The composers Leroy Anderson and Bernard Herrmann rose to prominence, in their respective ways, through their invaluable contributions to American popular culture.
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 more than 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,” a showcase for the CBS late night movie.
Herrmann (1911-1975) was staff conductor for 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.
He fell in with Orson Welles, with whom he worked on radio shows such as “Mercury Theatre on the Air” (including Welles’ notorious adaptation of “War of the Worlds”). When Welles went to Hollywood, Herrmann went with him, to write the music for “Citizen Kane.” This would be the first of decades worth 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 (including “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”), but he also wrote top-notch, ear-opening scores for producer Charles Schneer and special effects artist Ray Harryhausen (most notably “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 completing the recording sessions for Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” in 1975.
Happy birthday, gentlemen! Thanks for all the music.
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Staying up late with “The Syncopated Clock”
“North by Northwest”
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PHOTOS: Cranky Herrmann needs caffeine; sunny Anderson remembers his royalty checks
Mel Brooks is 100 today. Here he is at his most tasteless – and most hilarious. (View the sequence in full at the link below.) Is there anything about it that isn’t genius? The slide, the choreography, the patter, the mallets, the slot machine, the handspring, the Busby Berkeley nuns. Yet it should be one of the most offensive sequences in the history of motion pictures. Instead, it’s the funniest bit from “History of the World, Part I.” This is “Springtime for Hitler” taken to the nth degree. If the entire movie were at this level, it would be THE mainstream comedy classic everyone would be afraid to screen.
But by 1981, anyone who went to the cinema to see a Mel Brooks movie knew to check their pearls at the front door. “Blazing Saddles” trafficked in racial tension with taboo situations and slurs, and “The Producers” trivialized the Thousand-Year Reich by introducing showgirls clad in Bavarian pretzels and a Nazi kickline. NO ONE would have the guts to mount anything like it today, or would get away with it. But Mel tackled controversial subjects with the precision of a scalpel and the conviction of a wielded sledge hammer. Fascinatingly, in the end, it was always the laugh that was the most important.
Also, it was a different world, remember. Brooks didn’t come up with all this stuff out of thin air. He was born Melvin Kaminsky on a Brooklyn tenement kitchen table. His grandparents and his mother were Jewish immigrants, who came to this country fleeing hardship and persecution and hoping for a better, safer life. So the ethnicity – the culture, the accents, and the injustices – were all ingrained. He had a humble start and also some bad luck. When he was two years old, his father died of tuberculosis at the age of 34.
Yet as a first-generation American, he was born at an exciting time, one ripe with potential for upward mobility, when aspiring artists and entertainers in all fields were seizing their moment0 and shaping the country.
But first he would have to defend it, drafted into World War II at the age of 18, and unlike many entertainers, he wasn’t just doing USO shows. He was at the Battle of the Bulge, and he saw a lot of horrific things. He had important responsibilities as a forward artillery observer and a combat engineer. He was often perilously close to the enemy, and he was tasked with clearing booby-traps and defusing landmines. This is one comedian who saw a lot of life. His sense of humor kept him sane, and it brought levity to those around him.
After the war, he found work as a musician in the Catskills. Then he was pushed on stage to do stand-up. He also did summer stock and radio. Within a few years he had crashed television. He had met Sid Caesar for the first time while working at a Borscht Belt hotel when the two were still in their teens. Later, he buffeted Caesar with gags until he was hired as a writer on “Your Show of Shows.” At 24, he was working with Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, and lifelong friend Carl Reiner.
With Reiner, he introduced his popular character, the 2000 Year Old Man, which soon found its way onto a hit record. With Buck Henry, he created the television series “Get Smart.” Then he wrote the screenplay for “The Producers.” The failure of his film “The Five Chairs” led to the success of “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” and many others.
He channeled some of the profits into producing, quietly (so that they would be taken seriously) underwriting David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man,” “Frances” (with Jessica Lange), “The Fly,” and “84 Charing Cross Road” (which starred his wife, Anne Bancroft).
In his 70s, he made a late-in-life stab for the Great White Way – always a Brooksian ideal, as evidenced by the frequent, staged musical numbers in his movies – when he adapted “The Producers” for Broadway.
