The complete idiot's guide to classical music (46 page)

There was soundtrack music long before Al Jolson got down on one knee to serenade his Mammy in
The Jazz Singer
;
indeed all the way back to before the turn of this rapidly concluding century. In 1888, Thomas Edison was tinkering with a gadget (he called it a Kinetoscope) through which “we may see and hear a whole opera as perfectly as if actually present, although the performance may have taken place years before.” Within half a dozen years, Edison’s Kinetograph camera was filming snippets of Broadway musicals, and by 1895, he had developed the Kinetophone so that when peepshow patrons plunked down their dimes, they could not only watch five consecutive scenes from
A Gaiety Girl
or some other stage hit of the day, but listen through ear tubes to an accompanying recording.

By 1900, no less than three companies validated Edison’s predictions at the Paris Exhibition, with ballet and grand opera excerpts included in their competing versions of talking pictures. It would take another generation to develop the technology to make sound movies viable for general production and distribution, but just because most of the major pictures of the teens and 1920s were silents doesn’t mean they lacked music. Engraved in American lore and legend, after all, is the image of the put-upon piano player at the ratty old upright, raiding the classics to improvise accompaniments for the train robbery, the kiss, or whatever else might materialize on screen.

Gradually, producers of important films began distributing cue sheets and “suggested music,” so the tonal wherewithal might have a closer kinship to the on-screen action.

The more ambitious studios even began sending out scores, to be played by orchestras in the lavish, big-city film emporia.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
They don’t make gigantic movie houses any more. When the Strand opened on Broadway in 1914, it boasted high-pile plush carpets, crystal chandeliers, original artwork, and a pit where more than 30 musicians accompanied the film of the day (not to mention the inevitable vaudeville stage show).

Other theatres astonished their patrons with the variety of sound effects possible on “the mighty Wurlitzer” organ. Smaller town halls made do with a more modest band of five or six instrumentalists or, in a pinch, fell back upon the aforementioned piano player. With these live music capabilities in place, producers began commissioning and distributing full background scores (usually in a variety of orchestrations). This system continued even after the advent of the sound era, primarily because the live orchestra was a lot more pleasing to the ear than the tinny music emanating from the primitive theater speakers. As technologies continued to advance, synchronized sound and sight became the norm that prevails to this day.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Just as live music helped draw an audience into the silent screen action, it sometimes motivated the actors while the pictures were being shot. A number of early silent-film directors, among them Alfred Hitchcock, actually hired musicians to perform on the set, hoping thereby to inspire the players to higher levels of thespian glory.

Almost from the very beginning of the art form music and motion pictures were natural partners. Sometimes music served as a subtle enhancement, “like a small lamp placed beneath the screen to warm it,” as Aaron Copland put it. But it could be a powerful emotional tool as well, delineating characters, creating suspense, and counter-pointing the dramatic highs and lows of the story action. The best film music not only did that, but went on to transcend its original screen function to thrive in the concert hall. And producing that music since the 1930s has been a brilliant cadre of classically trained composers.

We’ve already mentioned the film scores of Copland, Thomson, and Bernstein, but however excellent their work, Hollywood was clearly a diversion from their more usual concert or theatrical venues. The composers of whom we now speak, wrote sonatas and symphonies and operas too, but their abilities in the cinematic medium were so remarkable that their names are, for better or worse, indelibly associated with Hollywood and the blockbuster films they scored.

The biography of Dimitri Tiomkin begins almost the same as Prokofiev’s. He was born in Ukraine (1894–1979), studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and began his career as a virtuoso pianist. Tiomkin made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1924, playing the Liszt Concerto no. 1, and four years later brought Gershwin’s Piano Concerto to Paris for the first time, where he also gave joint concerts with Gershwin at the Paris Opera. As a rising star, Tiomkin was booked onto the vaudeville circuit in the U.S., but when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression stalked the land, the dates dried up. Only the movies—those blessed havens of escapism—were still booming, and Tiomkin managed to boom with them, especially when a producer decided that only a Russian composer could properly score a film version of Tolstoy’s
Resurrection
complete, as Tiomkin recalled it, “with beards and Cossacks.”

