Lee Holdridge releases appear almost every day in the end of November. Intrada Records has recently released the music to Richard Trank's documentary In Search Of Peace, which marks the last unreleased piece of Holdridge's extensive work in the field of Holocaust documentaries. This release was very closely followed by Winterhawk, put out by BuySoundtrax who had to transfer this very early credit from old analog tapes. We talked about this early score with the composer, finally disclosing one of the strangest aspects of this music...

Although he is the composer of the score, Holdridge had often been credited together with Nicolas Flagello and William Goldstein - imdb even credits them as the composer and Holdridge as an adapter! It's time to set the record straight and learn more about this trio of composers who had to complete the score in a matter of weeks, working with each other's themes and delivering music that successfully underscores this most unusual Western which decided to make a Native American as its protagonist instead of the usual "cowboys and indians" affair.

Your most visible title before Winterhawk was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, on which you worked together with Neil Diamond. How was the workload shared?

Neil Diamond is a very gifted songwriter, however at the time of Jonathan Livingston Seagull he did not have any orchestral scoring background. At first I was to orchestrate his songs but gradually my role grew and I had to score long orchestral passages in the film. Though I used Diamond's thematic material it necessitated me composing a lot of long stretches of original material.

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Samples courtesy of Screen Archives. Click here to buy the CD.

Christophe Beck in Las Vegas Part II. Click here for Part I.

A surprise hit of the 2009 season, The Hangover is a Vegas comedy where three best friends lose their the fourth member of the group. In an attempt to find him, they go around Las Vegas the following day, finding out that the city is even more dangerous during daylight than at night time. Unlike yesteraday's entry, The Hangover had a soundtrack release due to its popularity. The soundtrack contains several songs from the picture,including a hilarious improvisation about "tiger snooze" and an off-key tribute to the "three best friends". Unfortunately Christophe Beck's score was omitted from the CD, but there could have been at least a suite or something... The music provided for this Vegas adventure has a retro feel with some cool guitar work and an instruments that sounds just like the Hammond organ. Again, not the most substantial scores out there, but there's a definite fun factor in both these Vegas scores.

I first became aware of the work of Paul Leonard-Morgan through his excellent music for BBC's History of Scotland. The best thing about it that it wasn't typical "Hollywood-Scottish" music which abuses certain instruments to death. No, it was a colourful, energetic representation of the Scottish people's trials and tribulations, put into a musical format. History of Scotland collected great reviewes, but as I was about to find out, Paul's career has several more aspects: he is also the resident composer of Spooks, he is working with countless recording artists and he has a concert coming up on 29th November in the Usher Hall which will be broadcast live by BBC Radio Scotland.

How did your interest in music and particularly in film music begin?

My mother is a music teacher, so I was always surrounded by music. Particularly flute and piano music as that's what she plays. The first film music that I remember was the classic Ennio Morricone scores to the Spaghetti Westerns, and also the Mancini scores to the Pink Panther. But perhaps the score that I remember most inspiring me to become a composer was Morricone's The Mission. The gorgeous simplicity of the oboe solos, the lush building strings - still one of my favourites.

The music to the Taylor-Burton vehicle The Sandpiper had so many musical talents involved that it would be hard to count them all. Of course composer Johnny Mandel and conductor Robert Armbruster are given, but there was one additional helping hand: Quincy Jones producing the album. Jones' jobs on this project included sequencing the album, manipulating the music for optimal listening experience - adding fade ins and outs, pitch shifts and other magical elements to the mixture. And no surprise, the album was a success. I don't know if Jones' work included the liner notes as well, but they are so high-quality that they might as well have been. There are notes from composer Johnny Mandel about his music and a good summary of the movie itself. We've seen earlier examples where the whole liner notes were dedicated to describing the movie's plot in excrutiating details - but this one gets the ratio just about right.

The Music

In composing the score for the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton motion picture The Sandpiper, I decided to attempt something different in soundtrack music. Usually, a cinema composer tries to dazzle the listener with the wildest possible variety of sounds and tempos. For The Sandpiper, I have, instead, tried to sustain a constant mood throughout. It’s a haunting mood matching the poignancy of the story, underscored by the beauty and loneliness of the magnificent Big Sur location.

