D.Tiomkin, George Duning, E.  Bernstein are
>some among my favorite.  Brian Easdale (The Red Shoes), W.Alwyn (Odd Man
>Out), or Walton (Hamlet) are also worth mentioning.(And some dozens more).
>
>Were the '40s & '50s a Golden Era? Was there a special school for this kind
>of music?

I don't know of any special schools, but I do think different circumstances
came into play after this "golden era."

In the 40s and 50s orchestras were common vehicles for films.  Studios
employed and used them.  Now there are so many other formats, including
rock music and synthesizers, both of which are cheaper to use.  I would
think, also, that music for them is easier to write, making the whole
process of supplying music for films more efficient and less expensive.
Notice I did not say better.

I also believe there is the need for that one hit song.  Notice how
quickly soundtrack recordings hit the market after the film comes out.
I don't think we had that situation forty years ago.  You had the film
and the music was part of the film.  Eventually, some of these scores took
on a life of their own, but I don't think that was the idea when they were
written.  I don't think that the soundtrack recording of Kings Row was ever
part of the marketing scheme.

You wondered if there was a special school for movie composers.  Korngold,
Herrmann, Waxman and the other composers you mentioned were more or less in
the mainstream of the classical composers of their time and were classical
composers, or at least classically trained composers, themselves.  That was
their school.  Their movies scores grew naturally from that and out of the
tradition of opera, where music always commented on visual action.  The
music they produced was easily adapted to film.

By the fifties or so, however, classical music turned more atonal/serial,
replacing the more romantic fare of Korngold, et al.  I suspect this new
music that turned off so many people from the fifties through the eighties
turned off moviemakers, as well.  Whatever else you want to say about that
music, I would bet that most directors, etc., did not think it conducive
to the moods they were trying to create in their movies.  I'd suspect,
too, that they were afraid of it, believing that if it turned off concert
audiences, it might turn off movie audiences as well.  It's tough enough
trying to make a successful movie visually without having to worry about a
difficult esoteric soundtrack killing audience numbers.  I doubt very much
whether movie directors and producers were that hot on the idea of going
"cutting edge" with their musical scores.  Schoenberg's Five Orchestral
Pieces may be a great work, but I can't imagine many movies that could
successfully use a score written in that style.  A few, but not many.
Yes, I know Ligeti would be perfect for a lot of space movies, but I wonder
just how many movies such music would work for.  And forget what *I* can't
imagine.  THe important thing is what producers/directors, not to mention
the marketing people who are so tuned into popular culture, can or cannot
imagine.  I suspect it would be less.

So if the movie people felt that contemporary classical music as
they perceived it (and I'll bet it was as most people perceived it, as
serial/atonal music) where would they go? To popular music, of course.  Not
that this was unusual.  Many, probabably most, movie scores of the forties
and fifties used the jazz and big band music that was popular at that time.
Now it would be rock, and eventually synthesizer.  The only difference
would be that where once there were many notable classically-oriented
scores, now there would be far fewer.  And if you want to go further and
say that of those, not many were especially memorable, and, by the way, not
much classical music of the time was especially memorable either, I won't
disagree.  I do think there is a parallel in quality and style between the
music we call classical and the movie scores we perceive as being
classically influenced.

Interestingly, I believe there are some interesting classical works of
more traditional (read appealing) nature being written these days.  I have
been especially impressed with a few of the new operas.  This is important
because opera is a classical form that has unusual popular appeal, and it
is possible that these new operas are changing the popular notion of what
is classical music.  If so, I should not be and am not surprised to see the
return, however tentative, of the classically influenced orchestral score
to the movies.  The parallel between classical music and movie music
exists, I believe.  If so, and if classical composers are starting to write
music that is appealing enough to find an audience, producers may again
come to believe that a great classical movie score will help sell a movie
and, incidentally, sell well by itself.  Popular scores were always cheaper
to produce, but still we had the Korngolds and Herrmanns.  There is no
reason why we can't have them again.

The above brought to you by the firm of Wishful Thinking and Speculation,
Inc.

Roger Hecht