In my previous articles about the music of QUO VADIS, IVANHOE and PLYMOUTH ADVENTURE I have expanded my theories about music written for historical films. Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR presented new problems. If it had been merely a historical film about Julius Caesar I would have undoubtedly tried a reconstruction...
Category: Vintage Score
Ginrin
Musique concrète for the Film Ginrin (1956) – the first Film Music by Tôru Takemitsu (1930–1996): Representation of his Identity as a Postwar Avant-Garde Composer and Implication of Commercial Interference by Makoto Mikawa In 2005, the avant-garde Public Relations film Ginrin (Silver Wheels, 1956) was discovered. Since its location had been unknown almost for a … Continue reading Ginrin
Invaders from Mars
Not only is the music for the recent INVADERS FROM MARS re-make entangled in strange circumstances, but the score for the original 1953 film is likewise surrounded by controversy. Credited to Raoul Kraushaar, a Paris-born composer who was educated in the United States and began working in films in 1928 as a musical assistant...
The Heiress
Aaron Copland's score for the Paramount film, THE HEIRESS, is basically music of an intimate nature. Its overall effect is that of a kind of quiet restful picture of the late Victorian period in which the story is set. Instrumentation tends to be sparce. It is not music of an over-dramatic quality. In fact this element is underplayed causing the music to assume a subordinating...
The Man on the Eiffel Tower
Before coming to Hollywood some years ago, I had lived in Paris for about eighteen years, but I always longed to see again, if only for short while, that extraordinary City of Paris, with its old culture and its modern art. Then something marvellous happened! Paris suddenly came to me in a small projection room, where I saw for the first time the picture entitled...
No Sad Songs for Me
NO SAD SONGS FOR ME is the story of a happily married woman, with a good husband and little daughter, who suddenly discovers that she is dying of cancer and has about eight or ten months to live. Being a woman of unusual fortitude, she does not tell her husband of the imposing tragedy but makes plans which she hopes will lessen the grief of her death...
Lust for Life
Hollywood has not exactly achieved world fame for the historical accuracy of its film biographies, as the carefree manner in which it often juggles historical facts with sheer fantasy to suit its own dramatic purposes is its Achilles heel, where it can be - and usually is - attacked. LUST FOR LIFE, however, is a notable exception. It is most gratifying to see...
The Pride and the Passion
I felt it a rare privilege to be given to compose such a picture as THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION. Here, for once, was a large and completely authentic background picture, laid in Spain of the earliest 1800s, and with a compelling heart interest story as well as a larger story of the Spanish people in revolt against their Napoleonic oppressors.
War and Peace
n composing the background music for WAR AND PEACE I followed the two concepts of the story as they develop in Tolstoy’s novel, constantly alternating, or overlapping and flowing together, thus giving a certain rhythm to the entire narrative and establishing its musical structure. These two concepts, already so clearly expressed in the title...