Classic Ross Amico

Category: Daily Dispatch

Labor Day Music on Sweetness and Light

How laborious it was to put together this morning’s “Sweetness and Light!” Which I suppose is only appropriate, since today’s theme is music for Labor Day.

It’s not uncommon when producing a show that the running time can come up a little long. I try to avoid it, but when it happens, it’s usually remedied with a few snips. But this week I was a full 90 seconds over, which meant trimming my commentary to the bone. It can take a while to whittle it all down.

In the end, I was still 30 seconds over. The rock was high and Classic Amico was so small!

So I had to swap out Aaron Copland’s rarely-heard “John Henry” (at 4 minutes) for something decidedly more “Common” (at about 3:30). If you’re at all familiar with the composer and his output, I think you can deduce what that is.

Another casualty was my fine encapsulation of the essence of John Alden Carpenter’s construction worker ballet “Skyscrapers.” There’s an awful lot of color in that score to convey a few sentences!

“The scenario involves workers in overalls, who struggle to bring order to a confusion of girders and flashing red lights; all around them the hustle and bustle of the city. Eventually the whistle blows. There’s a diverting side-trip to a Coney Island-type amusement park, with its crowds and attractions and popular dance rhythms. Again the whistle blows, and the laborers return to work.”

The music is still there, but I wind up basically saying “here it is.”

Life is full of frustration, folks, but it still beats digging ditches.

I hope you’ll join me for a program that will also include works by George Frideric Handel, Nikolai Medtner, Michael Torke, and Eric Coates, with Princeton’s own Paul Robeson singing Earl Robinson’s labor classic “Joe Hill.” How that’s sweet OR light, I have no idea, but I’m playing it.

As always, I earn my bread by the sweat of my brow. Just in time for breakfast, I’ll be bringing home the bacon, on “Sweetness and Light,” this Saturday morning at 11:00 EDT/8:00 PDT, exclusively on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Stream it wherever you are at the link:

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

IMAGE: One of ten dynamic panels from Thomas Hart Benton’s mural, “America Today” (1930-31). You can click through thumbnails of all of them here:

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/499559

August 31, 2024
Labor Day Movie Music Working Stiff Cinema

Heigh-ho! This week on “Picture Perfect,” we celebrate Labor Day with music from movies about the working stiff.

“The Molly Maguires” (1970), set in and around the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania, illustrates the unfair labor practices imposed on immigrant workers there, which triggered violent strikes and acts of sabotage. Sean Connery is the ringleader and Richard Harris the Pinkerton detective brought in to infiltrate the gang.

The film was directed by Martin Ritt, a number of whose projects deal with labor, corruption, and intimidation, and his own experiences living through the era of the Hollywood blacklist – among these, “Edge of the City,” “The Front,” and “Norma Rae.”

The music is by Henry Mancini, a far cry from his work on “The Pink Panther,” “Peter Gunn,” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” with a decidedly Celtic lilt.

Charlie Chaplin was a brilliant comedian, of course, but his perfectionism often resulted in uncomfortably close supervision over every aspect of his films. The young David Raksin found this out the hard way, when he accepted the job of assisting Chaplin in the writing of the score to “Modern Times” (1936).

Chaplin, a violinist and cellist himself, would whistle tunes and then stand over Raksin’s shoulder as he figured out how to make them fit the action. Alfred Newman, a much more seasoned hand, resented the micromanagement and stormed out of the film’s recording sessions. Raksin was actually fired once, after only a week and a half, but he was quickly rehired. Despite the creative friction, Chaplin and Raksin became friends, and Raksin recollected his work on “Modern Times” as some of the happiest days of his life.

The film begins with an iconic factory scene, Chaplin working an assembly line at an increasingly hectic pace, literally being put through the gears of the machinery. He suffers a breakdown, goes berserk, and throws the entire mechanized dystopia into chaos.

Speaking of dystopias, few can match the OSHA-flouting nightmare of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927). One of the landmarks of silent cinema, “Metropolis,” unfortunately, is eerily prescient of a world divided between the haves and the have-nots. Once seen, the subterranean hell of the workers’ hive is not soon to be forgotten.

Lang’s vision continues to resonate in more ways than one, with its iconography shamelessly recycled by dewy-eyed fans and film students down the generations. Similarly, Gottfried Huppertz’s influential, Straussian score led the way for the opulent symphonic canvases of Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and John Williams.

Finally, we’ll accept a helping hand – as well as claw, tail, beak, and tongue – from the benevolent woodland creatures of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937). Frank Churchill and Larry Morey’s songs are justifiably immortal.

The “picks” are all “mine” for Labor Day. Whistle while you weekend, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!

Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/

August 30, 2024
Last Starfighter Robert Preston Mystery

How the hell did they get Robert Preston to appear in “The Last Starfighter” (1984)? Especially as Preston had only just achieved a career high two years earlier with his Academy Award nominated performance in Blake Edwards’ “Victor/Victoria.” On paper – and let’s face it, on screen – it would seem that Preston is really punching down. But as Christopher Lee once said (and he is one that should really know), “Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them.”

