Notes; 6/1/1999; Wright, H. Stephen
By Laurence E. MacDonald. New York: Ardsley House, 1998. [xvi, 431 p. ISBN 1880157-56-X. $31.95.]
The literature of film music, though vast, is often distressingly elusive; much of the available information on the subject is hidden in obscure journals or out-of-print books. Thus, any new work on film music - particularly a reference work - may legitimately aspire to the enviable position of a standard, fundamental source. Although an author who seeks to displace a New Grove or a Baker's on a crowded reference shelf faces a formidable challenge, no such inhibitions shackle the writer on film music. Stewart R. Craggs, with his Soundtracks: An International Dictionary of Composers for Film, presents what might be perceived as a filmmusic Baker's; undoubtedly this beautifully packaged work, with its comforting subtitle containing the critical words "international" and "dictionary," will find its way onto reference shelves throughout the English-speaking world. Whether it deserves its position on those shelves is highly questionable.
Craggs offers a straightforward alphabetical listing of about five hundred composers who have contributed scores for film and television productions. To his credit, he attempts truly international coverage, in contrast to the American bias of most English-language writing on film music. Yet his list is far from comprehensive, particularly in regard to composers active in American television; Shirley Walker, Don Davis, Alf Clausen, Richard Gibbs, and Artie Kane are nowhere to be found.
In his preface, Craggs explains that he provides "[v]ery brief biographical details" (p. viii) for each composer; despite this disclaimer, the sheer
paucity of information is appalling. In most cases, Craggs merely states the nationality of the composer (e.g:, "American composer"). Occasionally this revelation is padded with phrases such as "who has also written for television," or with one or two random bits of biographical data. Craggs does include birth and death dates "wherever possible." (Apparently it was not possible in many instances.) He singles out a few composers, primarily British, for special attention in the form of an entire paragraph, but there is no apparent rationale for these choices beyond nationalistic bias.
Craggs includes a filmography with each entry. Oddly, these are in alphabetical rather than chronological order, and in nearly all cases (except for the least prolific composers) they are selective rather than comprehensive. One could easily acquire more extensive (though not always reliable) credit information for most of these composers using the "Internet Movie Database" (http://www.imdb.com). In a handful of entries, Craggs also cites a few available recordings of film scores, yet this discographic information is so meager that one wonders why he included it at all.
All of these limitations would be less disturbing if the information that Craggs does provide were reliable and accurate, yet the number of errors does not inspire confidence. For example, Hollywood composer (and sometime comedian) Frank De Vol is identified as an "Italian composer"; Monty Norman is credited with a whole string of James Bond films, when in fact he only composed one Bond score (Dr. No); David Amram's surname is spelled "Amran"; and Walter Schumann is, incredibly, identified as "William Schuman." Craggs also appears to have a problem with the name "Lennie": both Lennie Niehaus and Lennie Hayton have their first names spelled "Lenni." One cannot help wondering from what sources Craggs harvested this capricious information; in his preface, he says that his data was "compiled from a wide variety of sources" (p. viii), but he declines to cite any of them.
One welcome feature is a "Select List of Feature and Documentary Films with Music Wholly or Partly Inspired by Classical Composers." Music librarians everywhere have wrestled with questions about classical music used in films and television, and there has never been a single, reliable source for this information. Craggs offers a succinct list of popular films that make striking use of works from the standard repertory, and this may help answer some of the more commonly asked questions of this type. A comprehensive list of classical works used in films, however, would easily fill a book, rather than the thirteen pages allotted by Craggs.
After the severe disappointment of Soundtracks, it was difficult to be optimistic about Laurence E. MacDonald's Invisible Art of Film Music; the bold subtitle A Comprehensive History aroused immediate suspicion. Happily, it is impossible to dislike this genial, attractive survey of Hollywood film music, in which MacDonald manages to discuss eighty years of film scores in a scant 377 pages of text.
