In this year's Oscar shortlist, there are 81 candidate scores who were not only technically eligible for the nomination but the distributors actually bothered to nominate them. Of these 81 titles, only 2 were wrtitten by woman. Today's spotlight shines on one of them... Pinar Toprak was born in Turkey and spent the last couple of years working on some very interesting projects. The following interview covers everything you should know about the composer, from her days as one of Hans Zimmer's programmers to her recently completed now score for Daniel Adams' The Lightkeepers.

You were born in Istanbul, Turkey. How available were American movies and film scores in your country?

They were widely available. My father was a film fanatic and he made sure I grew up watching a lot of films. As far as film scores, they are definitely a lot more popular now then they were back when I was living there. Now, there is definitely a lot more appreciation for the art of film scoring. 12 years ago, When I was telling people what I wanted to do for a living most of the times I got the "yeah, good luck with that!" look :) Now I get emails from people all around Turkey telling me how proud they are to see a Turkish name on an American film.
 
( Read more... )

Sphinx is my second favorite score from Michael J. Lewis, particularly because it has a lot in comming with my favorite, The Medusa Touch. From my discussions with Michael last year, I learned a lot about both of these scores, but I only got to examine Sphinx in greater details just a couple of weeks ago. And despite the fact that it ranked as one of the composer's favorite projects to tackle with little interference from director Franklin J. Sheffner, I manged to find two missing cues, one of which I restored below (the other I can't even guess where to put). The excerpt below gives you and idea about not only Lesley-Anne Dawn's unfortunate hair cut, but also how music can add tension to this scene. The scene originally plays without music and the distant sound effects of honking cars and random traffic noises don't help the scene at all. Let "Meneptha's Letter'" show you, how it's done...

Reusing material from rejected scores is nothing new, everybody does it when there's a chance to cut corners on a demanding project. But there are examples which are lesser known than others. In 1997, Wynton Marsalis was working on the music of two movies, neither of which eventually used his talents. Marsalis however released a CD called Reeltime which actually contained his unused score to John Singleton's Rosewood (eventually scored by John Williams). But this wasn't the last time this music was utilized... for it resurfaced in Ken Burns' documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. Some sources claim that the music is directly lifted from the Reeltime album, but in fact the score is made up of new recordings of the older material. And you know what? The music fits the documentary a lot better than the Rosewood movie!

Back in the 1960s, releasing television sountracks wasn't like today's practice. With a few rare exceptions, all the TV soundtracks were concert arrangements of the major themes from the show, not actual cues from the soundtracks themselves. Such was the case with The Big Valley, a show that ran for four season, but had the privilige of given a musical album in the middle of its first season already. Although several composers were attached to the series (including Elmer Bernstein), the music on the LP largely focuses on George Duning's material, who wrote the main theme apart from episodic scores. I reproduce the liner notes mostly because it follows a very curios practice. Instead of talking about the music, it goes onto a description of the show. However, all the CAPITALIZED WORDS refer to actual tracks from the LP, making the liner notes read like an accompaniment program for the record. This method of discussing film music was quite frequent for TV show records and Varése had been using it recently in some of their CD Club titles. Somehow, this approach works a lot better on dusty LP jackets...

Especially arranged in the form of a suite for this album, George Duning's music to THE BIG VALLEY is highly expressive of the beauty of the land and the heartbeat of the exciting men and women who people it. Truly American is melodies, it evokes the character of THE BARKLEY'S (Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Long, Peter Breck, Lee Majors, Linda Evans, Charles Briles), the close-knit family to whom the neighbors look for wisdom and leadership when they are threatened by the land-grabbers and mountebanks of that era. Yet, the music also notes the skeleton in the family closet, the recklessness of Tom Barkley, the father, cut down before his time in the stubborn defense of this independence. Understanding Tom's weakness, the family draws together to defend his memory, proud of the heritage he has left them in wealth and spirit.

HEATH (Lee Majors), taken into the family only late as Tom's illegitimate son, is still troubled by the memory of his difficult childhood, still reaching out for the love which he never had. AUDRA (Linda Evans), proud and pretty, girlishly sensuous, yet still to be tamed by the love of a man, is fully realized in a hauntingly beautiful, hauntingly pleading ballad in which the middle part is as flirtatious as the thoughtless promise of a pretty face.

