Holiday was travel magazine so it came as a surprise to me that it even had a column on movies.

Very interestingly, this particular issue devotes four pages (22, 24, 25, 27) to a column by Al Hine discussing movie music.

The column begins with quotes by Oscar Levant on his experiences in Hollywood. It then shifts to some history, discussing silent movie scores, and the original score to Birth of A Nation.

There is a still fresh discussion about using theme songs which mentions Seventh Heaven and Laura as the best examples. This is followed by brief descriptions of scoring cliches, the plot cliches of composer bio-pics, and the success or failure rate of performers from the opera and symphony hall who made appearances in the movies.

What follows is an amazing roll call and celebration of film music at that time.

Steiner is mentioned as is The Informer, Now Voyager, and Since You Went Away. Al Hine adds, "Max Steiner shows no signs of slowing down albeit there are marks of repititousness in his work."

Alfred Newman is called uneven but infatigueable and the score to Wilson is mentioned.

Hine goes on to mention by name Rozsa and Spellbound and The Lost Weekend, Herrmann and All That Money Can Buy, Tiomkin and Duel in the Sun, Copland and Of Mice and Men, Anthiel and Spectre of the Rose, and Kaper and Gaslight.

Hine talks about the horror film, mentioning Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Cat People (which he mistakenly attributes to its conductor C. Bakaleinikoff rather than to Roy Webb).

Hine also mentions "the recent British invasion" and praises Vaughan-Williams for The Invaders, Alwyn for The Notorious Gentleman, Ireland for The Overlanders, and Walton for Hamlet. Unbelievably, the article is illustrated with a photo of Alwyn composing and a photo from the Hamlet scoring session!

Auric is mentioned as well as A Nous La Liberte, Beauty and the Beast, The Eternal Return, and Symphonie Pastorale. Hine reminds us that Prokofiev's Lt. Kije suite comes from the film, The Czar Sleeps.

There is an interesting hint of HUAC and the blacklist: "Hannes Eisler, whatever his political beliefs then or now, did memorable work for None But The Lonely Heart."

There is discussion about topics in film scoring that we still discuss today. Hine says its common in Hollywood to make the claim that Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms would be film composers if they were alive today. He also discusses the concert use of film music and adds this interesting thought about Mickey-mousing: "It is a debatable point in music for films whether that music is better which will live independently of the scene it points up or whether music which is inextricably a part of the action is more honest movie writing."

There are hints about the amount of freedom given composers even then and the quality of the films they have to work on. A paragraph mentioning Thompson's score to Louisiana Story continues: "Seperately, in the documentary film, composers have had a liberal field day. But then the documentary itself has consistently been able to take longer strides toward maturity than its richer [Hollywood] relative."

For me, this article is a fascinating mystery. One, that Hine gets so much into a few columns of text. Two, that it's kind of a throwaway piece in a completely unexpected source. Three, that Hine is willing to mention composer names and film titles and that the films scores he discusses (which are rather recent in relation to when the article was written) have stood the test of time to become film music's classic Golden Age repetoire (oddly, he makes no mention of Korngold interestingly enough). And, four, that he has a very good handle on many of the issues involving film scoring that we still discuss down to this day fifty years later.

...reading this article reminds me that things haven't really changed that much in the last fifty years, that the Golden Age might not have been so golden after all in terms of what a composer could do or how he was accepted and regarded.

Please elaborate. As with everything else in our evolved open-and-anything-goes society, it would seem a composer has more options than ever. And re acceptance & regard, I would suggest it is incumbent upon the youngest amongst us to dig into the past and thus qualify such acceptance and regard and/or the lack thereof, no different than you and I and others in the not-so-old-not-so-young class already have done and continue to do.

Hine certainly could not have foreseen the incredible doors opened up to our ilk today. Your post is a worthy and fitting tribute to him nonetheless.

*******************************************************************

Simply put, even in an era where composers were able to retain a personal style in their film compositions (no mistaking Herrmann for Rozsa or Tiomkin), there were boundaries they couldn't cross. The same struggles that composers talk of today are built into the very fabric of film composition and have been around since the start of it.

Many of the topics we discuss today--snobbery against film music, typecasting of composers, homogenization of the film music sound, film music as concert music, etc.--are therefore "old hat" and have been debated by people related to film music from very early on.

Using Al Hine's article as a marker of progress over time, we discover that many of the basic problems involving film music haven't been solved in these last 50 years. Sure we have tons of scores on CD and they had but a few on 78s, but the basic idea of recordings of film music (and selective ones at that) and their overall popularity in the culture remains the same.

Good elaboration. But let me take this point in a direction you may not have intended, namely, compositional boundaries then vs. the wide-open field today. These are 2 extremes; the first would appear to discourage branching out while the second tends to celebrate "innovation". As such, I firmly believe that those boundaries in the former forced a different kind of innovative creativity that resulted in music that continues to endure. In contrast, my beef with the latter is that there is too much made of "novelty"--which is not the same kind of innovation that challenged the Golden Agers, a challenge they met--and far too little acknowledgment of a lack of overall quality once you get past the novelty. In this regard, I must agree with theatre critic John Simon who, though not writing about film music, per se, stated "Of the two forms of delinquency, the second is by far the worse. Opposition forces the innovator to strive harder, resort to subtlety to circumvent intolerance. Mindless salivating at novelty merely encourages phonies to peddle their inanities to unwarranted Pavlovian acclaim."

This leads to a nasty question and then an even nastier one: Could a Waxman, Rozsa, Herrmann, etc. function today? Better yet, could a Zimmer or a Horner function back then?

