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Watch Live & Comment... The 2025 Golden Globe Awards!
Grace Kelly
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scriptgirl
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lapresse
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corbis
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corbis
scriptgirl
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From the exhibit
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Another dress from the exhibit
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scriptgirl
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The Australian
HE startling truth about soundtrack music throughout the history of the movies is that it's highly trained music. From the silent days onward, movies have been the home of the most conspicuously talented composers. On this topic you can always buy an argument with the upper echelon of purist arts pundits, but it's the truth.
It's an awkward truth, because it sounds like an endorsement for the idea that the free market drives the arts. And it can always be said that music written for a movie has no separate existence when detached from the movie. But that contention sounds less substantial when you do detach the music from the movie and perform it in the concert hall. If it comes up fresh and interesting, even if you haven't seen the movie, then the matter is settled. The complicating factor is that you often have seen the movie and can't forget it.
Take the music of Franz Waxman, a refugee from Germany who composed for movies by Alfred Hitchcock. Most people my age have seen Rebecca and most people of any age have seen Rear Window, which has lasted better, mainly because Grace Kelly was the female lead. If you can get her angelic image out of your head for a few minutes, however, you can hear subtleties in Waxman's score that you never would have noticed while the movie was running, because your (all right, my) eyes would have been on James Stewart's face when Kelly sat in his lap. The doomed beauty was also in Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, which was a much lesser film, mainly because Hitch couldn't really open up its stage-play format beyond a certain point. But the score by Dimitri Tiomkin, a refugee from Russia, was a lulu. Tiomkin was downrated by those critics who took him literally when, accepting an Oscar for his score for The High and the Mighty, he thanked every composer from whom he had stolen. He was, however, highly original, with a range stretching from the concerto to the pop song. Tiomkin wrote the hit song from High Noon, (Do not forsake me oh my darlin), which I will sing on the stage of the Sydney Opera House this week unless they stop me.
Such a wide range has always been characteristic of composers for the movies. They are all trained musicians and most of them can orchestrate the whole score. (Often they start out orchestrating scores for the few who can't.) But they tend to have an extra grounding in less legitimate areas of the business. Alfred Newman, the daddy of them all (he composed the music for the 20th Century Fox logo), started off in vaudeville. John Williams, at present the composer most in demand by the studios, started off in a US Air Force band before he went to the Juilliard School, and after graduation he put in years of hard graft playing jazz piano in clubs.
Williams brought that whole scope of experience with him when he started scoring for Steven Spielberg. Every Spielberg movie except The Colour Purple was scored by Williams. Every Star Wars movie, even the unwatchable prequels, also has a score by Williams. His 45 Oscar nominations are all for movies that you might have seen, except one. Nobody sane would voluntarily sit through Oliver Stone's JFK, because Stone isn't sane, but the score, when it isn't dragging in some questionable source music, is highly original and includes a piercingly beautiful title theme.
When you hear it played, you have to ask yourself how much of Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music is piercingly beautiful. Piercing, yes, and presumably he wanted it that way, dedicated as he was to the proposition that nothing attractive could possibly be ethical. But sometimes, when he was playing ping-pong with George Gershwin in Hollywood, even Schoenberg must have wondered whether it hadn't been a mistake to withstand corruption quite so strenuously.
Corruption through opportunism has always been a threat. Jerry Goldsmith was probably wasting his time and talent when he composed a score for Basic Instinct, a movie dedicated to the dubious proposition that Sharon Stone incarnated the spirit of rebellion when she uncrossed her legs to reveal the absence of panties. (If she had uncrossed her legs to reveal the presence of Che Guevara, that would have incarnated the spirit of rebellion.) But Goldsmith also composed the score for Roman Polanski's Chinatown, an undoubted masterpiece. And when you hear the music separately, you soon realise it contributed a lot more than atmosphere.
Polanski's personality must have been unsettling enough, but Goldsmith added a whole new layer of seductive desolation. Like so much of the best film music, it doesn't send you out of the cinema with a theme you can hum, like John Barry's title music for the Bond movies. But movie music often goes a lot deeper than mere tunes. In fact some of it goes so deep that it might almost be - whisper it - serious music. If that sounds like heresy, try to imagine The Godfather with a score by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Do we really think Nino Rota was a lesser composer just because he wrote themes that everyone in the world can recognise within the first four bars? No, we don't.
Clive James and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra will perform Crime Time (Symphony at the Movies) from today until Saturday at the Sydney Opera House.
