Raise A Glass

Happy Birthday, Jerry Goldsmith.

Last year I lamented that it's sometimes still difficult to accept that there would never be another new Goldsmith score. The last twelve months, though, have seen a flood of releases of Goldsmith scores in expanded or previously unreleased form that amounts to an embarrassment of riches, including:

The Boys from Brazil
Cain's Hundred (t.v. series from the early 1960s)
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
Freud
I.Q./Seconds
In Harm's Way
Innerspace
Islands in the Stream
Lonely are the Brave
One Little Indian
Rent-A-Cop
Sebastian (with additional music by Tristram Cary)
Twilight Zone: The Movie

The Pikey will let me know if I've forgotten anything. Most of these I haven't been able to acquire (legitimately) due to the lack of necessary funds but they're out there in one form or another and will be for awhile so I'm not too worried about it. The Pikey and I have discussed how it's quite likely that, at this rate, nearly all of Goldsmith's scores will be available commercially in the next few years. And why not, when there are folks like me clamoring for the stuff?

One score in particular that I'm looking forward to the prospect of is that of an early John Frankenheimer film called Seven Days In May, a taut political thriller wherein a cabal of generals threatens to overthrow the president because he supports nuclear disarmament. Goldsmith chose to score the film using only pianos and percussion and with typical sparse spotting. I think the score totals less than 30 minutes.

So there it is. Once again we mark the anniversary of the birth of the great Jerry Goldsmith.

Okay, so I'm not crazy

Well, maybe a little bit, but not about this.

During the presentation of the Cecile B. DeMille award to Martin Scorsese at the Golden Globes they played a montage of clips from all of his films. It ended, naturally, enough, with scenes from his upcoming Shutter Island. Under the scenes from Shutter Island I heard something familiar. A bass line and rising chromatic figure that I knew all too well. I actually backed it up just to make sure I'd heard it correctly. Yep, there it was. Plain as day. The passacaglia from the Penderecki Third Symphony. I immediately became intrigued and found that there was no composer credit for the film. Apparently Scorsese uses all found music for this particular film. People who know his films know that this isn't anything new and that he oftentimes treats the original scores composed for his films in a similar manner.

Anyway, the list of works/composers is actually pretty damned impressive. Penderecki, Giacinto Scelsi, John Adams, Ingram Marshall, Ligeti, Morton Feldman, Lou Harrison and others.

Check out the track listing for the soundtrack to Shutter Island.

Ahhh, New Music

I had a piece premiered this last Friday afternoon at the Missouri Music Educators Association meeting. (Osage Beach is so lovely this time of year. Except not.) Anyway, I wrote a brief Magnificat a few months back and the choir that gave its premiere did a really great job with it; especially considering it's a difficult piece (so I'm told). It's only about two-and-a-half minutes but it has a great deal of rhythmic complexity which was fun to work out. Many folks were very complimentary of the piece and much to my surprise several even expressed interest in performing it. So that's nice. Hopefully soon I'll figure out a way to embed the piece here on the old blog. I guess I need to get me one of those website thingies.

Interestingly, no one asked why I only set the first two lines of the Magnificat text.