MAUVE DECADE MUSIC WOULD MAKE POPULAR RETURN SAYS STEINER

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 84, 20 August 1948, Page 3

MAUVE DECADE MUSIC WOULD MAKE POPULAR RETURN SAYS STEINER

Music of the "mauve decade" featured in the screen version of "Life With Father" might well be revived and made popular today, in the opinion of Max Steiner, diminutive Viennese composer. Steiner, who has conducted the orchestra for many of the studio's outstanding pictures, believes that singers such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and the orchestras of Tommy Dorsey, Fred Waring and others could easily popularise such forgotten classics as "Sweet Marie," "Love's Old Sweet Song," and "Sweet Genevieve." Such gentle numbers, in contrast to the flamboyant Gay Nineties ditties usually heard in period pictures, are used to carry the mood of the film version of the American family classic. Before composing this score, Steiner made a special trip to New York where he saw the play three times and conferred with authors Lindsay and Crouse. "It was a ticklish business trying to catch the mood of the 80's," he said. "We had to remember in orchestrating that there were no saxophones or vitaphones used in the orchestras ,of the day." Probably no layman, who sees the film will notice Steiner's inventive genius when father's antique music box plays 'Sweet Marie." Actually it does not play at all. The composer orchestrated the special arrangement for seven musicians who play the number and make it sound exactly like the old music box.