HE startling truth about soundtrack music throughout the history of the movies is that it's highly trained music. From the silent days onward, movies have been the home of the most conspicuously talented composers. On this topic you can always buy an argument with the upper echelon of purist arts pundits, but it's the truth.
It's an awkward truth, because it sounds like an endorsement for the idea that the free market drives the arts. And it can always be said that music written for a movie has no separate existence when detached from the movie. But that contention sounds less substantial when you do detach the music from the movie and perform it in the concert hall. If it comes up fresh and interesting, even if you haven't seen the movie, then the matter is settled. The complicating factor is that you often have seen the movie and can't forget it.
Take the music of Franz Waxman, a refugee from Germany who composed for movies by Alfred Hitchcock. Most people my age have seen Rebecca and most people of any age have seen Rear Window, which has lasted better, mainly because Grace Kelly was the female lead. If you can get her angelic image out of your head for a few minutes, however, you can hear subtleties in Waxman's score that you never would have noticed while the movie was running, because your (all right, my) eyes would have been on James Stewart's face when Kelly sat in his lap. The doomed beauty was also in Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder, which was a much lesser film, mainly because Hitch couldn't really open up its stage-play format beyond a certain point. But the score by Dimitri Tiomkin, a refugee from Russia, was a lulu. Tiomkin was downrated by those critics who took him literally when, accepting an Oscar for his score for The High and the Mighty, he thanked every composer from whom he had stolen. He was, however, highly original, with a range stretching from the concerto to the pop song. Tiomkin wrote the hit song from High Noon, (Do not forsake me oh my darlin), which I will sing on the stage of the Sydney Opera House this week unless they stop me.
Such a wide range has always been characteristic of composers for the movies. They are all trained musicians and most of them can orchestrate the whole score. (Often they start out orchestrating scores for the few who can't.) But they tend to have an extra grounding in less legitimate areas of the business. Alfred Newman, the daddy of them all (he composed the music for the 20th Century Fox logo), started off in vaudeville. John Williams, at present the composer most in demand by the studios, started off in a US Air Force band before he went to the Juilliard School, and after graduation he put in years of hard graft playing jazz piano in clubs.
Williams brought that whole scope of experience with him when he started scoring for Steven Spielberg. Every Spielberg movie except The Colour Purple was scored by Williams. Every Star Wars movie, even the unwatchable prequels, also has a score by Williams. His 45 Oscar nominations are all for movies that you might have seen, except one. Nobody sane would voluntarily sit through Oliver Stone's JFK, because Stone isn't sane, but the score, when it isn't dragging in some questionable source music, is highly original and includes a piercingly beautiful title theme.
When you hear it played, you have to ask yourself how much of Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music is piercingly beautiful. Piercing, yes, and presumably he wanted it that way, dedicated as he was to the proposition that nothing attractive could possibly be ethical. But sometimes, when he was playing ping-pong with George Gershwin in Hollywood, even Schoenberg must have wondered whether it hadn't been a mistake to withstand corruption quite so strenuously.
Corruption through opportunism has always been a threat. Jerry Goldsmith was probably wasting his time and talent when he composed a score for Basic Instinct, a movie dedicated to the dubious proposition that Sharon Stone incarnated the spirit of rebellion when she uncrossed her legs to reveal the absence of panties. (If she had uncrossed her legs to reveal the presence of Che Guevara, that would have incarnated the spirit of rebellion.) But Goldsmith also composed the score for Roman Polanski's Chinatown, an undoubted masterpiece. And when you hear the music separately, you soon realise it contributed a lot more than atmosphere.
Polanski's personality must have been unsettling enough, but Goldsmith added a whole new layer of seductive desolation. Like so much of the best film music, it doesn't send you out of the cinema with a theme you can hum, like John Barry's title music for the Bond movies. But movie music often goes a lot deeper than mere tunes. In fact some of it goes so deep that it might almost be - whisper it - serious music. If that sounds like heresy, try to imagine The Godfather with a score by Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Do we really think Nino Rota was a lesser composer just because he wrote themes that everyone in the world can recognise within the first four bars? No, we don't.
Clive James and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra will perform Crime Time (Symphony at the Movies) from today until Saturday at the Sydney Opera House.
scriptgirl
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scriptgirl
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Images from Monaco's Red Cross Ball through the years
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf8dyYyHKNI&feature=related
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf8dyYyHKNI&feature=related
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scriptgirl
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Grace introducing Frank Sinatrahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CzqvsSXMOA&feature=related
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scriptgirl
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scriptgirl
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scriptgirl
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scriptgirl
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ebay
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figaro
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corbis