I have attempted, with this music, to capture the sounds of the surf, the grandeur of the mountains, the beauty of the land. I fell in love with Big Sur more than 10 years ago. Naturally, I was delighted with a motion picture assignment that allowed me to transmit to the listener the feeling I have about this great and unspoiled corner of America. I hope I have succeeded.

The Motion Picture

For the Martin Ransohoff production The Sandpiper, director Vincente Minnelli took his crew and color camera to the paradisical Big Sur coast of California to film a compelling love story that might have been made to order for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It is a highly emotional picture that brings together an unconventional woman living a nonconformist life and a married man of a strong conservative background. Their passionate love affair comes close to destroying the man’s marriage and ruining his career.

Miss Taylor is Laura Reynolds, who has chosen to lead a free life as an artist, even spurning the offer of marriage from the man who has fathered her child out of wedlock. Burton is Dr. Edward Hewitt, an Episcopal minister and headmaster of a private school, married to Claire (Eva Marie Saint), a beautiful woman completely devoted to him.

Despite the explosive clash of the entirely different personalities of Laura and Hewitt and his antagonism toward her beatnik friends (one of whom sculpts her in the nude), their mutual attraction is overpowering and their love inevitable. In the end, Hewitt finds the strength to break with Laura—but their love affair has left them with a great understanding that has enriched their lives.

Director Minnelli (whose credits include Gigi and An American in Paris) has probed deeply into the characters and dramatic conflicts of The Sandpiper and brings each scene to new heights of screen excitement. He has perfectly caught the Big Sur land with its rugged beauty, and uses it as a brilliant backdrop for the story’s passionate romantic interludes. Here, too, Minnelli brings to life an explosive scene of a wild beatnik party that ignites into violence. The Sandpiper — an outstanding motion picture.

After Christopher Young wrote experimental music for Tobe Hooper's Invaders from Mars, his music was thrown out. But he ended up having about 15 minutes of music in the picture - music that was more conventional. For some reason, the "End Credits" piece always reminded me of the conclusion of one of the greatest chillers ever: Jaws. This is a fun pastiche to have at the end of your movie, because there are really few more relaxing melodies than this one to conclude your picture with. This music of course came from a point of Chris Young's career when he had little chance to fight against the temporary tracks - imagine what kind of movie would Invaders from Mars would be with all his wicked ideas in its place! (On its own, its still not very listenable though...)

Case Number: CY86DS

The Film: Hunter Carson IS George Gardner, a boy caught up in an alien invasion in this remake of the classic 1950s sci-fi. Enlisting the help of Karen Black and battling a frog-devouring Nurse Ratched, the aliens are defeated to the music of a Jerry Goldsmith-inspired march and some nice synth music which was put in the movie to replace something more sinister and disturbing.

The First Composer: Christopher Young was given a blank slate on what to do with the music and apart from a few traditional orchestral cues (ripping off some well-known standards), he wrote a very experimental music for the scenes with the aliens invading. Heavy orchestral textures, clashing sounds - this is one heavy score that's a very demanding listen on its own...

The Second Composer: But that's the only way you're going to hear it, because it didn't make the movie. Composer David Storrs was asked to replace the non-traditional material with catchier synth music, a less distrubing and ultimately more successful solution. Christopher Young retains his Superman-inspired front credits, Storrs is only mentioned in the end crawl.

Addendum: Young's music has been released countless times. A suite of the used material was put on the compilation Cinema Septet, while a piece entitled Musique Concrete (arranged from the rejected music) was released in conjunction with Young's score to The Oasis. The complete score was released in 2009, including Young's used and unused music alongside David Storrs synth cues.

