Published in FSM Online March 2010 This year marks the 75th anniversary of the first Academy Awards in Music. While the Best Song category has remained essentially unchanged since its inception (except for those continually bizarre behind-the-scenes nomination rules), the Best Scoring category has been subjected to numerous permutations and title changes over the years [...]

Published in Film Score Monthly Online October 2009 “Once the opera is done,” Bernard Herrmann wrote to his ex-wife, writer Lucille Fletcher, “I shall never write another note again.” Herrmann’s opera, Wuthering Heights, based on Emily Brontë’s classic novel, was to be his “chef d’oeuvre, his fame as a serious composer,” said Fletcher, who also [...]

Published in Film Score Monthly Online May 2009 Film music and the concert hall have always forged a strained relationship. “Classical” (for lack of a better term) composers seldom write for film—Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Copland, Corigliano, Glass and Muhly are a few exceptions. And unless it is programmed as part of a pops concert, film music [...]

Published in Film Score Monthly Online April 2009 On March 26, 1948, film composer Hanns Eisler bid a bitter, final farewell to the U.S. from the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport. Austrian-born Eisler (1898-1962), a successful revolutionary composer in Weimar, Germany, had fled the country in 1933 when Hitler came to power. But his exile in [...]

Published in Film Score Monthly Online March 2009 Before there was Lukas, Bob, or Doug, before there was Silva Screen, Chandos, or Naxos, one man was responsible for excavating classic film scores from obscurity—Charles Gerhardt. With his series of Classic Film Scores recordings for RCA in the 1970s, Gerhardt (1927-1999) introduced a whole new generation [...]

On the one month anniversary of FilmScoreClickTrack, I pay tribute to my favorite film composer–ALFRED NEWMAN. No, Newman is not Alfred E. Neuman, the face of Mad magazine. Though, according to the WMFU Blog, in an interview with The Comics Journal, Mad editor Henry Kurtzman recalled: The name Alfred E. Neuman was picked up from Alfred Newman, the music arranger from [...]

Propaganda and Peasants: Aaron Copland’s Score to THE NORTH STAR Published in Film Score Monthly Online February 2007 On June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded Russia, violating the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939 and foisting the Soviet Union as an ally on an unprepared world at war. The Bolshevik revolution, the Moscow purge trials and executions of [...]

Stalin the Powerful: Prokofiev, Eisenstein and IVAN THE TERRIBLE Published in Film Score Monthly Online August 2007   Sergei Eisenstein called it his “suicide note.” Part I won the coveted Stalin Prize, yet Part II was banned from distribution, and Part III was virtually destroyed by Soviet officials. Over 60 years later, IVAN THE TERRIBLE remains Eisenstein’s most controversial film and, inexplicably, Sergei Prokofiev’s [...]

“Hail Satan!”: THE OMEN and Jerry Goldsmith’s Trilogy of Terror Published in Film Score Monthly Online December 2007   Growing up to the accompaniment of my father’s Roger Williams and Mantovani records, the harshest musical sounds in our house came from Beethoven’s Eroica. In the summer of 1976, that all changed. * * * “You have been [...]

Today marks the announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, the highest honor in American journalism, arts and letters, and music. At 3:00 PM EST, all eyes will focus on Columbia University’s School of Journalism to see who the lucky recipients will be. Since a rule change in 2004, film scores have been eligible for consideration, [...]