The complete idiot's guide to classical music (47 page)

During World War II, North became a captain in the Army, and oddly enough, it was here that he started on the yellow brick road to Hollywood, scoring more than 25 documentary films for the Office of War Information. His interests were still centered on concert music, though, and after the war, he wrote “Revue,” a clarinet concerto that was premiered by Benny Goodman, with Leonard Bernstein conducting. He also wrote several children’s pieces on commission from the New York Philharmonic, two Cantatas, and his First Symphony.

Called upon by director Elia Kazan to write background music for his film edition of Tennessee Williams’
A Streetcar Named Desire
—over the objections of the Warner Brothers Music Department who looked upon North as an inexperienced outsider—the composer established himself as a major creative artist on the Hollywood scene. He innovated the use of jazz, played by a stage band, within the context of a classically oriented score, and created instrumental leitmotifs that emphasized the dramatic impact of the action. Blanche du Bois’ torment is identified with the plaintive and sensuous alto sax; the faraway tingling of a celesta suggests her lessening grip on reality.

North considered his forte to be intimate drama and character development. His skills were evident in his music for
Death of a Salesman
(1951) and another Williams play,
The Rose Tattoo
(1955), but he didn’t shy away from such literate spectaculars as
Spartacus
(1960),
Cleopatra
(1963), and
The Agony and the Ecstasy
(1965). One of North’s greatest frustrations was that his score for
2001: A Space Odyssey
was discarded in favor of Strauss’ “Blue Danube” and other classical snippets (North later resurrected the lost music for use in his Third Symphony); one of his final achievements, in 1988, was the remarkable score for
Good Morning, Vietnam
.

All in all, Alex North wrote music for more than 60 pictures. In the inscrutable Hollywood manner, he was nominated for Academy Awards 15 times, but came home empty-handed until 1986, when he received a special Lifetime Achievement Oscar. “It is the genius of Alex North to convey an emotion to the audience,” said the great director John Huston, who had collaborated with the composer on a number of pictures, among them
The Misfits
and
Prizzi’s Honor
. Sadly, North’s many orchestral, choral, and chamber pieces still await significant performances and recordings; as long as there are movie channels, however, his music will continue to sound forth around the world.

Born in 1922 and following the now-familiar trail from classical conservatory to film studio, Elmer Bernstein (pronounced “steen,” as opposed to Leonard Bern “styne”) graduated from the Juilliard School, and dabbled in dance before deciding to cast his lot among the Hollywood composers. When you’re the new kid on the block, you’ll take any assignment that comes along, and what came along first for Bernstein was
Robot Monster
, one of those sci-fi B-movies that used to be a great lure for teenagers on their first dates. Two years later, in 1955, came a biggie—
Man with the Golden Arm
, starring Frank Sinatra as a heroin-addicted jazz musician trying to kick the habit—and the year after that, Bernstein graduated from the seedy to the sublime, with his richly orchestrated music to one of Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical sagas,
The Ten Commandments.

Soon, Bernstein’s versatility was known throughout the industry and he was pegged for films as diverse as the pulse-pounding
The Magnificent Seven
(1960), the poignant and intimate
To Kill a Mockingbird
(1962), and the action-packed
The Great Escape
(1963). Elmer Bernstein won his only Oscar for
Thoroughly Modern Millie
in 1967, and when his elaborate orchestrations seemed a bit out of place in the film directions of the 1970s, he responded with a parody of his own style in
Animal House
(1978), adding further to his comedic total with appropriately wacky scores for
Airplane!
(1980) and
Ghostbusters
(1984). His more recent cinematic achievements added terror to
Cape Fear
(1991) and romantic warmth to
Rambling Rose
(1992).

Is there anybody over the age of six who hasn’t flown with Superman, gasped at
Jaws,
or rooted for E. T. to call home? What desert island do you come from if you haven’t gone with the Force in
Star Wars,
or wondered at
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
? What all these films have in common, aside from being box-office bonanzas, is that they boasted music by John Williams. The venerable Royal Academy of Music in London has a strict dress code, but when this proudly American composer was awarded honorary membership, one guest came dressed as Darth Vader; another arrived wearing a shark costume. Were they turned away? Of course not.

 
Important Things to Know
Along with the films mentioned earlier, the Williams touch—sweeping themes, lush orchestrations (heavy on the brasses) and throbbing climaxes—enlivened such other film adventures as
Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back,
and
Return of the Jedi.

Born in New York (1932), where his father was a film studio musician, John Williams became a well-rounded musician himself. He learned to play trumpet, clarinet, and trombone, studied piano with the legendary Rosina Lhevinne at the Juilliard School, then took composition lessons from Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco when the family moved to Los Angeles. He put his feet into the cinematic waters gingerly at first, transcribing other people’s music for films and TV; then, after winning an Oscar in 1971 for his arrangements and conducting in
Fiddler on the Roof,
he moved over into important composing assignments.

The man who won an Oscar for the jagged suspense of
Jaws
and the soaring, full-throated ecstasy of
Superman
would seem to have been an unlikely choice for
Schindler’s List,
Steven Spielberg’s harrowing, heartbreaking, and ultimately inspiring chronicle of death and life during the Holocaust. Genius cannot be cubby-holed, however, and Williams provided a score at once powerful, understated, and totally in keeping with the serious theme of this extraordinary film.