AMC's new mini-series The Prisoner is the remake / re-imagination of the classic 1967 classic British cult series of the same name, starring Patrick McGoohan. The original series only ran for 17 episodes, but the mysterious story of a former secret agent completely isolated in a remote prison for unknown reasons still keeps viewers intrigued. The series did especially good in DVD sales and the music of television veterans Ron Grainer, Robert Farnon and Albert Elms has been released countless times by Silva Screen and Network. The new series' score will be released by Varése Sarabande who put together a generous helping of Ruper Gregson-Williams' music. We talked to the composer about the series music as well as some of his other projects.

Were you interested in film music as a child? If yes, what did you take notice of?

I saw Jaws when I was eight. I remember when the theme first played - I didn't think 'wow , I want to be a film composer' at that point......I just thought the film as a whole was scaring the life out of me. It was only when I was older I recognized that the music had manipulated me without taking me out of the movie.

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And here's the promised restoration from the finale of Michael Apted's Gorky's Park. In order to illustrate the fundamental differences, you can compare the original version and James Horner's unused cue called "Releasing the Sables." The music in the picture is tracked from an existing classical recording, it's by Tchaikovsky if I'm not mistaken. It's heavier and more dramatic, which is juxtaposed against the funny sables running away. Horner's music (which I'm sure is an adaptation of some Russian classical piece as well) is more playful and is actually utilizing Irina's theme. This is all the more apt since the movie closes with a voiceover from Irina, paralleling the freedom of the sables with the freedom of the Russian people. The cue is thematically conscious, but there's just something inherently more effective about the classical piece played against the images of animals running away in a wll-choreographed manner. I fell this must have been one of the reasons Tchaikovsky was used intead of the original cue.

Gorky Park is by far one of my favorite early James Horner score, eclipsing the "usual favorites" of things like his Star Trek scores of Aliens. And it's not only because the music works excellently as a narrative score, but also because it's a very, very good listening experience on its own. Some of the electronics remind me of Giorgio Moroder and the several cues where "someone follows someone" are almost waiting to be sampled by a hip-hop artist. The score was originally released on LP with Varése doing a very early CD release - because it's been released close to 25 years ago, copies are increasingly harder to find. But if you have a CD, it will be easy to program the film order. In this case, it means that the cool following / chase cues will be more concentrated in the beginning, interrupted by two romantic cues back-to-back and closing of with the more atmospheric and lengthy finale cues. One track called "Releasing the Sables" is unused in the movie - it was replaced by actual Russian music (Tchaikovsky I believe) instead of the more light-hearted classical pastiche presented in the score. Perhaps that will be restored some day...

1. Main Title (2:43)
7. Faceless Bodies (1:52)
4. Following KGB (1:53)
5. Chase Through The Park (1:52)
2. Following Kirwill (2:59)
8. Irina's Chase (3:45)
6. Arkady And Irina (2:28)
3. Irina's Theme (3:32)
9. The Sable Shed (6:38)
10. Airport Farewell (4:07)
11. Releasing The Sables (0:00-1:03)
11. End Titles (1:03-4:15)

There are films whose musical history is more than confusing. We're all familiar with composers who have been replaced on movies, but there's a fate that's even worse than that - being stuck on the same film, rewriting cues so many times that you're practically producing two or perhaps even three different scores. Today's Treasure Hunt offers three examples where these unused altenate scores are legally available for comparison.

Escape from Fort Bravo: This movie went through numerous rewrites in its script phase, so it's no wonder that when the movie about an escaped Confederate prisoner was first screened, it too had to go through numerous re-cuts. The changes were so great that composer Jeff Alexander essentially had to write his score two times to acknowledge the new scene changes - and he also had to eliminate some portions of this score. The first version of this score is more experimental and interesting, with numerous percussive passages that is meant to represent the silent enemy: the Mescalero indians. The revised score is more traditional, eliminating the musical representation of the Indians and instead featuring a good dosage of Western ballads and old-fashioned marches. When Film Score Monthly released five Western scores in a box-set, Escape from Fort Bravo was one of the titles. Thanks to the extensive restoration work, both versions of the score are available for collectors.