This, then, is the family whose realm is THE BIG VALLEY where on SUNDAY the morning draws at the call of the birds and the buggy takes men and women, young and old, to the church; the hymn which they sing is of simple faith and direct communication. The services over, the children play while the womenfolk chatter, and a leisurely ride takes everyone home to rest in the comfort of the land. A HARVEST FESTIVAL DANCE depicts a spirited, gay getting together to the tireless repeats of the fiddlers until a young pair separates to be alone in a waltz, a first meeting between boy and girl; but before their secret is discovered they rejoin the neighbors and swing their partners as though the quiet moment had never been. This is the land worth fighting for, and fight they must when hundreds of hired guns are sent in to GRAB FOR LAND to be delivered to the robber barons. The people of the valley do not fight joyfully, knowing that while they fight, the earth remains untended; yet they fight grimly as long as they must, unashamedly shedding tears as they collect their dead after the battle is won and the marauders driven off. Sometimes they give CHASE, unrelenting, violent chase, sparing neither the horses nor themselves. Comes the time for the ROUNDUP AND FIESTA, they provide for the work and the fun which their Mexican hands love so dearly; the BIG VALLEY THEME, stated in the OVERTURE and recapitulated in the FINALE, is played in counter melody to an authentic roundup song leading into a Mexican folksong which is treated with abandon and exuberance, commensurate with the hard play earned by hard labor. The BIG VALLEY THEME is really a love song to the beauty of the land, which shapes the thinking and the feeling, the face and heart of its inhabitants; it is the Big Valley which inspires their actions and their dreams.

Case Number: MM68CF

The Film: Jane Fonda IS Barbarella, the heroine of Roger Vadim's erotic sci-fi adventure. After doing a weightless striptease in her spaceship, Barbarella lands on a planet to find the perverted main villain, Durand Durand. During he journey, she meets all kinds of devious sexual devices on a trip nobody will forget.

The First Composer: French composer Michel Magné was a frequent collaborator of Roger Vadim and he composed a whacked-out, classically inspired score for the picture. His music finally appeared four decades later on a compilation that focused on music from Roger Vadim's films - this was a premier release because it didn't appear in the movie.

The Second Composer: Composer Charles Fox was asked to supply a more commercial and pop-oriented score which included a number of songs as well. The music became a cult classic (in no small part thanks to the kinky cover), but very few people actually knew about the previous, unused score.

Addendum: Although Magné's composer credit disappeared from the main title sequence, his conductor credit remained intact in the end credits. This lead to a number of erroneous credits that claim Magné conducted Fox's score - the same mistake appears in Harkit Records' release of Charles Fox's music. This is of course not true, the French composer only conducted his unused score.

Isten hozta őrnagy úr is one of the few Hungarian movies I bother to own. It's a unique picture with some visual wizardry that actually helps the picture instead of distracting from it. Zoltán Latinovics plays an eccentric high-ranking military person who takes a vacation in the middle of World War II. He travels to the family pansion owned by the parents of one of his soldiers' and the helpless family does everything he wishes so they could get their boy a promotion. The major has some unusual wishes and very weak nerves: he requires constant attention, he doesn't like people being taller than him, he avoids eye contact and he can't rest. To solve this problem, the family introduces him to their pasttime of earning some money - making paper boxes for the military. This will turn out to be a very bad idea in the end... Like most Hungarian movies, Isten hozta őrnagy úr doesn't contain much music, most of it is inventive applications of military songs for the family's endless box-making shenenigans. András Mihály's piece available here is played under the inventive main titles sequence, during which the whole plot of the movie is played in fast motion in a small room modeled on the real sets. The music is just as anarchic and random as this description sounds, so be prepared...

"Wow! You really did Mr. Baseball" I hear you saying. "Why waste your time on such an unimportant piece of..." Hey, if Jerry took the time to write the score and then scramble it up for the album, I can easily spend a fraction of that time in untangling the chronological order. Sure, it's not a Holy Cow like The Sand Pebbles or Alien, but it's still Goldsmith at his... well, it's still Goldsmith. With all the reprises of the synth-lead baseball melody and the Eastern love theme, you kinda see why this album was scrabled up. This album in particular really plays a lot better with this sequence. No, I'm kidding, if you don't know the movie, it really won't make a difference. But I know you love cutting up soundtracks as much as I do, so get ready for an easy edit. Oh, and before you ask, yes, there is unreleased music. A whole 20 second cue! Oh, the humanity!