Speaking of noncubby-holes, even while he was producing this long list of film scores, John Williams was also busy in the concert arena, writing two symphonies, concertos for flute and violin, a number of chamber pieces, and for more than a dozen years, starting in 1980, he succeeded Arthur Fiedler as music director of the Boston Pops.

Every action has a reaction, we learned in high school, and when the bubble of super romanticism burst in the first part of the 20th century, composers made their reactive moves in different directions. Stravinsky went one way, Schoenberg another, and—sad to say—many audience members went a third. Finding themselves out of the listening loop, as it were, their comfort level challenged by pieces that were dissonant or otherwise difficult to grasp, they simply said no to a lot of the music being written in their time, contenting themselves with the cultural riches of earlier generations. Composers kept writing new works, but they were applauded largely by other composers and guardians of the academic trust. The lines of communication were badly damaged between the creators of music and their audiences, and some composers decided to do something about it.

Again, their remedies took divergent paths. Some returned to warmly lyric writing more often associated with the 19th than the 20th century (“neo-romantics,” Jacob Druckman called them); others tried to provide a soothing alternative to the stresses and strains of modern life with a kind of wallpaperlike background music that came be known as “New Age.” Threading a tonal course between those two approaches were the composers called “minimalists” because they pared music down to its simplest, most basic ingredients, attempting to get the greatest effect from the least amount of input. A chord might be played over and over again until a slight variation unveils a new series of repetitions, or a single melodic or rhythmic phrase serves as a mantra, its reiterations and slowly unfolding digressions (theoretically) sending the listener into what Richard Jeffries called “a timeless universe of contemplation and inner peace.”

If you hear a chord over and over again, until a very slight variation establishes a new harmony, which then itself gets repeated many times, you’ve probably stumbled onto a minimalist piece. If a tune or a rhythmic phrase keeps coming at you like a sonic mantra—and you let yourself go with the flow instead of getting edgy at the monotony of it all—you may well find yourself drifting into a new dimension, entering, as Richard Jeffries so eloquently put it, “a timeless universe of contemplation and inner peace.” See you in the morning.

Steve Reich all but coined the term minimalism, but the inner peace he was seeking to convey can be traced back to the mystics of ancient days; it can be found in the hypnotic power of the Gregorian chants, the exotic gamelan (percussion) music of Bali, and other non-Western cultures. “In composing music,” Reich said, “it isn’t what you do, it’s how you do it. I find it basically impossible to separate the emotional and intellectual aspects of a piece of music.”

Born in New York City (1936), Steve Reich grew up in a musical family where jazz, show tunes, and the classics were in equally full supply. His own musical directions were further influenced by the drum lessons he took as a teenager from Roland Kohloff (later principal timpanist of the New York Philharmonic). “The combination of tastes for Stravinsky, Bach, and jazz,” he says, “coupled with my early training as a drummer, has persisted as a basic musical outlook in my compositions.”

Following his graduation from Cornell University (as a philosophy major), Reich studied at the Juilliard School with Vincent Persichetti and William Bergsma, and at Mills College with Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio. While those major composers instilled in him high knowledge and rigorous discipline, it was outside the mainstream that Reich’s distinctive personality would blossom. Non-Western forms and concepts, including repetitive rhythms, are an integral feature of his music. In 1970, Reich went to Ghana to study West African rhythms with a master drummer of the Ewe tribe; several years later, he was in Jerusalem, learning about traditional forms of Hebraic cantillations. He also evolved what he called “pulse music,” where sound patterns are created by the sounding of tones in and out of phrase with each other.

Finding that many artists had little or no knowledge of non-Western musical traditions, concepts and performing methods, Reich put together his own ensemble. Over the years, “Steve Reich and Musicians” have given us many many definitive recordings of his works; as for their concert performances, New Yorker critic Nicholas Kenyon summed them up as “an extraordinary experience: exhilarating, engrossing, hypnotizing, disorienting. . . .” Or, as the musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky puts it, “By rejecting the conventional way of music making, and thus infuriating the academics, Reich finds a direct avenue to the hearts, minds, and ears of the young.”

Don’t try to use Reich’s music as background, or have it on while you’re doing the dishes. It demands total concentration, preferably with dimmed lights and a glass of wine. You needn’t fear wild dissonances or jolting rhythms; this is music for contemplation, for the suspension of time; you have to immerse yourself into his very special sonic world, to share his karma, as it were. You can follow the creative unfolding of Reich’s musical style with “Drummings” (1970–71), “Music for a Large Ensemble” (1978), “Tehillim” (Psalms for voices and chamber orchestra, 1981), and “Different Trains” (1988). Then look into one of his most recent works, “The Cave,” a kind of multimedia oratorio piecing together sound and video samples taped here and in Israel, documenting varying interpretations of a story from the Bible.

Philip Glass is another of the minimalist composers who combines rhythmic cycles and other non-Western devices with repetition, stripping musical form down to its barest essentials, then letting those patterns play out in extended works, sometimes lasting as long as four hours.

 
Important Things to Know
Behavioral scientists have proved if certain areas of the brain are not stimulated in early childhood, they may never develop to their full potential. Kids who grow up with fine music around them—even if it’s only a mother’s lullaby or classical radio broadcasts providing playtime accompaniment—will often develop a lifelong love for music; conversely, youngsters whose only tonal encounters come from the screechings of a rock-and-roll boombox may forever be deprived of that enriching potential.