Alien: This is the big one. When Jerry Goldsmith worked with director Ridley Scott, he didn't have nightmares of the images... It was because of the increasingly changing demands. After the score was completed, the composer was asked to re-write five major cues, including the "Main Title", which turned from romantic space opera to ambient textural design. Other directorial decisions involved tracking in Goldsmith's Freud score in a number of times and replacing the whole finale with "Symphony No. 2" of American composer Howard Hanson. When Intrada released their 2 CD set, they included all the original music recorded for the film (but not the Hanson symphony or said Freud pieces). The extensive liner notes go into all the small details on how much of each cue was used and how was it replaced or cut. Biggest surprise: of all the cues written for the picture, Scott utilized only one cue as it was intended to be used in the movie. Despite the setbacks, the score still became an in-demand classic.


Broadcast News: When discussing problematic assignments in an interview, Bill Conti listed Broadcast News alongside The Right Stuff and Murderers Among Us where problems arose. While the latter scores forced the composer to blatant temp-track copying, Broadcast News gave him so much job that he wrote three times as much music as what appears in the movie. Almost all the cues exist in two or three different variations, with several themes appearing in the alternate scores. The final movie contains a mixture of various cues, taken from different times of the production, so it's really hard to make sense of the score itself. When Varése Sarabande finally released the score, the CD included a generous helping of the various alternates which give us a peak at what went behind the scenes. The biggest difference I could hear was that some cues were more centered around broadcast-type music (hear example below) while their relevant alternates were more free in their form.

Many film music fans dream about writing film music and one day get a shot at that project which will raise them from obscurity - then there are those who live the dream. Composer Austin Wintory's credits include the hit video game flOw, the recently released Captain Abu Raed (CD released by Buysoundtrax) and Paul Solet's Grace, a disturbing horror about a mother who realizes she can only feed her newborn on blood. He is also a regular collaborator of director Rob Williams with whom he already worked on four pictures, including a ghost story and a yuletime comedy. Austin's example shows us that with enough patience, learning (and luck), everybody has the shot to become a film composer. In the interview below, the composer shares some of his secrets:

You started out as a fan of the film music genre before becoming a composer. Does your extensive knowledge add to your work in any way?

Being such a fan of music in general, film scores in particular, has proven to be a huge benefit to my career. I have a base of knowledge to draw from in speaking to directors, and it opens up doors for easier communication. Basically it lets us get off and running a whole lot faster!

( Read more... )

In the last couple of days, I've been trying to find more ways to improve the searchability and the layout of the blog. I've experimented with two methods and was 50 % successful.

The Good News

One of the things that annoyed me with the outlay that the interviews I've been doing made the site almost impossible to navigate. Thanks to the generous composers who answered in details, a busier week usually meant that the main site grew too long and it was impossible to navigate. Also when you clicked any of the links such as "Spotlight", "Fresh Release" or "TV Generation" you were greeted with all the interviews loading in, taking up bandwidth and just hard to comb through

Not anymore. After months of experimenting, I mastered the LJ-cut, a simple device which works the following way. Apart from the introduction and the first question, I selected everything else and made an LJ-cut - which means the text is hidden. You have to click on a link that says Read More... to read the full article. This sounds easy, but it was very hard. Due to the exclusive contents (mp links, video embeds), the LJ-cut couldn't work with those, so I had to reformat every single interview so far to make it work. But I think it worth it. I hope you enjoy it too.

The Bad News

I recently saw some really cool Twitter widgets which show the latest tweets. In my case, this means you can simply look on the left side and see the latest important articles, interviews, etc. recommended. It's a really cool feature and I even prepared the code, but I can't embed it. It's simply impossible. It doesn't show up. If someone knows what can be the reason, give me a shout. Until then I can't do anything about this problem. It looks so cool and I want to include it, but the problems involved seem to be too complicated for my technical knowledge.