1. Mr. Baseball (2:33)
4. New Apartment (0:25-0:45)
5. The Dragons (1:05)
4. New Apartment (0:00-0:25)
7. The Locker Room (0:37-1:06)
6. Call Me Jack (0:00-0:33)
2. First Night Out (1:54)
6. A Wise Brain (0:33-2:45)
3. Acceptance (1:54)
8. The Bath (3:07)
10. Go Get 'Em (0:00-0:44)
14. Shabondama Boogie (Fairchild) (4:23)
9. Training (2:31)
11. Team Effort (2:50)
7. Winning Streak (0:00-0:37)
12. Swing Away (1:46)
10. He's Still Got It (0:44-1:25)
13. Final Score (5:04)

As you might have guessed, I love editing and sequencing CDs. This takes up a lot of time, basically there's about 4 hours of work behind each and every new list. But there are frustrating stories which may take up as much as 6-8 hours and by the end I still can't publish a list. These CDs can not be sequence because the music on the CD is simply not in the movie. They are not rejected scores or anything like thats - just the music itself is very deceptive. And since I can't publish sequencing guides yet spent so much time on these movies, I thought I'd share my stories in this new series. I call these CDs the "unsequencables".

PART I: FIERCE CREATURES

Fierce Creatures is one of the Jerry Goldsmith / Fred Schepisi collaborations. A quasi follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda, John Cleese plays a zoo director who is forced to make profit with his endeavor. He decides to achieve this by eliminating all the cute creatures from the rooster, only focusing on the dangerous, thus money-making creatures. Harmless fun, some nice moments, even some outrageous ones and the score matches that. Jerry Goldsmith wrote his "Willa's Theme" from his unused 2 Days in the Valley score and eventually put together that didn't even reach 30 minutes in length. Not only that, it was said that he wrote some new tracks for the album in order to provide enough material on CD. This seemed like an intrigueing job to sequence (imagine the clever edits I envisioned), but the fact is that you can not sequence Fierce Creatures, because more than half of the music doesn't appear in the picture.

Going through my notes again, it seems about 3-4 cues were used in some degree. "First Day" was used for the opening, "Contact" was heard when Jamie Lee Curtis met the gorilla, "End Credits" was used for the finale and that's it. Parts of "A Long Story" were used for Rollo trying to explain why he has women in a hotel room, but the track on the album is significantly expanded for the CD. And that's it. All the other music on the CD is so re-written that you couldn't really find matching musical counterparts in the score. Some titles are really suggestive (such as "Trained Seals"), but when you line up the CD track against the cue in the picture, you won't find many matches.

Again, it was implied that new material was recorded for the CD, but I didn't imagine it was that much. Almost every cue that runs over a minute was put on the CD, the rest barely reached the 30 second mart. Fierce Creatures actual score is made up of many many very short cues which couldn't even be edited together as the experience would be still disjointed. This is why choice material from the score was re-recorded the same time as the film cues and these new compositions/compilations form the backbone of the entire CD. And while it certainly makes a pleasent listening experience, it's also unsequencable because of it. And I spent six hours finding that out...

Tomorrow you'll get another Schepisi/Goldsmith collaboration in the chronological order and later I'll tell you another horror story from "The Unsequencables."

After working with Dean Devlin on The Triangle and The Librarian movies, composer Joseph LoDuca was a natural choice for the producer's upcoming hit series: Leverage. Written, shot and scored in the style of 60s caper movies, the show follows an oddball team of specialists with their own quirks who act as modern Robin Hoods. Whenever small people have issues with big corporations who cheat them or don't care that they are ruining lives, the Leverage team sets up a con which gathers enough profits to turn the wrong right from the ignorant party's money. Headlined by Oscar-winning Timothy Hutton, the show is one of TNT's most successfull current productions. With a temporary break from the job (just to put together a CD for the fans), Joseph LoDuca discussed the show and its music with the Daily Film Music Blog, giving us an early hint of what may be one of the biggest challenges he has to face on the show in the next season.

You're mostly known for the orchestral fantasy scores of Hercules and Xena or your horror music (particularly for Sam Raimi), but you actually began your career as a jazz musician in Detroit. Could you share some interesting stories with great jazz musicians?

Detroit has a tremendous jazz heritage. The list of jazz musicians from Detroit ifrom the 50’s through today is exhaustive: in the 50‘sThad, Elvin and Hank Jones, Kenny Burrell, Yusef Lateef, and Ron Carter. Joe Henderson and Alice Coltrane in the 60’s. There was plenty of opportunity to learn, sit in, and eventually gig with with the masters who remained there: Marcus Belgrave, George Benson (the saxophonist), and Charles Moore, to name a few. And remember that the Motown musicians were generally jazz players, so I had the opportunity to work with many of the musicians on those famous songs, the Funk Brothers, as they call themselves. I had many gigs at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, the oldest jazz club in America. In fact Sam Raimi used to bring dates there to hear my band.
 