One of the peculiarities of much writing on film music is a tropism toward the "great man" approach, exemplified by works such as American Film Music by William Darby and Jack DuBois (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1990) and Film Score by Tony Thomas (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1979); typically, the reader is presented with separate chapters on Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and so on, proceeding chronologically to the present and concluding with a chapter on John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith. MacDonald does follow a simple chronological path, taking each decade and year in turn; strictly speaking, this is more a chronology than a history. Fortunately, he avoids any fixation on a pantheon, providing an evenhanded, balanced overview of each year's film music and taking care to mention the work of composers who are not so well known.
MacDonald sweeps past so many films so swiftly that he can make only the briefest comments on most scores, typically a few sentences describing the work's general style and thematic approach. He singles out at least one score from each year for lengthier attention, and his choices are often surprising and refreshing; for example, he lavishes attention on Bill Conti's much-maligned score for The Right Stuff (1983), while John Williams's popular Return of the Jedi, from the same year, is covered in a few sentences.
In contrast to more acerbic critics such as Royal S. Brown, MacDonald is almost uniformly positive about the huge spectrum of film music; his tone is relentlessly cheerful, and he seems reluctant to disparage anything. Vangelis's incongruous electronic score for Chariots of Fire (1981) is described as "catchy" yet "slightly out of place" (p. 289), while Burt Bacharach's ludicrously dated pop score for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is merely "somewhat questionable" (p. 220).
MacDonald appends a list of the films mentioned in the text and indicates whether a compact-disc or LP recording exists for each, but he provides no publication details on these recordings, so readers seeking a film-music discography must look elsewhere. The book is illustrated with black-and-white film stills and the occasional composer photograph, but, sadly, no music examples. The scholarship of The Invisible Art of Film Music is not overwhelming; this book straddles the border between the popular and the academic. Yet it deserves attention simply because it is the most complete survey of American film music available to date.
In contrast to the elegant packaging and mainstream ambitions of the work of Craggs and MacDonald, Don Christlieb's Recollections of a First Chair Bassoonist is an unpolished, though remarkable, bit of ephemera: a self-published memoir by a veteran of Hollywood studio orchestras. Christlieb is a member of an unjustly neglected breed; no one who attends a film-score recording session can fail to be impressed by the astonishing skill and professionalism of the musicians who labor, anonymous and unseen, to perform the music heard in Hollywood films. Christlieb's literary effort is, by his own admission, amateurish; yet through his calm recitation of anecdotes and memories, he manages to convey the peculiar combination of joy and cynicism so common among members of the film industry.
Christlieb's career spanned entire eras of filmmaking, and his list of credits is staggering; his bassoon artistry can be heard in Gone with the Wind (1939), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Fantasia (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), Laura (1944), North by Northwest (1959), Camelot (1967), Planet of the Apes (1968), and Star Wars (1977). This career brought him into contact with the giants of film music and with some other major figures in and out of twentieth-century music. (In one of his most charming anecdotes, Christlieb relates an encounter with Albert Einstein.) This remarkable perspective - the history of film music from the inside out, so to speak - makes the stylistic awkwardness easily tolerable.
Christlieb's approach, after a brief biographical sketch, is simply to recount the names of composers, orchestrators, and instrumentalists he has encountered and to provide a few reminiscences of each. The text is rich with personal detail; we learn that Franz Waxman was "small in stature, scholarly in appearance" (p. 23), and that the youthful John Williams had a "pink, cherub-like face" (p. 49). Christlieb's portrayals are warm and sympathetic - even notoriously difficult people such as Bernard Herrmann are treated with affection - and his anecdotes are revealing and often witty.
Christlieb includes a brief selection of photographs, his own drawings of several film composers, and some text and diagrams relating to his research into the bassoon and reed making. He also provides a list of the film credits of some of the composers, conductors, and orchestrators he played under; although more complete composer credits are available in other sources, Christlieb's filmographies for conductors Emil and Lionel Newman and orchestrator Arthur Morton are particularly welcome.
This book, like anything self-published, will undoubtedly find its way into few libraries, yet scholars of film music can ill afford to ignore it. The details of Hollywood studio culture that Christlieb has so lovingly recorded - details available nowhere else - will be bobbing to the surface of books on film music for decades to come.
H. STEPHEN WRIGHT Northern Illinois University
COPYRIGHT 1999 Music Library Association, Inc.
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