I was watching the 1952 film noir "Angel Face" the other day and was aware of what seemed to me a rather effectively-written chunk of a romantic piano concerto serving as the background score in places. I began to wonder if the composer, Dmitri Tiomkin, had written a concerto and - rather than let it languish in obscurity - had used it in this score so I looked-up the Wiki article on him. No mention of a concerto but certainly of a very distinguished musical background including lessons in composition from Glazunov. Apparently he gave the European premiere of Gershwin's Concerto in F. This set me on the track of some other composers of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Although the musical credentials of such as Korngold and Rosza are well-known I was unaware that Max Steiner had Richard Strauss as his godfather and that, among his mentors were Robert Fuchs, Felix Weingartner and Gustav Mahler. Others , such as Alfred Newman and Victor Young couldn't boast such a line-up but their academic training seems to have been thorough and impressive. As an aside and, with reference to part of the discussion on "The Man I Love" it seems that Hoagy Carmichael had originally written "Stardust" as an up-tempo instrumental number and that Young had made a slowed-down version to which were added the words that became known to everybody ever since.

Another thing that became obvious was just how many of these composers were Jewish, often of an Eastern European or Russian background if not themselves at least from the previous generation or two. It's significant just how much composers of such an origin influenced popular Western culture of the twentieth century.

Of course we, in the UK, have produced some marvellous composers who worked in the film industry too...Malcolm Arnold, Benjamin Frankel, Anthony Hopkins and William Alwyn come very much to my mind. But it is to the glamour of Hollywood that the film composers made their most lasting contribution to the psyche of the general public in the middle years of the last century. They certainly must have had quite an influence on forming my musical tastes in the 1950s as, with no TV in the house, the family spent three or four evenings a week watching (and listening to) such fare in some of the local cinemas which existed in abundance back then.