( Read more... )

The biggest problem with the soundtrack to Aaron Zigman 's The Bridge to Terabithia lies in the fact it's filled with obligatory pop songs from Walt Disney artists - with many songs not even appearing in the movie. This quite mature picture contains a wonderful fantasy score by Aaron Zigman, which is naturally relegated into a secondary role on the original soundtrack - but in the movie it's dominance can't be debated. This scene entitled "To the Museum" was the only case where Zigman's cue was replaced with a song ("Shine" by The Skies of America). The song is the kind of road trip rock which is played whenever music supervisors realize "Born to be Wild" is a passé by now. Zigman's cue is more of the folksy traveling music variety - it's quite brief and will not change the whole of the movie, not even for a hardcore film score fan. Take it for what it is - a curious alternate approach.

To illustrate yesterday's interview with some musical examples, let's dig up our showel and unearth some of the best pieces from Jack Curtis Dubowsky's currently available scores. Instead of me talking about the music, I'll let the composer take over the description of the music - I only bring you the introductory text this time.

That Man Peter Berlin: [Talking about the final cue which had to be rewritten - you can hear the original version here] Ordinarily a composer may make many different passes, options, or rewrites on a cue. Normally I’d just discard earlier or rejected versions for a soundtrack release. However, I really wanted to include this particular alternate cue on the soundtrack, because even though it was rejected, I really liked the idea behind it. The film ends with old footage of Peter Berlin cruising a guy but not hooking up. It’s Peter’s characteristic game of “cat and mouse.” In the rejected cue, two lines of counterpoint are chasing each other and weaving around each other, never really connecting, just like Peter’s approach to cruising. It also used a theme already presented in the score. Perhaps this approach was just too obscure for anyone other than a musician to appreciate. But I was really hung up on how clever it was, so even though it didn’t make the picture, I thought I’d throw it on the soundtrack.

Redwoods:

As you can learn from the interview below, Jack Curtis Dubowsky is not a "local artist" - the young composer is kept busy on both sides of the Atlantic, primarily working in the New York and the Sanf Francisco film scenery. But that's not the only special thing about Jack... While most people list John Williams and Star Wars (or Jaws) for the reasons they turned towards film music, Jack's favorite works are Angela Morley's Watership Down and Danny Elfman's Edward Scissorhands. Armed with a love of film scores, the composer got his degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and set to work on independent short films, documentaries and eventually feature films. He struck up great working collaborations with directors Todd Wilson and David Lewis and he also scored Jim Tushinki's provocative documentary about 70s gay icon Peter Berlin. With more of Jack's scores popping up on iTunes, this seemed like a good time to aim our spotlight in his general direction and do a link-heavy interview!

When did your interest in film and music start?
 
I was interested in music as a kid. My Mom gave me piano lessons from old books and sheet music she had as a child. Then, of course, growing up as an American, I became very interested in popular music.  The first film score I bought was an LP of Watership Down by Angela Morely, who died last year. In a side note, there’s an amazing BBC documentary about Morely, who used to be Wally Stott, and had gender reassignment surgery the same year as Walter/Wendy Carlos. Morley worked as an orchestrator and arranger with Scott Walker and scored many films. I was able to get the Watership Down score on CD a few years ago. I still think it’s brilliant. “Kehaar’s Theme” is an amazing variation of Debussy’s “L’Apres midi d’un Faune,” which I didn’t know at the time! “Kehaar” takes the famous opening flute line and turns it into a soaring, majestic, wondrous waltz.

( Read more... )

Enola Gay is one of the few Maurice Jarre scores which hasn't had a CD release up to this point, but there was an LP release done by Varése Sarabande. Although the liner notes on Varése's LPs vary by the author, the one on Enola Gay is quite detailed: it contains a short composer bio (which is essentially a list of credits), notes from the producer and most unusually, notes on the soundtrack recordign techniques. The "About the Composer" chapter surprisingly contains a good number of titles from Jarre from the pre-Lawrence era, a timeframe which is largely unknwon and unreleased even to this day. Franklin R. Levy's notes are relatively short, but they are up to the point. The third part focusing on the recordings on the other hand is surprisingly detailed and explains quite a lot about combining analogue and digital recording techniques. This part is short but well-written and it can be used as an introduction to people who don't know about recording techniques at all - recommended for film music history classes in chronicling this transitional period.