With over 300 titles in Max Steiner's filmography, you'd think there'd be a lot of unreleased material from the composer's ouevre. And you're right, but a good number of scores are unreleased for a reason - many of them are lost, and let's face it - not all of the 300 titles are Earth-shattering masterpieces worth the investigation. With so many excellent original and new recordings of Steiner's best works, it was almost impossible to find something really good that would fit this column's pre-requisites (that is, to be unreleased in any kind of format). But I finally found something that may be interesting and obscure... Finishing School is a tame RKO drama about a snobbish school girl in one of the earlier examples of this genre. While the plot wouldn't let you believe, this movie was actually officially condemned by the Catholic Church when it was released way back in 1934! Different times in deed... This bit of suite is assembled from a VHS release (cover to the right), containing fairly inoffensive fluff for the subject matter. But this is Steiner's fluff, so there's at least some historical value in this recording.

With the recent release of Alan Howarth's score to Backstabbed, I made a strange discovery. The director of this Danish film named Martin Schmidt is also the author of Short Cues, an interview volume featuring discussions with top film composers. It's always nice when a director respects film music, but few have gone to the length of actually writing a book on the subject. In addition to Short Cues, Schmidt has also authored several books in Danish about filmmaking on low budget - some of his books are even used in film classes to teach stundents how to make well-looking films on a shoestring budget. Schmidt's other obsession is John Carpenter about whom he wrote a book and this fascination led him to work with Carpenter's usual scoring partner Alan Howarth on one of his films.

What are your earliest memories of film music? I'm thinking about scores you liked growing up, composers that had an impression on you...

I very distinctly remember sitting in my childhood cinema, in the outskirts of Copenhagen, watching John Carpenter´s The Fog feeling a very definitive urge to becoming a film director myself. That film was a pivotal moment in my life and one of the things that I especially noticed about the film was Carpenter´s unique scoring. Right after watching this film I began collecting soundtracks, with the score for Escape from New York, Jaws and Halloween II as the following records in my collection that now spans more than 3.000 vinyls and CDs.

It seems really nice when an LP is re-issued on CD, the order of the tracks is kept intact. This is good for the buyers who used to listen to the record endlessly and want to recreate the same experience on CD - not to mention that sometimes is contractually impossible to present the recording in a different order. And that's where The Daily Film Music Blog comes to your help. I myself always found the mixture of light jazz music and heavy battle scenes curiously uninvolving on the In Harm's Way LP. Sure, both halves of the music are good in their own right, but mixing the two with frequency they appear on the LP was just breaking the mood for me. Now, does this re-sequencing offer a better experience? Well, it makes more sense for me and by putting the album only track "The Rock" at the beginning, we get a fantastic thunderous opening this album deserves. In Harm's Way is almost three-hours long, so be thankful I sat through it just for this guide. It's not something I want to repeat in the near future...

3. The Rock (1:35)
2. Liz In Harm's Way (2:03)
8. Night On The Beach (2:08)
6. Positive Identification (1:35)
12. Change Of Command (3:28)
11. Hawaiian Mood (2:00)
10. The Rock And His Lady (2:50)
13. Medley From "In Harm's Way":Try Again, Moonburn (2:47)
5. Goodbye (2:45)
4. Native Quarter (2:01)
7. Battle Theme From "In Harm's Way" (2:28)
9. Attack (2:05)
1. Love Theme From "In Harm's Way" (2:30)
14. One-Way Ticket (1:49)
15. First Victory (2:44)

1950 A Life Of Her Own (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 8, No. 17) 12 tracks
1952 Invitation (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 8, No. 17) 23 tracks
1952 The Wild North (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 11 Nr. 7) 17 tracks
1953 Lili (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 8, No. 15) 22 tracks
1953 The Naked Spur (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 11 Nr. 7) 16 tracks
1953 Ride Vaquero (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 10 Nr. 9) 20 tracks
1954 Them! (Monstrous Movie Music MMM-1950) 11 tracks - re-recording
1955 Quentin Durward (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 8, No. 7) 16 tracks
1955 The Glass Slipper (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 8, No. 19) 17+13 tracks
1955 The Prodigal (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 5, No. 9) 34 tracks
1956 Forever, Darling (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 10 Nr. 3) 19 tracks
1956 The Swan (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 7, No. 5) 14 tracks
1958 Auntie Mame (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 11 No. 11) 12 tracks
1958 The Brothers Karamazov (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 6, No. 16) 28 tracks
1959 Green Mansions (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 8, No. 3) 21 tracks
1960 Home From The Hill (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 6, No. 3) 32 tracks
1961 Dr. Kildare (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 12 Nr. 6) 4 tracks
1962 Mutiny On The Bounty (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 7. No. 16) 24+17+26 tracks
1965 Lord Jim (Film Score Monthly FSMCD Vol. 8, No. 11) 13 tracks
1967 The Way West (Intrada ISC 92) 13 tracks

