LISTENING TO THE MOVIES
COOK, BRUCE
XWOn Music LISTENING TO THE MOVIES BY BRUCE COOK Once, in the course of an interview, I told trumpeter-composer Chuck Mangione I felt he ought to try writing music for the movies. He made a face,...
...it can convey emotion, even imply thought...
...Surprisingly, it is not at all hard to listen to...
...More recently, French director Bernard Blier was completely off-base in choosing jazz violinist Stephane Grapelly (much as I like him myself) for Going Places...
...One would be wrong, however, to infer from this that the more distinguished the composer and the more complex his music, the less likely he is to satisfy the Hollywood lowbrows who make decisions on such matters...
...instant effect...
...Of all recent film music, though, the score that seems most successful to me is Gato Barbieri's Last Tango in Paris...
...After all, The Four Norwegian Moods is not an espe-pecially complex piece...
...it takes over, so to speak, and says things on purpose that the visual cannot...
...Listen to it on United Artists (LA 45-F), and you will be struck, I think, by the diversity of the forms employed by the Argentine jazzman...
...By the same token, selecting the wrong composer can seriously damage a film...
...A film score can create an atmosphere...
...a crescendo is necessary at 1:43...
...Miller when he had pop poet Leonard Cohen write and perform songs that self-consciously commented on the action...
...The point is that Barbieri's Last Tango communicates a feeling that images belong with it, something the best movie music always seems to do...
...Critics, too, seem to consider it the basest kind of hack work, despite the fact that through the years several distinguished composers have written for the screen-among them Serge Prokofiev, Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky...
...In other words, Stravinsky expected the film to be shot around his score...
...The emphasis here is on teamwork and, with it, the deference the composer pays to his collaborators...
...Louis Malle's use of recordings by France's Quintet of the Hot Club in Lacombe, Lucien was chronologically right but atmospherically wrong, while the Scott Joplin rags in George Roy Hill's The Sting were atmospherically right but chronologically wrong...
...Intended as fake Rachmaninoff for the film Dangerous Moonlight, it may not have had much originality, but as fake Rachmaninoff it was superb...
...Upon hearing the plot of Commandos Strike at Dawn, the composer went home and returned in a few weeks time with a finished work -even though the movie itself was not yet completed...
...But Barbicri introduces Afro-Cuban rhythms, too (not to mention the tango from his native Argentina...
...There are, to be sure, isolated exceptions...
...Stravinsky, on the other hand, commissioned to do the music for Commandos Strike at Dawn, a 1942 war movie starring Paul Muni, created a work that could not be used...
...No, the trouble was-according to Tony Thomas in his book Music for the Modes-that Stravinsky never bothered to learn the rules of the game...
...Since then, jazz has become extremely common in films...
...It should be clear that the process is an arduous and restrictive one...
...Prokofiev, with Lieutenant Kije and Alexander Nevsky, has probably been the most successful...
...In contrast, lyric poetry is written with a trust in a long future...
...j till, even laboring under the most severe limitations, some screen composers have produced rewarding music...
...it can suggest time and place...
...Yet normally work on the music for a film does not begin until the movie has been reduced to the so-called "rough-cut stage"— that is, edited into just about the shape the director wishes but not cut to the desired running time...
...Unfortunately, there is a longstanding prejudice against film music, and most jazz or classical composers would, like Mangione, be insulted to be told they might be good at it...
...But Copland has also produced a number of competent scores, mostly in the '40s-of Mice and Men, The North Star and The Heiress being examples...
...With stopwatch in hand, he takes notes on the duration, placement and type of musical effects required: 1 minute and 58 seconds of music is needed at a particular place...
...Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto, for instance, was written in the so-called Golden Age of Movies, when classical themes were borrowed or, more often, imitated...
...Ideally," Miss Lutyens observed, "you shouldn't know the music is there except when everybody— meaning the director, the producer, the composer-all mean it to be there and allow for it...
...Ultimately, it was the director in each of these cases who was responsible...
...It was subsequently performed, and well received, on the concert stage as The Four Norwegian Moods...
...Like most pursuits related to art where craftsmanship rather than genius is called for, composing for films is very easy to underestimate...
...Those melodic love-montages of the late '60s became a cinematic cliche because filmmakers found lyrical music far more expressive in such situations than any sweet-little-nothings the scriptwriters might have come up with...
...There are so many built-in curbs to creativity that most composers looking for a means of self-expression automatically look elsewhere-as, of course, Stravinsky finally did...
...It's a form of musical journalism which can be excellent of its sort, like an enormously good and interesting article in a paper...
...But I thought then, and I continue to think, that his best work— especially concert pieces like "Hill Where the Lord Hides" and "The Feel of a Vision"-has a lyrical, suggestive, almost descriptive quality thai would be appropriate in a movie theater...
...The jazz is there, naturally-sensual, lyrically expressive, practically wistful...
...Most of the cuts are highlights from the essentially operatic scores of Max Steiner, one of the most proficient of the old craftsmen...
...Thus, film scores are written in bits and pieces to very specific requirements...
...And his music has another quality, the same one I sensed in Chuck Mangione's work...
...Then he sits down to repeated viewings, often at a movieola machine...
...But this must be a cooperative decision...
...In a recent interview published in Sight and Sound, Elizabeth Lutyens, an Englishwoman who has composed background music for everything from documentaries to horror films, explained: "One must write on the presumption of one hearing...
...Along with the usual movie highlights, it contains Korngold's Cello Concerto in C, written to be "performed" by Paul Henreid in the movie Deception...
...The composer proposes, and the director disposes...
...At this point the composer discusses with the director where in general the music should go and what kind it should be...
...Although the classical idiom remains very much alive in film music, today's composers have a great deal more latitude in their choice of idiom and style...
...The surest orchestral manner among traditional Hollywood composers belonged to Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and an album of his scores is also available on RCA, Elizabeth and Essex: The Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (ARL 1-0185...
...People who yearn for those good old days-vast symphony orchestras pulsating as Bergman fixed Bogart with a soulful stare-may wish to refresh their memories with the rerecorded and re-released album Casablanca: Classic Film Scores for Humphrey Bogart on RCA (ARL 1-0422...
...they were the only false notes in the entire movie...
...And that simply isn't the way it's done...
...a strong chord should come at 1:02...
...As good a director as Robert Altman goofed badly in Mc-Cabe & Mrs...
...The breakthrough came in the '50s, when Leith Stevens, for The Wild One, and Elmer Bernstein, for The Man With the Golden Arm, utilized jazz to score straight dramatic movies...
...Ken Russell is said to have decided upon the Tchaikovsky background first and edited The Music Lovers to fit its rhythm and texture...
...Rock has been widely used as well, even hit songs (Easy Rider and American Graffiti...
...He made a face, and immediately I was sorry I had brought up the subject...
...the film's wild delinquents would have responded to rock music and to that only...
...Another possible restraint on creativity concerns the old question -old to movie buffs, anyway-of whether the audience should ever actually be aware of the music...
...The piece is fairly lush and romantic, with just enough dissonances for artistic respectability...
...But the men in the business have never doubted its importance, not since the days when movies were first exhibited commercially and a piano player was employed to provide mood music...
...Call it a visual dimension, or visual suggestion, or whatever...
Vol. 58 • January 1975 • No. 1