What I didn’t fully appreciate when I was younger was just how ballsy the movie “The Producers” was. Yes, there was still shock value when I saw it for the first time in the 1970s. Even when I was a kid, I knew Hitler was no laughing matter. But at the time the movie was released in 1967, it had only been roughly two decades since the end of the war. Millions of people had largely unfunny experiences with, and memories of, the Nazis. Countless lives had been destroyed. People who fought in the war were only entering middle age. All in all, Brooks’ conceit of two Broadway impresarios’ get-rich-quick scheme, mounting a Broadway musical so outrageous (about Hitler, of course) that the show would be forced to close on opening night – unexpectedly backfiring when it becomes a runaway hit – was an unlikely premise for a screen comedy.
By the time the movie was adapted into an honest-to-goodness Broadway musical in 2001, Nazism must have seemed like a conquered evil of the past. And now here we are, a quarter century on, and the hydra of antisemitism and neo-Nazism is sprouting new heads. But Brooks always maintained that the best way to defang evil was to mock it.
Of course, on a more basic level, he also reveled in sending up conventions and just being plain silly. He was a champion of Borscht Belt schtick and Yiddish theater zaniness. Rewatching his Hitchcock parody “High Anxiety” only last week, after many years, I found myself absurdly entertained by an onscreen psychiatric session that devolves into a boxing match between Brooks’ character and his mentor, played with Freudian gusto by Howard Morris (also of “Your Show of Shows), with Harvey Korman peeling off his jacket to reveal the striped shirt and black bowtie of a referee. It is a moment of inspired insanity that would have done the Marx Brothers proud.
Likewise, in the aforementioned (and below-linked) Inquisition number, Brooks’ juxtaposition of the cruelty and horrors of persecution and torture with the buoyant razzle dazzle of John Morris’ floorshow arrangements and orchestrations is deliriously ludicrous.
It’s not that he’s insensitive. Brooks once theorized that a lot of his humor is based on anger or hostility. If so, it’s actually a very healthy way to process. Society’s earnest attempts to rise above its baser qualities can sometimes come across as more ridiculous than any Brooks comedy, and a lot less entertaining. Progress comes easier when you can make people laugh than when you try to lead them by the nose. It’s a lesson that’s been lost, unhappily, and it’s entirely possible there’s a lot more friction and division in the world because of it.
C0omedy can’t be expected to mend all our faults, but Brooks has succeeded in making a lot of people lighter of spirit. Along the way, he’s also flown in the teeth of racism, atrocity, and historical tragedy by making us all roar at outrage. Ridicule can make the horrific risible. It’s fascinating how Brooks can be subversive as hell, and yet at the same time he’s always been one of the establishment’s greatest comics.
He is one of only 28 entertainers to achieve EGOT status – the recipient of four Emmys, three Grammys, an Oscar, and multiple Tonys (for his stage musical of “The Producers”). And yet, somehow, he has always been somewhat underrated.
And now, here he is, 100 years old and filming another “Spaceballs.”
Happy birthday, Mel. Sincere thanks for a lifetime of service. Every time you’ve made someone laugh, you’ve made the world a better place.
Now that you’re hopefully in the right frame of mind, dear reader, if you’re ready for the Inquisition, click the link.
Neoclassicism in music was a reaction against what was perceived as the garish effusiveness and gooey excesses of late Romanticism.
Contemporary composers, in search of a new lucidity, turned their attention to the 18th century, revisiting its musical processes, though reinterpreting them through a distinctly 20th century prism. Stravinsky was the master, but neoclassicism swept the world.
This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have three cheery examples of Czech neoclassicism, including works by Ilja Hurník (his “Sonata da Camera”), Iša Krejči (his “Serenade for Orchestra,” conducted by Karel Ančerl) and Bohuslav Martinů (his Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra).
These composers – well, Krejči and Martinů, anyway – manage to balance the clarity of the Enlightenment with an unmistakably Czech national sound.
Hurník’s work is perhaps the purest, in terms of looking back. The term “Sonata da Camera” recalls music of the Baroque and Classical eras, as does the clarity of its instrumentation, involving flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord. Each movement begins as if it were ripped from the pages of history and then gradually squeezed like a lemon, leaving a tangy, contemporary aftertaste.
