With its latest release, Tribute Film Classics serves up a musical treasure fit for a king–Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s complete score for THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER (1937). When Tribute Film Classics emerged as a new label in 2007, their mission was to “to record deserved scores in complete renditions–including music that may have been omitted [...]

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 [...]

According to the online dictionary, die.net, the GOLDEN AGE is “the first and best age of the world, a time of ideal happiness, prosperity, and innocence; by extension, any flourishing and outstanding period.” When discussing Golden Age film music, we’re talking about a specific period of time in Hollywood, a time when the studio system flourished, cranking out [...]

Mark Swed’s Los Angeles Times review of the opening concert of the Pacific Symphony’s American Composers Festival made for some angry comments left by film score fans. However, I found his opening remarks particularly vivid: Hollywood’s “Golden Age” was, of course, black and white.  What gave the pre-World War II talkies their “color” was their [...]