Reading so many books for my bookshelf, I'm surprised I didn't come across a book like this before (or perhaps didn't look hard enough)? Music and Mythmaking in Film was written by Timothy E. Scheurer and deals with film scoring traditions / clichés on a genre-by-genre basis. The preface already identifies the author's major fields of interest: he writes about his love of Rhapsody in Blue as well as the first time he heard his favorite Max Steiner score (The Charge of the Light Brigade). A baby boomer raised on classic Hollywood films (particularly from the studio era), Scheurer's major field of research became the identification and examination of musical traditions that seem to appear in almost every Hollywood picture, regardless of when it was made. The preface ends with the usual list of thank yous which shows us that the author in deed did his homework - he seems to have contacted everyone that can be of any use for such a publication. But what about the genres (which at some point are referred to as "royal genres")?

Part I of the book begins with an introduction to the discussed genres, then each chapter focuses on one of the following types of films: science-fictions, detective films, historical romances, westerns and horrors. Each of these chapters are structured in a similar vein: first the author tries to outline the history of the genre (for instance describe how synthesizers became so important in horror film by the late 1970s) and also quote as much literature as possible. Sometimes these quotations overpower the author's own assessments and what we get instead is a checklist of references of important authors. I know this is a pre-requisite of academic writing, I just wanted to read more about the author's own thoughts about these genres - but its good for students who want to do further research. I found the second part of each chapter usually more intriguing with its clever parallels drawn out over the ages. In these sections, Scheurer analyzes the musical tropes of every discussed genre and compares several movies from different eras to see how these things evolve. Most of the times he finds that the ideas are twisted and changed over the years, while some of the concepts are lost within decades. It is the continuation of how these musical ideas evolved that I found most fascinating about the book and I believe this will be most intriguing part for those into music too.

Part II of the book is more focused on gender / musical relations and reads like a different book altogether. One of the two chapters in this part is actually republished from an earlier article, but has been reworked from that original version. I feel this second part is only loosely connected to the first, but since the articles are good enough on their own, they are perfectly enjoyable and are good additional reads. The first essay is about the heroism of recent sports films: The Natural, Rudy and Hoosiers. It's obvious that the author is very fond of this subjects as he skillfully discusses the patriotic aspects of the All-American sports that the movies deal with - that's a sentiment I can understand, if not share 100%. The second chapter about women's films features a curios selection of movies: Rebecca, All that Heaven Allows and The Piano. The selection is broad, although I'm not quite sure why the second picture was picked as a representative of the genre. I also think the section on The Piano was a bit brief for this magnificent score, but it was well integrated with the other two pictures and it was expertly compared with the earlier pictures.

Music and Mythmaking in Film is richly illustrated with short musical examples, which sometimes make the text more suitable for students of music because of its special terminology - but ideas remain understandable for those who are not familiar with all the musical expressions. I know students who want to write their thesis' on film music this year - and though their proposed titles are too wide (such as "the role of music in horror films"), they seem mostly reliant on genres or composers. I never had problems on what books to recommend for people who want to write about Henry Mancini or John Barry... But what about genres? Now I know where to point them for a good jumping board. If there's one problem with the book, it's that the copy I have (softcover, printed in 2008) seems to have disintegrated after two reads. When you receive your copy of Timothy E. Scheurer's book, handle it more carefully than I did.