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

Maurice Jarre , on of the most prolific and honored composers, began writing music for film in 1952 with Hotel Des Invalides. Other notable film scores have since included Crack in the Mirror, The Longest Day, Sundays and Cybele, The Collector, Lawrence of Arabia, Is Paris Burning, Dr. Zhivago, Night of the Generals, Great Expectations, Jesus of Nazareth, The Professionals, Grand Prix, Resurrection, Ryan's Daughter, Crossed Swords, Mohammed: Messenger of God, The Tin Drum and Shogun.

ABOUT THE SCORE

In 1962, I sat in a dark theater watching Lawrence of Arabia, a film which was to become one of my all-time favorites. The Academy Award-winning score was composed by Maurice Jarre, and it became a dream of mine to one day make a film with the scope that would enable me to entice Maurice Jarre to create another epic film score.

When I began to develop Enola Gay as a film, the first creative element I envisioned -- even before I began considering directors and screenwriters -- was that musical score I'd dreamed about in Hollywood dreams come true, and now, eighteen years after Lawrence of Arabia, Maurice Jarre has created this magnificent music for Enola Gay.

I asked Maurice at our first meeting on the film to help make it a tribute to the old way films of the past. I didn't have to say more, as evidenced here by the military marches, romantic themes, Japenese motifs and big band sounds of the forties.

I hope the people who view Enola Gay on screen and television and who listen to the music of Maurice Jarre on this album will enjoy some of the same pleasure I have received from this music, which truly enhances every moment of the film.

Film Music 2 is the sequel to Film Music I, the Film Music Society's essay collection which is now compiled by editors Claudia Gorbman and Warren M. Sherk. The publication is given extra attention with a dedication to the late Tony Thomas and a foreword by composer Christopher Young. Claudia Gorbman's introduction begins with memories about Film Music I, then goes on to introduce each published essay in the volume. Like a good editor, she tries to find a unifying force between the published essays as she orders them and ties them together, but fact is Film Music 2 is a more varied collection than Film Music I was. That is not to say the essays are not good, but there is less cohesion in the volume itself because of the wide range that's covered.

The book opens with Neil Lerners writing on the documentary scores of Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland. The essay is brief, but well researched with lots of notes - in fact, this is one of the few essays when I found myself consulting with the notes more often than with the actual article. The essay is enriched by well-selected and illustrative musical examples. Peter Franklin's writing on E.W. Korngold's Deception covers the same era, focusing more on the classical Hollywood studio era. I never thought of Deception as that much of a great film, but the essay brings forward many interesting points, including how Korngold himself may have influenced the picture - apart from the music of course. There are fewer references in this essay, the main focus is really on the author's interpretation of the movie itself.

The first film music book contained interviews with several lumanries and its continuation is no exception. Arthur Hamilton's interview with Jay Livingston and Ray Evans may be one of the most eye-opening interview published from this era. The Herrmann interview from the first volume was just as outspoken, but that archival discussion quickly deteriorated into Herrmann rambling on various subject matters and the interviewees trying to ask for tapes of unreleased scores. The good thing about Livingston and Evans is that they are not only willing to discuss their greatest hits, but they are very well aware of what didn't work, what was unnecessary and what was trash. Great call!

The next two essays discuss people who played important roles in film music, yet are quite unheard of. Alfred W. Cochran is an expert on Gail Kubik and he summarizes his knowledge in the field of film music by discusssing what he refers to as the composer's "Functional Music." I swear I read another Cochran essay on Kubik somewhere else and that was comprehensive, but this is good enough for an introduction (even though some of Kubik's more brushes with film music are omitted). Warren Sherk's essay on Paul Beaver is similarly dedicated to an unsung hero of film music: Paul Beaver, who was the man to call in Hollywood when someone needed a synthesizer back in the good old days.

The remaining part of the book is where things become a bit random. Jeff Smith's article on United Artists' record releasing practices is a nice tie-in reading to the Livingston-Evans interview, though it's a bit short.Michel Chion's "The Opera Films of Daniel Toscan du Plantier" (translated by Claudia Gorbman) seems like an odd inclusion as we are drifting far away from film scores into a completely different territory. Robynn J. Stillwell's essay on Sense and Sensibility brings us back to the subject at hand - the music examples and the scene / score comparision appendix makes this the most visually attractive writing of the lot.

The final two essays are more on the practical side. H. Stephen Wright wrote about the sources of film music research in the first volume and he tries to tackle a similar subject here by discussing FILMUS-L. For those who don't know what this is, FILMUS-L was a mailing list started by Wright and he writes about discussing film music on the internet. This writing reminds me of the senator who claimed "the internet is not a big truck" - this writing is a bit out-of-date now and it only holds historical significance for today's readers. At least it seems people complaining about scores that are not released is an inherent point of discussion no matter what year it is... Finally, Michael V. Pisani's article on teaching film music may be interesting for people who want to tackle this subject and need hints into organizing their classes.

