To a great many, Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer, a time for picnics and trips to the shore, for Hollywood to flood the multiplexes with soulless blockbusters, a signifier of the end of school, and the beginning of three long, lazy months of way too much daylight.
But it didn’t always bear those associations. The precursor of Memorial Day was Decoration Day, first widely observed in 1868, to honor and remember those who died in the Civil War. It was a time for decorating graves, making solemn speeches, and marching in parades. These customs metamorphosed to the point where, after World War I, Memorial Day was seen as an occasion to honor those who died in ALL American wars.
Regardless of how one may perceive armed conflict, of whether any given war may be called just or unjust, it is not war itself or conflict in general that is being celebrated. Rather, it is the sacrifice of those who died in defense of a larger cause, and ostensibly that cause has been for the common good.
One would think, were one an idealist, that by this stage of our collective development, when any disruption in the global fabric obviously effects all of us, that wars would be considered obsolete. But sadly, human nature being what it is, there will probably always be reasons to remember.
This week on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll salute those who made the ultimate sacrifice, by listening to three works commemorating the dead of World War II, including “For the Fallen,” a berceuse for orchestra by Bernard Herrmann; Aaron Copland’s Violin Sonata, dedicated to Lt. Larry H. Dunham, who was killed in the Pacific in 1943; and the peace cantata “A Time for Remembrance,” by John Duffy.
Duffy himself was a World War II veteran, who lied about his age when enlisting. He became part of the Amphibious Scouts and Raiders, forerunners to the Navy SEALs, before deploying on the USS Hopping, a destroyer escort in the Pacific. His duties included detonating Japanese mines by shooting them from ship deck. When his ship took fire from shore batteries at Okinawa, the sailor standing next to him was killed. Duffy had to stand guard over the dead man’s body until burial at sea in the morning. That night watch determined the course of his life. “Since our time is so fleeting and unpredictable,” he later commented, “I knew I had to dedicate my life to music.”
War is no picnic. I hope you’ll join me for “Requiescat in pace,” 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
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu
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John Duffy on his war experiences and his decision to become a composer:
Tag: Bernard Herrmann
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No Picnic: “Requiescat in pace” on “The Lost Chord”
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A Hollywood Bowl Super-concert on “Picture Perfect”
Regardless of how you feel about the current state of the industry or the awards ceremony itself, you have to concede, there’s quite a rich history of impressive music written for film. And the Academy Awards is always the perfect excuse to look back.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” I’ll be leaning heavily into the nostalgia, as virtually every major composer from the golden age of Hollywood comes together at the Hollywood Bowl for a concert of now-classic film scores, originally broadcast on CBS Television in 1963. The event is often referred to as “the greatest film music concert in history.”Participants included, among others, Alfred Newman (“How the West Was Won”), David Raksin (“Laura”), Alex North (“Cleopatra”), Johnny Green (“Raintree County”), Franz Waxman (“A Place in the Sun”), Bernard Herrmann (“North by Northwest”), Dimitri Tiomkin (“High Noon”), and Miklós Rózsa (“Ben-Hur”). They were joined by Mahalia Jackson, Andy Williams, and Jack Benny!
An album was released on LP, but understandably the three-hour concert was severely truncated. This was somewhat remedied on a CD-reissue on the Columbia Legacy label in 1995 that included 70 minutes of music. Among the casualties, however, was Elmer Bernstein conducting the theme to “The Magnificent Seven.” I will perform a service to film music by restoring that cut from another source.
Based on my reading and the fact that I’m finding other selections in my personal library that were recorded at the venue on the same date, there’s still much that remains to be compiled. Put out whatever you’re holding back on a double-disc, please, Sony Classical!
Hollywood couldn’t assemble this much musical talent today if it tried. Fortunately, recordings like this one endure. I hope you’ll join me for “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, 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
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu -
Music Propels the Action on “Picture Perfect”
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we take flight with music from movies about airports and airplanes.
In the original “Airport” (1970), producer Irwin Allen established the prototype for disaster movies of all stripes by placing an all-star, aging cast in spectacular peril. Burt Lancaster! Dean Martin! George Kennedy! Jean Seberg! Jacqueline Bisset! Helen Hayes! The list goes on and on, longer than the longest runway. The bongo-laden theme is by veteran film composer Alfred Newman,” from the last of his over 200 scores.
Another movie with something of the same feel is “The V.I.P.s” (1963), allegedly inspired by the real-life love-triangle of Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Finch. The story is set at London Heathrow Airport, where flights are delayed because of a dense fog. The film was written by Terrence Rattigan and the parts cast from another laundry list of stars, including Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Louis Jourdan, Maggie Smith, Rod Taylor, and Orson Welles, with Margaret Rutherford in an Academy Award-winning performance. The music is by Miklós Rózsa.
By contrast, Steven Spielberg’s “The Terminal” (2004) is an (intentionally) comic take on the predicament of a hapless Eastern European who finds himself in a kind limbo, trapped in an international arrivals terminal in New York, after his country erupts into civil war, so that his passport and other documentation are no longer valid. His plight mirrors that of real-life Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian who lived for 17 years in a terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport.
Tom Hanks plays the unfortunate traveler, who makes the terminal his home, and Catherine Zeta-Jones the airline attendant with whom he strikes up a relationship. The music is by regular Spielberg collaborator John Williams (whose 94th birthday it is on Sunday), and I think you’ll find it quite different from the Williams known for his work on “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones.”
