
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
worked for a while on some piano pieces I’m writing, little musical embodiments
of Weegee photos (Weegee
being the now-famous
tabloid photographer from the ‘40s). I’ve finished the first of these pieces, a
musical setting, if that’s the word, of the
class=SpellE>Weegee
Off-Duty Cop at style='mso-spacerun:yes'>
with the photo when it appeared in a newspaper.) It’s an odd, abrupt little
piece; I’ve been drawn to miniatures lately. It ends quite suddenly, with a
shock, if I did my work right, creating surprise that it ends so suddenly, and
then (again if I got this right) a realization that, yes, this really had to be
the end. Like the gunman’s life…
You can see a score of the piece
href="http://www.gregsandow.com/gunman_killed.pdf">here
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…










Recent Comments
ariel on The Monday post
Classical music crisis ! ? there is none - music is" evolving" to suit the sensibilities of the day and the...richard on The Monday post
Greg, Argento, while tonal, has used atonal material, and more "progressive" techniques than the composers you mentioned, and his operas have...Barney Sherman on The Friday post
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So the term "new music" also applies to New-classical music? By Stefania de Kenessey, say [http://www.musicacademyonline.com/composer/biographies.php?bid=144] (see Allan...David P. Sartor on The Friday post
"What we want to do is to show people that “classical” music is a living, vibrant tradition that is far...