Film Music 2 is a worthy successor to Film Music I, but the subjects are a bit more random and there are at least two essays that I think have little to do with the subject at hand and distract from the volume's flow (I won't name them, but perhaps you can guess what I have in mind). What this book adds to your collection are excellent discussions of people who are really underappreciated in this field from Livingston-Evans through Gail Kubik to Paul Beaver.

Case Number: CM76EM

The Film: Todo Modo IS a barely accessible Italian political thriller which was released in 1976. The movie was meant to be a political satire on the Italian Christian Democratic Party - even the title is a play on the name of former PM Aldo Moro. When the politician was kidnapped and murdered, the film became unexhibitable.

The First Composer: Jazz legend Charles Mingus recorded an improvised score for the picture after one of his Italian tours. He was invited by producer Daniele Senatore, but director Elio Petri wasn't too enthusiastic about the jazzy music. He decided not to use the music once someone told him that a particular piece reminded him of something else.

The Second Composer: Petri asked Ennio Morricone (who scored his Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) to do a quick replacement score before the premiere. One of the fastest written scores of the composer, this is easily one of Morricone's least inspired scores, consisting up of various orchestral textures.

Addendum: Mingus' put together an LP of his music for Todo Modo on which he paired this music together with a suite that was inspired by a script featuring Colombian drug traffic. The CD release of Todo Modo is slightly expanded with a couple of minutes and two short bonus tracks. Morricone's music hasn't been released.

The following two clips come from two Mel Brooks movies separated by a decade or so. History of the World: Part I (never actually followed by Part II) contains one of Mel Brook's signature comedy tricks: promising a sequel in one form or another. In this case not only the title was indicative of a second part, but also the end of the movie which promised "Coming Attractions" in the form of further historical sketches, such as an ice skating Hitler or "Jews in Space" which seems like a predecessor of Spaceballs. This trailer used a song whose melody and jolly approach was reused in the 1993 comedy Robin Hood - Men in Tights. Now there was a bit of change in the musical department as History of the World: Part I was scored by John Morris and Robin Hood - Men in Tights was done by Hummie Mann, but the song was actually done by Mel Brooks in both cases, so no worries there.

For the better part of his life, Mark Leneker has been an advocate of the music of Aaron Copland, especially his underrated film music works. Although the have been several suites and compilations released with great success (the two most notable being done by Leonard Slatkin and Jonathan Sheffer), the only actually released Copland score was his music for The Red Pony which spanned less than stellar sound. But now two new Copland scores have been made available through the efforts of Naxos. Thanks to Leneker's restoration work, the label managed to release complete re-recordings of the composer's landmark scores to Our Town and Of Mice and Men first as a download only release. But don't worry, this will shortly be followed by a CD issue as well. We discussed the decade long journey with Mark to honor the online availability of these landmark presentations, which will hopefully be followed by other re-recordings in the near future.

How did you first became aware of the music (and film music) of Aaron Copland?

I came from a small school system, but we were lucky enough to have both band and orchestra programs. So my interest in orchestral and instrumental music came from playing in those groups. I think I was in my early teens. I remember listening to my older sister’s tapes from her college Music Appreciation class, which provided a kind of capsule summary of pieces from the major musical eras. Of course when we got to the “20th century” it contained a piece or two from Copland -- probably Rodeo and Appalachian Spring -- which I immediately latched onto. Specific to his film music, I’d say the concert arrangements he did probably filtered in as I came across more of works. I was also listening to a lot of film scores in general. It wasn’t until much later that I really dug down deep into Copland’s specific film scoring assignments.

What's your opinion on the two most widely available Copland film music collection?I'm talking about the ones conducted by Leonard Slatkin and Jonathan Sheffer.

Both are excellent albums and I highly recommend them. I think the Slatkin is OOP, but still lurking in the secondary market. Its also the only recording of music from The Heiress. Sheffer’s has material from The Cummington Story, and most notably, The North Star both available nowhere else.
 
These compilations usually feature arranged suites, not the actual cues. Do you think these selections can be representative of the full scores?