Finally, we’ll turn to the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “North by Northwest” (1959), a film in which Cary Grant encounters love and danger in, on, and from a variety of planes, trains, and automobiles. Planes are particularly significant. During the course of the film, it’s revealed that the title is in reference to a Northwest Airlines flight; Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) must do all she can to avoid getting on a plane with Phillip Vandamm (James Mason); and of course, Roger Thornhill (Grant) flees from a strafing crop duster. Bernard Herrmann’s opening fandango propels us into the adventure.
FUN FACT: The film’s most iconic scene (pictured) is actually played without music.
Rush more to Rushmore! Music propels the action on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, 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 EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu -
Film Composers Think Inside the Box on “Picture Perfect”
Before “Harry Potter.” Before “Jurassic Park.” Before “E.T.” Before “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Before “Superman.” Before “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Before “Star Wars.” Before “Jaws.” Before even John Williams… there was Johnny Williams.
Well before Williams became America’s most famous living composer, he was busy honing his craft as an orchestrator, an arranger, a session pianist, and a composer in the bush league of television. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll hear some of “Johnny” Williams’ music for “Lost in Space.”
Also on the program will be selections from “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour” by Bernard Herrmann, the theme from “Wagon Train” by Jerome Moross, and a medley of well-known television music by Jerry Goldsmith.
Don’t touch that dial! Movie composers think inside the box, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies (and television), 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 EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu -
Fantastic Adventures in the 18th Century on “Sweetness and Light”
The Enlightenment isn’t exactly remembered for its flights of fancy. If the odd novel embraced a fantastic tone, it was frequently in the service of satire, an entertaining means to send-up contemporary mores and pursuits or to mock authority figures and good old reliable human frailty. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll explore a few of these fantastic adventures of the 18th century.
“The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1785) pokes fun at one Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, a German nobleman and veteran of the Russo-Turkish War, whose reputation for telling outrageous tall tales is lampooned by Rudolf Erich Raspe. Raspe, looking to avoid a libel suit, published the work anonymously, with the result that it was commonly believed that the Baron actually dictated the tales himself. Naturally, the real-life Munchausen was upset by the unwanted attention. Thanks to Raspe, his very name came to be associated with feigned illness and pathological lying.
The book has been adapted to film several times, beginning with a silent version by Georges Méliès, all the way back in 1911. We’ll be listening to music from two subsequent adaptations. The first, “Münchhausen” (1943), is undeniably entertaining and exceptionally well-made. However, undermining one’s enjoyment is a sense of unease in the knowledge that the film was a pet project of Joseph Goebbels, who wanted to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the UFA film studio by producing a lavish spectacle worthy to stand toe-to-toe with foreign efforts like “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Thief of Bagdad.”
Considering the source, one would have to look awfully hard to come up with anything resembling Nazi propaganda. The entire exercise comes across as a pastoral escape from the horrors of totalitarianism, total war, and the Final Solution. The elegant music, by Georg Haentzschel, would not be out of place in the concert hall. Haentzschel is regarded as perhaps the last representative of a generation of Middle European light music composers.
More than 40 years later, director Terry Gilliam undertook another production design-driven adaptation that resembles nothing if not a series of Doré illustrations brought to life. Contrary to received wisdom, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1988) managed to pull in a respectable amount of per-screen capital. The film was a casualty of a management turnover at Columbia Pictures, with the new regime eager to bury the projects of the old. Hence, it was never seen theatrically beyond a very limited release. The score, by Michael Kamen, while in a romantic heroic style, wittily contains abundant allusions to music of the 18th century.
“The Manuscript Found in Saragossa” (1805) is a transitional work, with its ecstatically lurid opening chapter – replete with gypsy storytellers, highwaymen, dueling skeletons, lesbian vampires, and a couple of corpses dangling in a gibbet – dragging the Enlightenment kicking and screaming into the Romantic age. It starts out as a masterpiece of surrealism, by way of Gothic convention, but the spell is eventually broken, sadly, by a large, cold bucket of Enlightenment water, in the form of a perfectly rational explanation at the end. But until then, the author, Jan Potocki, gets an A for effort. The interlocking structure, with stories inside stories inside stories looks ahead to postmodern experiments by writers like Italo Calvino and John Barth, to say nothing of Jorge Luis Borges.
The book was made into an acclaimed Polish film, “The Saragossa Manuscript,” in 1965. Its cult status led to a restoration financed by Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola that was released on VHS and DVD in 2001.
Who else could provide the perfect soundtrack to such a hallucinogenic experience but Krzysztof Penderecki? Penderecki intersperses spooky passages with neo-classical and baroque interludes.
Finally, we’ll hear music from one of the many adaptations of Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” (1726). “The Three Worlds of Gulliver” (1960) simplifies the book’s narrative and dispenses with a great deal of the misanthropic humor in favor of children’s fantasy. You won’t catch Gulliver extinguishing a fire in the Lilliputian Emperor’s palace with his urine in this version. What you will find is a good deal of technical wizardry and a delightful score by Bernard Herrmann.
What, you doubt my veracity? Then surely the music must speak for itself. Join me for fantastic adventures in the 18th century, 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 EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu
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PHOTO: A fancy flight with Baron Munchausen
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