It’s that time of year again. With less than two weeks until Halloween, you may be starting to experience that low-level anxiety. How exactly are you going to dress your cat?
For those in need, here are some great tips on crafting hats and hairstyles out of your little one’s own fur.
Now that you’ve got brush in hand, how about some appropriate background music? Some altruistic chap took the effort to compile all the classical music adapted for use in “The Back Cat” (1934), with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
Liszt features prominently, with an orchestration of his Piano Sonata in B minor, the orchestral version of his “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3,” the symphonic poem “Tasso: Lament and Triumph,” and of course “Les Preludes.”
There’s more Liszt in this “faux” trailer (with Bach and Schubert and near-Tchaikovsky too):
It’s a film score magazine that’s existed in many forms over the years. It was begun basically as a pamphlet; then it was expanded into a black-and-white print magazine; then it went glossy. Finally, like everything else, it went online.
The magazine was founded by Lukas Kendall in June 1990, when he was still a student at Amherst. After he graduated, Lukas relocated to Los Angeles, and FSM really upped its game. Many of the great living film composers were friends of the magazine and granted interviews over the years, and a number of the writers, now authorities in the field, have gone on to other things.
I stumbled across this back-issue from April 1994 (the black-and-white cover days), for which I provided two CD reviews. One of them is for a release appropriate to the season, so I am sharing it here. Maybe I was a little hard on the content. For broadcast purposes, it’s given me moderate enjoyment in small doses, but on a scale of 1 to 5, I think 2 is probably about right. Maybe I’d give it a 3 now, though the running time is ridiculously short. People who were familiar with the original record were going to buy it anyway.
I know I received at least one letter from a disgruntled Hans J. Salter fan. And I mean a physical letter, since this was before everyone lived on the internet.
At a point, FSM expanded into producing its own film score CDs, 250 limited edition discs of diverse fare from the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s & ‘70s, for which I will be forever grateful. Many of these are now available only on the collector’s market at astronomical prices, but you can still pick up some of the titles for around $15-$20. Good luck getting the rest!
I hasten to point out, Film Score Monthly still exists, as a website. I haven’t really followed it for some time now, but I know “Picture Perfect” has been mentioned on its message board.
Back issues of the print incarnation of the magazine are archived online to read free of charge.
A great compliment from Vinny Foti regarding our show on Friday evening. Everything goes better with a cheesesteak and pierogies. Be sure to order out in advance of our discussion of “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), on the next @[100063986017424:2048:Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner]. We livestream on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, this Friday at 7:30 pm EDT. Thank you, Vinny!
In this season when you can’t hear “Transylvania” without imagining a wolf howl, we’ll set aside creepy castles in the Carpathian Mountains for the more congenial sounds of Romania’s concert halls.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll look beyond George Enescu, Romania’s most celebrated musical polymath, to hear music by three of his compatriots, only one of whom managed to achieve recognition beyond the borders of his homeland.
George Stephănescu (1843-1925) was a seminal figure in the development of Romanian opera. He founded the nation’s first opera company in 1885. He is also credited with having composed the first Romanian symphony. Stephănescu conducted at the National Theater and taught at the Bucharest Academy of Music. His “National Overture” of 1876 reflects his patriotic concerns.
By contrast, György Ligeti (1923-2006) was destined to be a bit of an outlier. Born into a Jewish family in an ethnically Hungarian region of Transylvania, Ligeti went on to become one of the most important composers of his generation, but much of his music is in a style that would have been deemed “avant-garde.” However, he also had his playful side. In 1951, he wrote his “Concert românesc” (“Romanian Concerto”), a wholly accessible and little-known work based on actual Romanian folk tunes he had studied at the Folklore Institute in Bucharest. Despite this being one of his most overtly delightful pieces, the work was banned after a single rehearsal in Bucharest and not heard publicly until 1971. “Totalitarian regimes do not like dissonances,” he observed ruefully.
Finally, Paul Constantinescu (1909-1963) was part of a generation of Romanian composers that came of age in the shadow of Enescu. He composed in most musical forms: opera, ballet, oratorio, incidental music, symphonic, chamber and choral music, and music for film, yet he remains little-known in the West. His concertante output includes works for violin, cello, piano and harp, in addition to a concerto for string orchestra. We’ll hear Constantinescu’s Piano Concerto, from 1952.
Children of the night! What music they make.
Go batty for exhumed Romanian classics. The Count invites you to join him in his box, for “Romania Mania,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