And you know what? Preston is so charismatic (here doing a spin on his signature role of “Music Man” Harold Hill) that he succeeds in lifting “The Last Starfighter” to a whole other level. Even once he drops out of the narrative, the movie itself is able to maintain the good will he engenders. That’s how effective he is. One would never guess he was fatally ill at the time.

On the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner, Roy and I will discuss this popcorn entertainment from our high school years. “The Last Starfighter” was one of countless sci-fi fantasies – or space operas, as they were sometimes called – that were cranked out like sausages in the wake of “Star Wars.” I have to say, even as a kid who devoured so many of those – the good, the bad and the ugly – I gave “The Last Starfighter” a hard pass. Something about it just turned me off. Preston got great reviews, I remember, but the movie just looked plain dumb. I don’t think they knew how to market it.

Unquestionably, the film draws on so many of its predecessors. Anyone steeped in the pop culture of the era will recognize elements of “Star Wars,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” “E.T.,” “Superman,” “Blade Runner,” and “Tron,” to name a few. I had fun listening to Craig Safan’s score and picking out what must have been the temp tracks for many of the scenes.

The ‘80s were a good, carefree time for adolescent males at the movies, coddled as we were with softheaded fantasies of being admired not only by the cute girl (Catherine Mary Stewart), but also enjoying the esteem of our communities, even as we convinced ourselves that we were misunderstood and longed for something more, vicariously living out our dreams of saving the entire galaxy – the Hero’s Journey in the comfort of an air-conditioned theater.

In this case, the filmmakers even manage to idealize life in a trailer park, offering it such a Spielbergian gloss, one wonders why the protagonist longs to kick the dust off his shoes and see the wider world in the first place. This is no “Dodes’ka-den” (for me, Kurosawa’s most unpleasant film). Perhaps like George Bailey or Dorothy Gale, our hero will eventually realize there’s no place like home? Naaaaaa. There’s a galaxy to save!

The performances are fun pretty much across the board. At first, I thought the actor engaged as the protagonist (Lance Guest) a little bland, but then there’s a subplot in which he gets to have a good time playing his naive doppelganger. If it had been 15 years later, I could imagine Will Ferrell, in full “Zoolander” garb, as the usurper Xur (here played by equally Seussian Norman Snow, in the company of a bunch of would-be Klingons). If you ever get to feeling wrung-out by the intricate political maneuverings of “Dune,” watching “The Last Starfighter” would be a good palate-cleanser.

But it’s really Dan O’Herlihy, as a humanoid reptile named Gig, who serves as both mentor and sidekick to the main character, that does the most to keep things engaging when Preston is not on-screen.

Not long before, O’Herlihy appeared in one of the most unpleasant movies of the decade, “Halloween III: Season of the Witch,” as a dastardly warlock who aims to sacrifice children most horribly through the use of supernaturally-rigged Halloween masks. That film not only left a bad taste, but also alienated a whole lot of “Halloween” fans who were hoping for the return of unstoppable killing machine Michael Meyers, nowhere in sight. Ironically, “The Last Starfighter” was directed by Nick Castle, who played Meyers in the first two installments of “Halloween.” In fact, there are John Carpenter connections all over the place.

It would be criminal, however, to diminish O’Herlihy by associating him with one of his worst films. The veteran Irish actor also played Macduff to Orson Welles’ Macbeth and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Luis Buñuel’s “Robinson Crusoe.” Here, he’s obviously having a great time, or at least understands that “The Last Starfighter” needs him to appear so.

The make-up design is terrific, more convincing than most of the creatures in the “Star Wars” movies, the applications allowing the actors to be expressive. The visual effects are some of the earliest to rely almost totally on computer technology – especially organic here, as in “Tron,” since a video game plays such an important part in the story.

That’s all I’ve got to say for now. As I’m always chiding my overeager host, “Don’t talk it out!” If you crave the full megillah, we hope you’ll join us in the comments section for the next “Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner,” as we launch into “The Last Starfighter.” Our unlikely alliance will be livestreamed on Facebook, YouTube, etc., this Friday evening at 7:00 EDT!

https://www.facebook.com/roystiedyescificorner

By coincidence, last week Roy and I discussed John Carpenter’s “Starman” (1982), but it was so late in the week by the time I watched the film that I was unable to write anything intelligent about it in advance of the show. If you’re a fan, you can catch-up on our conversation about it here:

August 29, 2024
NJ MVC Heaven vs. Hell South Brunswick

I love the MVC on Route 130 in Dayton, NJ, the one that serves South Brunswick. Every time I go there, everyone is so nice and I never have a problem. Whenever I choose the one closer to home, the one in the Trenton area, it’s like running a gauntlet, with the employees lining up with chains and broken bottles, ready to challenge me to produce six points of identification.

For those of you with question marks over your heads, in New Jersey the MVC is the same as everyone else’s DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles). It stands for Motor Vehicle Commission. We’ve got to be different, because, look at us, we’re New Jersey. We won’t even pump our own gas.