Lisbeth Scott’s angelic voice has  graced movie scores since 1992, when she sang vocals on Hans Zimmer’s Toys. From the disturbing chanting of “Agnus Dei” in Broken Arrow to the scores of Harry Gregson-Williams' Spy Game, Shrek, Narnia and John Williams’ Munich, Lisbeth’s voice has appeared on over 50 scores. In addition to these accomplishments, Lisbeth also writes and sings her own songs – she recently collaborated with Nathan Barr on the soundtrack for the hit HBO series True Blood. Her most recent project is “Hope is a Thing”, an album which is tied together with a project that encourages children to send in their hopes on photographs. We talked to Lisbeth about her new CD, her film score work and a recent commission – to sing on James Horner’s Avatar.

You began your career as a pianist and started singing only at a later age. How did you make the transition from one to the other?

I started playing the piano when I was six and played all the way through to the end of college. In the eighth grade I took a brief guitar class and started to sing a tiny little bit then, but I only sang in my closet where no one could hear. Then my piano teacher yelled at me because playing the guitar gives you calluses and changes the tone of your piano playing, so I had to stop. It wasn't until I graduated from college that I started singing again, because some people heard me singing for a dance class I was playing piano for. I was humming along and they simply stopped. They said I had a beautiful voice, so I started to sing more and more after that.

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The curse of replacing famous composers affected the career of John Addision, who wrote new music for Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain after Bernard Herrmann's music was rejected. The ignorant press tried to trivialize the composer and label him as some kind of film music amateur despite the Academy Award he won for Tom Jones. Similar fate befell on Ron Goodwin after he "dared" to replace Sir William Walton on The Battle of Britain. Why I'm sharing this is that it's hard to find more concise summaries of John Addision's body of work thanks to his Hitchcock collaboration - usually what we get is some berating connected with Torn Curtain. The liner notes to Addison's  The Honey Pot LP finally give a better summary of this composer's talents. It's interesting to note that this record also contains one of Addison's trademarks: featuring a shorter cut of the main theme on the beginning of Side B. This is something he did on many scores, including this or... Torn Curtain! [cue  dramatic music]

John Addison was born in Surrey, England, and educated at Wellington College and at London’s Royal College of Music, where, as a student, he won his first major award for composition. His musical career was interrupted by World War II. After six years in a Cavalry regiment, he returned to civilian life and his music in 1946.

One of his first successes was a chamber work (a sextet for woodwinds) performed in 1950 at the Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music at Frankfurt, Germany. Later, various commissions followed, including works for the BBC, London, for the Promenade Concerts and Cheltenham Festivals, and other events.

His ballet Carte Blanche was commissioned by Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet. Other credits include a musical revue, Cranks, over fifty film scores, including Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, Girl With Green Eyes, and Tom Jones (which won an Academy Award “Oscar” in 1964 for Addison).

His most recent scores include A Fine Madness, Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, and Desmond Davis’s The Uncle. His work for theatre includes Lawrence Olivier’s production of Hamlet, which opened the National Theatre in London, and a number of plays being performed on Broadway and elsewhere, which were originally written for London’s Royal Court Theatre; among them Osborne’s The Entertainer and Luther, Ionesco’s The Chairs, and Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards. Addison has also written scores for TV specials, last year’s entry being CBS’s highly acclaimed The Search for Ulysses.

Addison believes in working very closely with his director, and The Honey Pot was no exception. During the composition of the score there were numerous meetings between Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Addison at their resepctive summer homes in Connecticut and England, at which the music was played over, discussed and altered. For presentation on the record, it has been edited by the composer.

John Addison lives with his wife and four children in a Georgian house surrounded by cherry orchards near Canterbury, England.

This is Part II of the Torn Curtain weekend. Click here for Part I.

Even after Hitchcock found the second composer for Torn Curtain, the murder scene remained controversial. Composer John Addison also wrote and recorded music for the scene which went unused - the scene now plays in total silences. Hitchcock later said that he didn't want any music, because he wanted to illustrate how hard it is to kill a man and a more realistic approach (sans music) was the best way for this. During this sequence, Stasi agent Gromek is stabbed, strangled and is finally suffocated from gas. I reconstructed the spotting the best I could - the final few measures in the cue were looped by myself. I did this because I felt this would give a superior result and since the recording was edited anyway, this was the best way I could compensate for the finale.