I want to sort of take both sides here. Copland always supported film music and saw it as no less a form of dramatic music than ballet, opera, etc. He famously noted that Hollywood was one of the few places in the world where the emphasis is almost completely on the living composer. That said, he also knew it was a collaborative creation, and that the music needed to be at the service of the picture. The fact he was able to take motion picture music at all and introduce it into the concert repertory of major orchestras in the 1940s is pretty amazing. His arrangements reflect the fashion of the time of chamber-sized orchestration, which when you think about it was quite practical because it allowed the music to be played by a wider array of groups versus just the large ensembles. Also, it was still important that the music function in concert as pure music away from specific beats. Scholars have suggested that Copland always kept the idea of “the long line” in mind for his pieces, the pure musical narrative. You can hear that in his Our Town Suite and Music for Movies suite. The music doesn’t need the picture and are evocative in their own right. I read that Copland considered the Our Town Suite to be a sort of “happy accident.” Now, after having said all this, one major thing I hope people take from listening to Of Mice and Men and Our Town in their entirety is the variety at play in the music. We get Copland in various styles: steeped in his populist idiom but with bursts of modernism which we usually associate with his earlier works from the 20s and also the 50s and 60s. Even something as consonant and monolithic as Our Town, has moments of dissonance. Maybe we can call this Copland’s “Hollywood Sound” or something, which allowed him to mix freely from his compositional palette to best serve the narrative.
 
How was the new Of Mice and Men / Our Town CD concieved? Whose idea was it to reconstruct and re-record these scores?

It was mine. This started a decade ago. It actually came from a request — not even a direct one, it was kind of rhetorical! — from an orchestra trying to perform more live concerts in NYC, whose members regularly performed on TV and movie scores, broadway pit orchestras and the like. It seemed to me that to do this music would blur the lines between film and classical music. Also at the time, Copland’s Centenary was approaching and it just seemed like a good idea.
 
Why were these two particular titles selected?

Mainly practical. I’d be lying if I said I had a deep thesis in the beginning. My initial inquiry was for Of Mice and Men, Our Town, The Heiress, The Red Pony, and a TV score called The World of Nick Adams. Extant full score copies for Our Town and Of Mice and Men were available from Copland’s collection at the Library of Congress. It also was sort of nice because they were his first 2 Hollywood scores written within months of each other.

What kind of sources were used for the recoonstruction and how did you obtain them?

How lucky we were that Copland kept such good records! Of Mice and Men fully orchestrated was right there in his collection! Granted the paper was degraded but all the notes were there! Our Town was, too, though I am glad I had the sense to request not just the film music but also the concert arrangements – he had pulled out the original sheets from the score, so I was able to fit them back in. The Copland Fund, in my experience, has been very generous in allowing access to these works, and certainly none of this could have happened without them.

Could you explain the step by step process of the reconstruction during which the sketches turned into recordings?

 Well as I said the scores, thankfully, were complete so the task of having to set notes down wasn’t needed. Some of it was me standing over a copier with this 70 year-old manuscript – a bit nerve-wracking – some of it was the Library sending repros. Its easier now to do all this online if your given the proper permission to seek out what your looking for. I did have the Of Mice and Men repros put over to acid-free paper, I think because some sheets were so large they had to be split up and I wanted to bring them back to one sheet. And what it got down to really, to make these playable, was for an expert computer engraver/copyist who must have had eyes of steel and the patience of Job to set up the whole thing, note by note, in Sibelius.
 
Did you learn any hidden secrets about the music while working with these two scores? Any interesting unused or alternate ideas that came up?

I guess the big thing in the Of Mice and Men score is the piece “The Wood Scene” which was to be the 2nd cue. It was written, recorded and then not used. We included it. I don’t know why it wasn’t used but I can guess: it was supposed to be the first time the main theme was heard, and it was to coincide with the first time George describes the ranch they want to buy to Lennie in the film. I think Copland, and director Milestone agreed that this was one time Steinbeck’s words were music enough. The theme appears soon after in the next cue anyways.

For Our Town the big thing was to present the famous “Grover’s Corners” cue in its complete original version. The Concert versions excised some bars while the movie excised some other bars, we play the whole thing with all the original bars. We also play some bars cut from “Introducing the Professor”, “George and Emily” and “Epilogue”. Nothing major --like 6-12 measures or something--but they are there nonetheless.

How was the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic and conductor Andrew Mogrelia selected for the project?

Naxos chose them. I know that Andrew had recently done a well-received disc of Leonard Bernstein ballet music for them. The Bohuslav Philharmonic recorded a complete version of Copland’s The Tender Land in 2002 for Albany Records.

What was the timeframe of the project from the first steps to the last?