To add to my enjoyment, every time I go to South Brunswick, I am issued a number preceded by the letter K. Classical music people inevitably associate that with a Köchel number. The Köchel catalogue is a system that was devised in the 19th century by Ludwig von Köchel to organize what he thought were the complete works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart into chronological order. So K = Köchel = Mozart in the minds of most classical music folks. Unless they’re deranged Scarlatti people, in which case they think of it as a Kirkpatrick listing.

Yesterday I was rewarded with K085 – Mozart’s Miserere in A minor. I must say, a miserere is uncannily appropriate for a visit to the average MVC.

To make yesterday’s visit even more delightful, I discovered a second Köchel number on my new license plate. I’ll refrain from posting what that is, exactly, since I already share too much of myself on social media, and I don’t want any pranksters reporting my license plate for random crimes I didn’t commit (or any I did commit, for that matter). Suffice it to say, the number stands for another dreary sacred work. That’s me all over.

So, not as good as last time, maybe, when I got K231, which translates into one of Mozart’s most scatological canons, “Leck mich im Arsch” (literally, “Lick Me in the ***”). You can read about that visit here:

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1032769507642112&set=a.883855802533484

BONUS FOR SCARLATTI-PHILES: I must say you have the advantage this time, as here’s the Keyboard Sonata in F major, K (Kirkpatrick listing) 85:

August 28, 2024
Alexander Goehr, Manchester Rebel, Dies at 92

Composer Alexander Goehr, the penultimate representative of the so-called Manchester School – that group of rebel angels that emerged from the Royal Manchester (now Northern) College of Music in the 1950s – has died at a venerable age.

The son of composer and conductor Walter Goehr, a Schoenberg pupil, Alexander was born in Berlin in 1932. The influence of Olivier Messiaen (his father conducted the U.K. premiere of Messiaen’s “Turangalila Symphony;” Alexander later studied with the composer) colored his own personal approach to the twelve-tone method.

Interestingly, Goehr’s first important, though likely least influential, teacher was Allan Gray (birth name Józef Żmigrod), also a Schoenberg disciple, who made his hay as a film composer. Schoenberg had already been rolling his eyes at Gray’s involvement in cabaret and theater. One can only assume what he made of this later development. (Of course, Schoenberg himself considered scoring “The Good Earth” in Hollywood, but priced himself out.) Gray would soon find employment providing music for Powell-Pressburger films like “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.” He also wrote the score for “The African Queen.”

Despite, or perhaps because of, his own experiences, Goehr’s father did not encourage his son’s pursuit of a musical career. He would have preferred him to study classics at Oxford.

At Manchester, Alexander fell in with angry young men Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Elgar Howarth, and John Ogdon. They may have presented a tough face, but after-hours, they would geek out talking about things like medieval modes. Together, they founded New Music Manchester. The works they championed were hardly easy listening.

Ogdon soon gained fame as a pianist, Howarth, now the group’s sole surviving member, kept bread on the table as a trumpeter and conductor, Maxwell Davies cannily developed a sideline of light music classics and was later appointed Master of the Queen’s Music, and Birtwistle, for all his notoriety, was regarded as one of the most important British composers of his generation.

While in Paris to study with Messiaen, Goehr became friends with Pierre Boulez, who served as a mentor in the late ‘50s. Eventually they parted ways, after Goehr became disenchanted with the strictures of serialism and craved greater artistic freedom, in regard to spontaneity and personal choice. Messiaen also sparked his interest in non-Western music, including Indian raga.

Questions of his personal evolution aside, in “Englands green & pleasant Land,” Goehr, in common with his classmates Maxwell Davies and especially Birtwistle, would continue to be regarded by casual concertgoers as an overgrown enfant terrible. At an age when many seriously begin to contemplate retirement, Goehr retained his influence and reputation as a prominent figure of the avant-garde. Yet in his later work, he seemed to step up his engagement with earlier historical styles and, as a result, wound up composing some of his most immediately appealing music.

I don’t claim to be a Goehr expert, nor should this post be taken as a comprehensive overview of his life or career. I suppose I know about as much about him as any fanatical classical music record collector might, but even a scroll through his Wikipedia page reveals that, for whatever effort I may have made here, I still have merely skimmed the surface.

Among other things I neglected to mention, he also held a number of prestigious academic posts, culminating in a professorship at Cambridge University from 1976 to 1999.

Goehr’s death at 92 was reported yesterday. I would have gotten this up sooner, but I spent this morning at the DMV!

Piano Concerto (1972), composed for Daniel Barenboim; played here by Peter Serkin

String Quartet No. 4 “In Memoriam John Ogdon” (1990)

“Metamorphosis/Dance,” inspired by Homer’s “The Odyssey”

“Fugue on the Notes of Psalm IV” (1976)

Interview with Alexander Goehr

PHOTOS:

Top, left to right: Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle, Audrey Crawford, formerly Goehr (front), John Ogdon (rear), Elgar Howarth, Peter Maxwell Davies, and John Dow in 1955;

Bottom: Goehr interviewed in 2014

August 27, 2024

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