I looked up Stothart on the web and found that , in his latter years, he had suffered a heart attack and memorialised the experience in a symphonic poem entitled "Heart Attack." Possibly could share a programme with Karlowicz's "Sorrowful Tale" - about a man committing suicide (the original score had included a pistol-shot at the climactic moment) and Leo Ornstein's "Suicide in an Airplane" to make a thoroughly depressing evening's entertainment.
Of course, like Rosza, Korngold plundered his own film scores (principally Another Dawn and The Prince and the Pauper) when he came to write his violin concerto; both concertos were championed by Heifetz.
Rosza's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is based on his magnificent Violin Concerto. It's such an extensive use of the work it's quite unusual as film scores go. Another fascinating score is Hermann's Hangover Square - the extended piano concerto he wrote for the end of the film, Concerto Macabre, has been played as a stand-alone piece. I think it's a bit like Liszt's Totentanz, probably a major influence on it. Rosza's surreal score for Hitchcock's Spellbound is another great work - although the director disliked it, probably because it wasn't Hermann who had been his first choice.
One of the most interesting film scores I ever came across was by Previn. The major instrument he uses is a harpsichord - and it's such a chilling effect; ghostly, like tapping sticks against the bones of a corpse. It was used in one of Bette Davis's film noir movies from the early 60's so seemed oddly appropriate I guess. One of his best scores, but hardly known really.
Atonalism is one of the things that has never really defined film music, either. Perhaps the most famous example is David Shire's The Taking of Pelham 123; but then Goldsmith's Planet of the Apes fits the bill as an atonal score.
And talking of atonalism, film students used to have fun trying to find anything possibly atonal that John Williams wrote. You'll come across it for two bars and you miss it. Go to The Empire Strikes Back and listen for it!
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.
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