*****************************************************************

Today, I think composers have many constraints on them, the same that earlier composers had, but even moreso. On the other hand, the producer-director's worse fear might be a salvation in disguise depending on the composer.

Welles said in his interview with Bogdanovich that he eventually picked the music he wanted in his films himself. That way he knew what he was getting and didn't have to reject a score and hurt a composer who went off on his own and did something he didn't like.

Producer-directors have become such meddling mother hens about the scores that'll go into their films these days that they watch very carefully what a composer does. Some composers suffer under this, but others might find it keeps them on track to compose what will be appropriate, please the sponsor, and be paid for.

As for innovation vs novelty, I think we've found out from a number of examples that, when the smoke clears, the noisemakers and controversy-makers need to have made some lasting contribution or else they wind up like the Emperor with no clothes.

Some boundaries need to be pushed, but if Citizen Kane were only jumbled flashbacks and not a good story as well as a whole new approach to interacting with movies, it would be completely forgotten today.

In any case, i'm not sure today's films allow for novelty or innovation that much. And, perhaps they never did. Hine was trying to tell folks in the late 40s that Walton, Auric, Steiner, et al. were not hacks which means there were a lot of people who felt they were--imagine what those people would have thought of Horner?

Which leads to the "nasty" question you raised. Could Rozsa, Waxman, and Herrmann work today? Well, Rozsa and Herrmann did work into the 70s and 80s, but their sound was somewhat retro, harking back to a previous era, by the end. Their distinctive sound might be frowned upon today where producers seem to like a homogenized sound where every composer puts out a sound that's similar to every one else, much like individual anime artists must render their figures into a single style. People might hire Herrmann for the power he could put out but quickly fire him when he refused to do as they say, work off a temp track, etc. Goldsmith, who had a wider range of what he could do to begin with, has toned down his distinctive sound from the 60s more in line with the homogenized sound of today. Then, so many composers have used Goldsmith's homogenized sound as the basis for their own works, that there are scores so generic that you could claim were by Goldsmith or Horner or Silvestri or Broughton and you'd agree no matter whose name was on it.

Could Zimmer or Horner have worked in the past? Well, part of their sound relies on modern technology they didn't have in the past, but they could probably find work, just what work would be hard to say. Horner would still be a producer's darling, stealing classical works and writing hit tunes. Zimmer would work in the pit at Universal next to Mancini, Stein, Salter, Skinner, and the rest, or else he'd be the musical supervisor who signed the credits in place of everyone else. Obviously, I don't have much respect for either of these guys, but had you picked some modern composers I respect in their place, chances are they would have worked in old Hollywood and maybe accelerated the process of streamlining we're faced with today.

But possibly, it's a difference in attitude. Welles was fine with composers in the beginning, but by the end, he didn't want to use them. Maybe the studios were proud of Korngold or Rozsa or Newman and supported individual composition styles so long as they didn't clash with their other requirements, but that as time advanced, having a film that sounded like Tiomkin or Herrmann didn't matter as much or even began to be seen as a negative: too obtrusive, no longer subtle, too much in competition with the director's images and vanity. As a result we finally get the drone score that accompanies every TV drama, an attempt at having music there to do some of what music can do but so bound by ropes that no one has to worry about its taking over. It's an attempt to have the cake and eat it too and naturally it fails. They don't see that it fails, to them it succeeds, as they can't see how annoying it is to have just denuted, meaningless sound there for the sake of filling up an aural vacuum.

And the thing is that the old stuff still plays just fine. Rio Bravo plays so often on AMC they might as well call it the Rio Bravo channel. And everytime it plays, it still has that Tiomkin sound, and it still works with that film just fine. So, if people can tolerate old style scoring in older films, why couldn't they go along with it in newer ones.

Why couldn't the next Star Wars installment get a score of library tracks from old Roy Webb scores or something?

While the public's demand for pop tunes ran parallel with the demand for motion pictures from the major studios -- reaching back to the beginning of films' sound era -- the music end of it was almost always subordinate to the needs of the studios' primary product: movies.

Director Nicholas Meyer, in his liner notes to the original lp (and later CD) release of Rozsa's TIME AFTER TIME score, makes the interesting observation that THE GRADUATE was the real turning point in the movies' relationship with music, and its function in generating profits. In Meyer's view, THE GRADUATE cemented Hollywood's conviction that all they had to do is lard movies with pop songs to rake in bushels of extra money, with no need of, or thought to, having any dramatic scoring to help shoulder the burden of dramatic story-telling.

Though STAR WARS helped revive the symphonic film score about a decade after THE GRADUATE's release, things have never been the same since, and the regard of studios and filmmakers for the importance of dramatic scoring has waxed and waned in sad, ironic harmony with the Top-40 charts -- always coming up short.

The Golden Age composers didn't have to contend with this mind-set; though the studios were certainly always on the prowl for a pop tune or arrangement that could be exploited by their music-publishing or record-producing arms, the old-line producers and executives still held the reins of power and, for the most part, they had a natural affinity for, and an at least unconscious understanding of, dramatic music's function in the art and craft of picture-making.

I think the turning point came before The Graduate however. With LPs and radio and television, as you said, came an opportunity to sell music. Tiomkin was one who could work both sides of the fence: dramatic scoring and a song tune in the same score.

In The Total Film Maker by Jerry Lewis written in '68, Lewis talks about using tunes to advertise the film (and using temp tracks for scoring as well) as practices he'd been using since the late 50s.

Pressure to write a tune led to the Torn Curtain fiasco and hard financial times for most of the Golden Age composers still around in the late 60s & 70s.