Noir music
I have some big posts coming, about the dramatic turnaround plans at the Metropolitan Opera, and (as promised) about the British research on a young audience. But no time for anything big today, so here’s something smaller.
In my
You can see a score of the piece here, as a PDF file. And here's a rough computer demo of the music.
Weegee’s photos are of course a lot like film noir, and for both reference and inspiration I recorded (from DVDs) some excerpts from film noir scores — from Out of the Past and Too Late for Tears — and saved them on my hard drive. In my hotel, I was listening to them and doing a little editing; I’d recorded them quickly, without bothering to give the excerpts beginnings or ends. So I was fixing that, and something started to dawn on me. The studio orchestras play these scores vividly. In fact, they do everything I complained a while ago that serious classical orchestras don’t do enough, which here I’d summarize as making all the effects the score calls for. If the film scores are supposed to be menacing, they sound menacing; if they slide into love music, it’s drenched with ambiguous romance. So bravo to these long-ago studio musicians…and why can’t we play Mahler like that?
***
Roy Webb wrote the score for Out of the Past, with a terrific tune as the main theme. R. Dale Butts wrote the score for Too Late for Tears, full of menace and atmosphere. Here's a sample of his work, and of the vivid, even slinky musical performance. This little excerpt from the film's soundtrack, with music, dialogue, footsteps, and the creak of a rowboat, makes a fine little piece of sound art. The people you hear talking have just killed the woman's husband…
Categories:
AJ Ads
AJ Arts Blog Ads
Now you can reach the most discerning arts blog readers on the internet. Target individual blogs or topics in the ArtsJournal ad network.
Advertise Here
AJ Blogs
AJBlogCentral | rssspecial
the blog of the National Performing Arts Convention
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
rock culture approximately
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
Douglas McLennan's blog
Art from the American Outback
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
No genre is the new genre
John Rockwell on the arts
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude
dance
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...
jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
media
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Martha Bayles on Film...
classical music
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds
publishing
Jerome Weeks on Books
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera
theatre
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
Elizabeth Zimmer on time-based art forms
visual
Public Art, Public Space
John Perreault's art diary
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog

Leave a comment