Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Remembering James Horner’s Iconic Film Scores

The prolific film composer James Horner died on June 22, when his single-turboprop plane went down in Los Padres National Forest in Southern California. He was 61 years-old.

This week on “Picture Perfect,” we honor his memory, with music from but a handful of his over 100 scores. Horner was the recipient of two Academy Awards – for Best Original Score and Best Original Song (“My Heart Will Go On”) – for his work on “Titanic” (1997). “Titanic” went on to become the bestselling soundtrack of all time.

Horner received eight additional Academy Award nominations. We’ll hear music from at least two of the scores so recognized: “A Beautiful Mind” (2001) and “Braveheart” (1995). “A Beautiful Mind,” of course, dramatized the life of late Nobel Laureate (formerly of Princeton University) John Nash, who died in a car accident in May.

We’ll also have music from Horner’s breakout success, “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (1982).

I hope you’ll join me, as we honor James Horner this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Friday evening at 6 ET, with a repeat Saturday morning at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

Horner’s obituary in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/us/james-horner-whose-soaring-film-scores-included-titanic-dies-at-61.html?_r=0

PHOTO: His heart will go on

July 2, 2015
American Music for Independence Day on WPRB

I’ve been following Marvin Rosen’s Classical Discoveries playlist with particular interest this morning, since I too plan to play all American music tomorrow, in anticipation of the Independence Day holiday.

Marvin is a much better planner than I, but at this point I can say with relative certainty that we MAY hear music by George Antheil, Paul Bowles, Romeo Cascarino, John Corigliano, Daniel Dorff, Irving Fine, Lou Harrison, Bernard Herrmann, Jennifer Higdon, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Peter Schickele, Caroline Shaw, Michael Torke, George Walker and many others.

Jerry Rife, for 30 years conductor of The Blawenburg Band, will join me around 9:00 to tell us just a little bit about the band’s upcoming concerts at Princeton Shopping Center (tomorrow at 7 p.m.), Yardley Community Centre in Yardley, Pa. (July 4 at 4 p.m.), and Hopewell Train Station (July 6 at 7:30 p.m.).

Tune in, wrap yourself in the flag, and feel the cool grass between your toes, as we celebrate America’s independence this week. Keep it classy with Classic Ross Amico, tomorrow morning from 6 to 11 a.m. ET, on WPRB 103.3 FM or online at wprb.com.

July 1, 2015
Discover Lajtha Hungarian Music’s Lost Voice

Hungry for Hungarian music? Give László Lajtha a shot.

A forgotten colleague of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, Lajtha (pronounced “Loy-tah”) too busily collected and transcribed folk music from the Hungarian countryside prior to World War I.

Later, he was appointed Director of Music for Hungarian Radio, Director of the Museum of Ethnography, and Director of the Budapest National Conservatory. He was summarily removed from all three posts and his passport confiscated by the Communist regime after remaining in the West too long while at work on the film score to a British screen adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” (which went on to win the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival in 1951). He hadn’t even provided a film score in the truest sense, instead composing three concert works (the Symphony No. 3, the Orchestral Variations, and the Harp Quintet No.2), which were excerpted in the film.

Anyway, he was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 1951 for his achievements as a folk researcher. At least that’s something. I devoted my life to Hungarian music, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Happy birthday, László Lajtha (1892-1963)!

An interesting assessment of Lajtha’s music:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2001/music-laszlo-lajtha-music-from-a-secret-room

Lajtha’s Symphony No. 4 “Le printemps”:

PHOTO: Not even that scarf could insulate him from the Cold War

June 30, 2015
Anderson & Herrmann American Music Legends

Today marks the birthday anniversaries of two composers who, in their own individual ways, gained fame through their invaluable contributions to American popular culture. Interestingly, both died 40 years ago.

Leroy Anderson (1908-1975), whose fluency in foreign languages (especially those of Scandinavia) made him an asset to the U.S. Army during the Second World War, was more or less staff composer for the Boston Pops.

His early work for the Pops was as an arranger. It was Arthur Fiedler who recognized his talent and began requesting original work. Good call. Anderson turned out to be the Irving Berlin of American light orchestral music, producing hit after hit after hit: “Blue Tango,” “The Typewriter,” and “Plink! Plank! Plunk!” among them. Johnny Mathis scored a gargantuan success with his vocal rendition of “Sleigh-Ride,” for over half a century a holiday staple. Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock,” a favorite from the start, became further entrenched in the popular consciousness as the theme music for “The Late Show,” the late night movie, shown on CBS.

Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975) was staff conductor on CBS radio. In this role, he introduced American audiences to an impressive array of comparatively arcane music for the era, including works by Charles Ives, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Edmund Rubbra, and Richard Arnell (Classical Discoveries’ Marvin Rosen!).

He fell in with Orson Welles, with whom he worked on radio shows like “Mercury Theatre on the Air.” When Welles went to Hollywood, he brought Herrmann with him to write the music for “Citizen Kane.” This led to decades of finely-crafted film scores, always orchestrated by Herrmann himself (an unusual practice in Hollywood) and always perfectly suited to the images on screen, or their psychological underpinnings.

Of course, Herrmann is best-known for his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, but he also wrote top-notch, ear-opening scores for producer Charles Schneer and special effects artist Ray Harryhausen (including that for “Jason and the Argonauts”). Amazingly, he won only a single Oscar, for his work on “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” in 1941. Herrmann died of a heart attack shortly after conducting the recording sessions for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” in 1975.

Happy birthday, gentlemen! Thanks for the music.

June 29, 2015
Gunther Schuller A Third Stream Pioneer

He was a composer, a performer, a conductor, an educator, and an administrator. At 15, he played French horn professionally with the American Ballet Theatre. The next year, he became principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony. Then he joined the Metropolitan Orchestra, where he played for well over a decade.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was president of the New England Conservatory. He was also involved with Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony, for over 20 years, serving as its artistic director from 1970 to 1984.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1994.

In addition, he cofounded the Modern Jazz Society. He recorded with Miles Davis. He edited and gave the premiere of Charles Mingus’ final work. He wrote two major books on the history of jazz. To describe what he saw as “a new genre of music, located about halfway between classical music and jazz,” he coined the term “Third Stream.”

An American polymath, he was clearly a man who just loved music.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we honor Gunther Schuller, who died on June 21, at the age of 89.

We’ll hear his Bassoon Concerto from 1982. The work, more of a five-movement suite, manages to synthesize atonality, lyricism, blues and Baroque, with some sly quotations from “The Magic Flute,” “The Rite of Spring” and “Peter and the Wolf” along the way.

Schuller also loved the music of Scott Joplin and did much to contribute to the Joplin revival of the 1970s. He founded the New England Ragtime Ensemble, with which he recorded some bestselling albums of Joplin rags. We’ll hear highlights from Joplin’s opera , “Treemonisha,” which Schuller orchestrated for a revival at Houston Grand Opera.

I hope you’ll join me as we salute Third Stream artist Gunther Schuller, on “A Midsummer Night’s Stream,” tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.

June 28, 2015

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