For me? Over a decade. But remember I started from literally nowhere, just a fan. So depending on a huge variety of factors, your mileage and results may vary. I should add that inbetween this, The World of Nick Adams concerts happened and Varese Sarabande released the ost to Something Wild (Copland’s last film score) and I was a part of those.
 
Naxos will release the music on CD and on digital download with slightly different contents. Could you explain what will be different and why these steps were taken?

Well, the scores total over 80 minutes of music. I believe to safely do a run of CDs you don’t want to max out the disc space – I don’t know manufacturing but thats what I am told. And its really not economical to issue 2 discs, even if you re-issue material to make up 2nd disc space. So the single disc will need to have some cues excised. Its months to come so I don’t have specifics.

Can we look forward to other Copland reconstructions? If yes, what scores?

I hope so, I would love to help make The Heiress and The Red Pony a reality. Certainly worthwhile and logical follow-ups. They present their own set of logistical challenges, as you may imagine.
 
Despite scoring only a few films when compared with contemporaries such as Max Steiner, Copland has an incredible influence on film scores. How would you explain this?

This kind of scoring somewhat preceded Copland’s arrival in Hollywood. Copland himself points out the work of Antheil, and especially Virgil Thomson for paving the way. But Copland is not Thomson. I kind of like the comparison given that Thomson’s music lacked the underlying toughness that Copland had. Also importantly, Copland was in the studios, working on Hollywood studio films getting premiers while Thomson was working on independent documentaries. Copland probably had greater opportunity to meet other composers on the lot; they probably attended sessions. Jerome Moross worked on Our Town with Copland, writing out parts. George Bassman assisted with Of Mice and Men. I think film composers saw the films, which were critically lauded, and heard how the music worked. On top of this, his concert music was inescapable and highly influential. So though this movement was not Copland’s alone, it seems he cast the most influential net.
 
Finally, do you have any random anecdotes you could share about the project?

There is a certain randomness about the whole thing don’t you think? But—I guess standing in the Library of Congress copying these scores – that was a bit surreal. Also answering emails from Andrew Mogrelia during the recording sessions on score questions…that was unique - a fun kind of stress.

Yesterday we looked at Báthory, the 2008 picture starring Anna Friel and I brought you a short suite of Simon Boswell music. The similarly themed The Countess was released the next year, written, starring, directed and scored(!) by Julie Delpy. That's quite a lot of hats to wear... The music to this picture was released by Colosseum in Germany (hence the German title on the CD packaging) and is quite hard to come by if your not into the whole "exporting CDs from a far away country" thing. For those who have the CD, I put together this nice little sequencing guide to do a chronological order. However, I have some notes for you. Several cues are used multiple times in the picture: "Dominic" alone makes four appearances including the end credits, "The Cage" is featured twice in its full length and once in the beginning it is edited into a different cue... So there's a lot of mess. To produce something simpler and listenable I include every cue only ONCE and place them at the most relevant place (usually where the title refers to).

3. Waiting for Istvan (1:45)
6. Going to Vienna (0:28)
5. First Night (1:03)
14. Second Night (0:58)
1. Dominic (1:02)
7. I Am Rotting (1:37)
8. Drops of Blood (0:52)
11. First Bleeding (0:55)
10. Killing Bertha (1:34)
12. Sending Darvulia Away (0:59)
2. The Cage (1:33)
13. Girls in the Woods (1:45)
15. Demons Are Here (0:59)
4. Looking for Clues (2:12)
17. Darvulia's Death (0:44)
16. Pola (1:06)
9.  With Istvan Again (2:23)
18. Istvan Finds the Cage (1:13)
20. Last Words (1:01)
19. God, You Have Abandoned Me (2:09)
21. Tale Told by the Victors (1:51)

From Deep Impact / Armageddon to Antz / A Bug's Life, it's become a tradition of moviemakers to somehow release identically themed movies at the same time. This is Part 1 of the "celebration" that the legendary Erzsébet Báthory (who just as well may be one of the most famous Hungarians). The countess is still legendary for her thirst for blood, but it should be pointed out that historians still haven't agreed about what the truth is - fact is that the case against Báthory came at a very good point for several prominent historical figures who had the power to orchestrate something like that. The first movie to be released was simply called Báthory and featured Anna Friel (of Pushing Daisies fame) in the lead role with a lion's mane for hair. The music for this picture was wrtten by Simon Boswell, a real master of gothic horrors whose previous credits include several Dario Argento movie's and A Midsummer Night's Dream which also happened to feature Anna Friel as Hermia. When compared with the other Báthory picture, Boswell's music has more of a period feel which can be heard in this short suite of his music. Be sure to check back tomorrow for another special Báthory feature!