MUSIC FOR THE MOVIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 198, 9 April 1943, Page 12

MUSIC FOR THE MOVIES

We Have Come A Long Way From "Hearts And Flowers"

(By

C. A.

LEJEUNE

in the London "Observer" )

/ USIC, by which I don’t _ necessarily mean "Minnie from Trinidad," or "Jingle, Jangle, Jingle," has been growing more and more closely associated with films of late. The cinema public, too, I fancy, *is becoming increasingly musicconscious. I get many letters these days asking who wrote the music for such and such a picture. (Producer: "Why don’t the fat-heads read the credit titles?" Me: "Because you seldom have

the sense to print them at the end, and until they’ve heard the music, how do they know they’re going to like it?"). %* %* * NOTHER good reason for talking about film music: to-day is that I have just heard what seems to me the finest piece of music ever specially written fof the screen, It is the setting composed by Sir Arnold Bax, Master of the King’s Musick, for a Crown Unit documentary about the island of Malta. We have not yet seen the picture which has been outstripped by events in the Mediterranean, and is being brought up-to-date with a new commentary. But I have been allowed to listen to the sound track. Speaking without the evidence of the film, I should not call this "descriptive" music in the. accepted sense. At least it raises no visual images in my mind of a particular place or of people engaged in particular avocations. It is large music, noble music, which might well provide a counterpoint to any film of noble things. But it would stand "on its own" in the concert hall, or over the air, and I hope very much that it will be allowed to do so. . * He % T is a long way from the days when the picture-house pianist thumped out "Misterioso Infernale" with his’ right hand, holding his cup of tea in the left to the Bax work on "Malta;" but it is‘a way that leads hearteningly in the right direction. Mind you, there was a lot to be said for the old musical cue-sheet and the picture-house piano player. They did keep you abreast of the situation. Should you doze off for a moment while the rancher’s daughter was making eyes at the cowboy beside the old schoolhouse ("Hearts and Flowers"), Langey’s "Hurry No. 2" or "Furioso No. 3" would wake you in time for the sheriff and his posse. Should the film break in two during the great shipwreck scene, a couple of bars of "Chin Chin Ohinaman" would convince you that you had landed somewhere in the Orient, FP Mens ae ht * HERE was a helpfully familiar tune for every Motion Picture Mood in the silent film days, and according ‘to Mr. Erno Rapee, who arranged them in a handy album in 1924, there

were 52 moods. Grieg was able to tackle most of them, but Mendelssohn was helpful, too, Besides Wedding, Funeral, Passion, Quietude, and National, he covered Aeroplanes. Chopin, it appears, was the man for Monotony. % % te VEN in the silent days, there were especially arranged orchestral scores provided with the bigger films, for the theatres that could afford to use them. A

certain amount of the work was original, although much, of course, was recognised Mood-music, After nearly 20 years, I can still’ remember the jolly tunes written for the Fairbanks Robin Hood, the rescue motif (Danton riding cowboysaddle) in Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm. With the coming of the talkies, writing, arranging, and compiling music came into a pastiche became a full-time job, or at least an alleviation of income tax for many more or less serious composers. * % * SHALL not -be rash enough to suggest the date when worthwhile original music came into the British cinema. I can only say that I first became aware of it in Arthur Benjamin’s score for The Scarlet Pimpernel. I was struck by it again in Bliss’s ‘Things to Come, John Greenwood’s Man of Aran, and Elephant Boy, Geoffrey Toye’s Rembrandt and William Walton’s Bergner films, Escape Me Never and As You Like It. %* %* Bg MORE discerning ear than mine I suppose would immediately have picked out Richard Addinsell’s score for Fire Over England and South Riding. I, frankly, first became aware of Addinsell as 4 film composer through the Warsaw Concerto of Dangerous Moonlight. It doesn’t surprise me at all to learn that at its boom time the public were buying the Warsaw Concerto record at the rate of one every three minutes. Now Y am alert for anything that Addinsell writes, knowing that it will be musie straight from the heart, educated musi¢ that still understands instinctively the needs of a popular medium. * % * AUGHAN Williams and Arnold Bax are the latest captures of the British film studios. Vaughan Williams was intrigued into writing the score for 49th Parallel by the idea of "the only undefended frontier in the world." His great music for Coastal Command gave the film a stature it did not always intrinsically possess. Bax, our Master of the King’s Musick, makes his screen debut with the Malta film. It may not be just the stuff for the people who still stand by "Hearts and Flowers," but it suggests a look hopefully towards ae film of the future,