One thing led to another, and Tiomkin was off on a 40-year Hollwood binge that included such memorable films as
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939),
The Moon and Sixpence
(1943),
Dial M for Murder
(1954),
Giant
(1956), and
The Guns of Navarone
(1961). And those were the scores that didn’t win the Academy Awards; those that did were
High Noon
(1952),
The High and the Mighty
(1954), and
The Old Man and the Sea
(1958).

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Tiomkin was the hit of the 1954 Oscar ceremonies when he accepted the trophy with a little speech expressing his appreciation of “the very important factor, which makes me successful and adds to the quality of this town. I’d, like to thank Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner. . . .”

Tiomkin made his conducting debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1937 and he composed nonfilm music for dance. But it is his richly romantic screen scores, reflecting his Russian heritage yet flecked with jazz from his adopted homeland, that influenced successive generations of film composers and keep his name high on the list of American originals.

Born in Hungary (1907–1995), Miklos Rozsa was already on stage at age eight, playing the violin, conducting a children’s orchestra in Leopold Mozart’s “Toy Symphony” and starting to jot down original music, much of it flavored by the gypsy and Hungarian folk tunes he heard around him. At the Budapest High School, he organized concerts of music by such then modern composers as Bartok and Kodaly, and at age 18, he won the Franz Liszt prize for a trio based on a folk tune called “The Sunset.”

For more than 20 years, Rozsa had no thought of films: he was far too busy writing concertos, chamber music, ballets, and all sorts of other concert pieces. When Leonard Bernstein made his historic debut at Carnegie Hall, one of the pieces he conducted was Rozsa’s “Theme, Variations and Finale.” According to
The New York Times
, “it brought down the house.”

In 1937, Rozsa, then living in London, was asked to write the music for
Knight without Armour,
an Alexander Korda film starring Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich. Its success engendered another scoring assignment, this time for
Thunder in the City.
Korda then made Rozsa his official composer, a collaboration that led to seven more distinctive movies, among them
The Thief of Baghdad
(1940), and
The Jungle Book
(1942).

During World War II, much of Britain’s film production work was transferred to Hollywood, and there Rozsa came in 1940, subsequently winning Oscars for his scores to
Spellbound
(1945),
A Double Life
(1948), and
Ben Hur
(1959), but also writing music for about 75 other films. On that voluminous list:
Quo Vadis
(1951),
El Cid
(1960), and
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
(1970).

 
Important Things to Know
Among the distinguished classical musicians who premiered Rozsa’s concert works were Jascha Heifetz, Pinchas Zukerman, Janos Starker, and Leonard Pennario (the concertos respectively for violin, viola, cello and piano). Rozsa also wrote a double concerto for Heifetz and the great Russian cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.

For most of this time (1945–1965) Rozsa was on the music faculty at the University of Southern California, and even after he left teaching, he continued to flourish as a concert organizer and conductor, and maintained a separate classical composing career.

In addition to dozens of CDs devoted to Rozsa’s film scores, some 30 of his classical pieces are listed in the current catalogues, and there will be more to come: Koch Records, with four albums out already, is continuing to tape new pieces, with the goal of eventually issuing the complete orchestral music of Miklos Rosza.

The son of a Russian blacksmith, Alex North was born in Chester, Pennsylvania (1910–1991), studied at the Curtis Institute, the Juilliard School, and later—choosing an unusual alma mater for a native American—the Moscow Conservatory. Upon returning to the U.S., North studied with Aaron Copland and Ernst Toch, and became music director of the Anna Sokolow Dance Troupe at a time when the spiritual daughters of Martha Graham were redefining modern dance in America.