>> I'm going to encourage that a young composer step back in time
because it's the kind of scores that they generally
would not spend any time listening to.
I was just in Bulgaria and I asked the class of 20,
had any of them ever seen Gone With the Wind?
Three hands out of 20 people came up, that raise.
That shocks me.
It seems to me the younger generation doesn't have as much of
a insatiable desire to know what made the past.
How did the present become the present?
It's always because of the past.
Both the successes and failures,
that's not happening anymore.
I'm going to be the deadbeat here and be the one who speaks only of old scores,
and these are ones just off the top of my head
that had been [inaudible] .
I'm going to pick a hand full of composers.
I just talked about Gone With the Wind,
that's Max Steiner.
My God, if you don't watch that movie and listen to that score,
I don't know what to say to you.
But the other score of his that I really think was
a game changer is that score he wrote in the original black and white King Kong.
Let's not forget at that time when that score came out,
the idea of having music underpinning a visual,
meaning the movie without a scene,
the musicians that were performing it was weird.
The only time you would hear instrumental music
was if there was a band playing on the screen,
or if it was a musical,
someone was singing then the band was accompanying the vocalist.
But as underscore, no,
it really hadn't happened.
Birds of Paradise was a score again that Steiner did,
that I think preceded this by little bit that did have score from beginning to end.
But up until that time, instrumental music,
main title, no score, end title, score.
The only other music in the movie was source music.
So King Kong was the first.
I've always found an excitement in knowing that that first score was a horror film.
I guess, Miriam C. Cooper realized after the film was completed without music.
It has become a classic movie,
but he was afraid that people are going to laugh
at a giant monkey running around.
Put the music in and all of a sudden becomes scary.
That's a radical score.
It both the first serious, dramatic underscored movie.
You must listen to that.
A lot of horror music that's being written today owes its success on that score.
The King Kong motive is a descending half steps, three
half steps. Jaws, as you know,
it's an ascending one half step.
The Next Door Neighbors, [inaudible]
John Wayne add that in the back of his mind.
Not saying he did, but maybe he did.
Other movies,
let's jump to another movie.
David Raksin is a composer I studied with at UCLA.
One of the great composers of that golden era of film music.
Watch Laura, watch The Bad and the Beautiful.
Those are the two that come to mind, or Forever Amber.
Three of his best-known movies and scores.
Laura is a classic film he wrote
and it's like a model thematic score.
Let's talk about Hugo Friedhofer,
wrote the score to the film
The Best Years of Our Lives; a war film.
Boy, it's that score, delicious.
So truthful, so Americana, inspired by Copland Aaron, Copland slightly,
but done in his own manner.
You will learn so much from that.
Elmer Bernstein, because I knew Elmer, he's later.
I love Elmer's score for the Kill a Mockingbird.
What makes that score unique as it's
told from the perspective of the children who were telling the story.
Highly recommend that one.
God, I watched this film probably twice,
if not three times a year,
because I think the score is so profound.
It's one of these movies and one of these scores that
inevitably by the end of it, I'm sobbing like a baby.
That is the film Ben-Hur;
the one that was done in the '50s with Charlton Heston,
scored by Miklos Rosza.
Bernard Herrmann, well,
where do you start with a guy like that?
He's the guy who made me fall in love with film music.
By chance, I picked up a record of his called The Fantasy Film World of Bernard Herrmann,
something that was released in the '70s that were
conducting suites of scores of his sci-fi fantasy films.
We all know the Hitchcock scores.
Everybody when I speak to my classes all over the world,
the students will know Vertigo,
they will know Psycho,
and that's pretty much the end of it.
Not necessarily the absolute end of it,
but that's the [inaudible] after that.
Of course, there is his favorite score for the film
that goes to [inaudible] that is such a gorgeous romantic score.
It makes me cry again when I listened to her.
I've only fallen in love with the score,
I had never seen the movie, never.
I was afraid to watch the movie.
I thought that the movie was going to hurt my perception of the score.
But in terms of his fantasy stuff,
this is what he's known best for them.
The odd combinations of instruments that made his music
so special, scores to films like Journey to the Center of the Earth,
Mysterious Island, The Three Worlds of Gulliver, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef.
These are all the scores that have wacko, weird groups of
instruments and they're so special in terms of their sonorities.
You really should listen to these.
If you were Herrmann fan of which there are so many,
please listen to more than just the Hitchcock scores.
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