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