All of this music is calculated to lift your spirits. I do hope you’ll join me for “Balanced Czechs,” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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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 – 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
Now that it’s summer, it’s time to catch up on our reading! Whether it’s a beach book or a timeless literary classic, reading for pleasure is its own reward. This week on “Sweetness and Light,” imagine yourself in a lawn chair, under a good shade tree, perhaps with a beverage at your side, and enjoy an hour of music, hand-picked to get you in the spirit.
It will be a veritable lending library of compositions for concert hall, opera house, musical theater, salon, and film, with works inspired by J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” Voltaire’s “Candide,” Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Peter Benchley’s “Jaws,” Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones.”
Celebrate two of life’s great pleasures – music and books! Set aside your cares. They’ll still be here when you get back. Get yourself in the mindset to unplug and enjoy some quiet time. Prime yourself for a carefree summer of reading, 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!
I prefer to keep my barbarians fictional, thank you. But with the nation’s 250th birthday approaching, I expect there will be plenty of instances in which truth will exceed credibility. It’s the world we live in, folks. Robert E. Howard, take me away!
This week on “Picture Perfect,” it’s an hour of music from movies inspired by Howard’s imaginative writings. Howard is best recognized for having created Conan the Cimmerian, a heroic warrior of the Hyborian Age. The character became the center of a series of lucrative stories first published in “Weird Tales” magazine, beginning in 1932.
It would be a half century before Conan made the leap to the big screen, under the direction of John Milius. “Conan the Barbarian” (1982) propelled Arnold Schwarzenegger, already a legend in the field of bodybuilding, to international superstardom. Okay, “Conan” isn’t exactly “Citizen Kane,” but it does have its pleasures. The intensity of the violence can be a little disturbing, but the ponderous tone is a blast. “Conan” is a film that takes itself just seriously enough to make it occasionally hilarious.
Another thing “Conan” has going for it is the fact that it was made on a blockbuster budget. The first-rate production values extend to the music by Basil Poledouris, who employs a full symphony orchestra to impressive ends. In fact, the “Conan” score was one of the strongest of the decade. It’s amazing that anyone would find so much inspiration in such a mediocre film, but Poledouris’ music intersperses Borodin-style Central Asia lyricism with brawny, thrilling action music.
Sadly, the sequel, “Conan the Destroyer,” betrays signs of penny-pinching, so that it often winds up feeling like a direct-to-video effort. Poledouris was forced to make do with a smaller orchestra, which sounds a bit too much like a television ensemble. Still, he gave it his all, and there’s something to be said for the fact that it is an original score, rather than a mere retread of the original.
Of perhaps related interest: it looks like a long-anticipated third Schwarzenegger Conan movie will finally be happening. “King Conan” is expected to begin filming next year, with Christopher McQuarrie writing and directing!
Let’s hope it fares better than an adaptation inspired by another one of Howard’s pulp creations, Kull of Atlantis, who was given the big screen treatment in “Kull the Conqueror” (1997). Kevin Sorbo, TV’s Hercules, plays the title role. The composer, Joel Goldsmith (son of Jerry), was asked to incorporate heavy metal riffs into his orchestral underscore. I haven’t actually seen this one, but for some reason I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
The astoundingly prolific Ennio Morricone – with more than 500 motion picture and television scores to his name – had an uncanny knack for spinning garbage into gold. His music for “Red Sonja” (1985) lends the film an aura of ‘80s cheese ball fun, perhaps more so than it deserves. This is the film that introduced Brigitte Nielsen as the chain-mailed barbarian beauty. Schwarzenegger appears in the supporting role of Lord Kalidor.
There are those who would deny themselves the guilty pleasures of viewing these silly, cheesy, violent films. In “Conan the Destroyer,” when our hero is presented with the statement, “I suppose nothing hurts you,” he responds, “… Only pain.”
Make the music loud, Crom! Drive my enemies before me and drown the lamentations of their women! Saddle up with Conan the Barbarian on “Picture Perfect” – music for movies inspired by the writings of Robert E. Howard – now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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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 – 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
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