Continuing music selections from the films of James Cameron, who just turned 70 last month, we have a brief suite from True Lies. This movie answers the thought experiment of “What if James Cameron directed a James Bond movie?” Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an American spy who maintains a boring family life by day (his wife and kid don’t even know he’s a spy) but does dangerous spy-shit by night (well, kind-of, he has a boring job where the “travels a lot”). But as he enters his most dangerous mission ever, his wife and kid suddenly become a part of the story. It’s a fun movie in its first and third acts, but act two is really hard to watch because there’s a weird subplot that has Arnold becoming convinced that his wife is having an affair or something so he sets up a bizarre sting operation to make her think she’s a spy and…it’s all very weird and honestly, not very comfortable to watch, to the point that when the movie’s main villain shows back up after having disappeared for 40 minutes, it’s almost a relief.
The score is by Brad Fiedel, who did the music for the Terminator movies. He’s not my favorite composer ever, but for a certain type of 90s action movie–say, the type directed by James Cameron–he’s fine. Here’s a short suite from True Lies.
I like it when I get in the car and hear just a few minutes of a piece with which I am unfamiliar, and then I either do a music search using Google’s listening and “ID a song” feature, or I take a quick photo of the name of the piece on the screen of my car’s stereo system, if the name is featured there. The problem is that I usually then forget about said piece of music until much later when I’m going through the Screenshots folder on my phone, or looking through my camera roll, and by that point I have no memory of the piece I listened to. So, over the next few weeks, I’m going to feature works that I “discovered” in this way!
We’re starting with a work by composer Jonathan Leshnoff. Leshnoff, based in Baltimore, is apparently a prolific composer whose work has been featured by many orchestras and ensembles in America, and yet, until I heard a few minutes of this particular piece, I’d not heard of him, to my knowledge. From his website:
Distinguished by The New York Times as “a leader of contemporary American lyricism,” GRAMMY-nominated composer Jonathan Leshnoff is renowned for his music’s striking harmonies, structural complexity, and powerful themes. The Baltimore-based composer has been ranked among the most performed living composers in recent seasons with performances by over 100 orchestras. He has received commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Kansas City, Nashville, and Pittsburgh, among others. Leshnoff’s compositions have also been premiered by classical music’s most celebrated soloists, including Gil Shaham, Johannes Moser, Manuel Barrueco, Noah Bendix-Balgley and Joyce Yang.
Of this particular piece, called Elegy, Leshnoff writes:
Elegy is scored for the unusual combination of horns, harp, timpani and strings. These instruments were selected for their darker color, a natural fit for this composition which is introspective and somber. Elegy is written in memory of the thousands of nameless people who suffered under oppression.
Writing a new composition for the Harmony from Discord series, I chose to musically depict these two contrasting moods with two contrasting ideas: a somber, dark theme that dominates the beginning of the work and a hopeful, brighter theme that is heard in the middle. Elegy starts with this lonely and contemplative theme first played by the violins and then slowly spreading throughout the string section, with the harp offering a haunting echo. After a brooding cadence, the hopeful theme is introduced in the horns. Full of moving lines and sweeping harmonies the music builds to a resounding climax, accompanied by the timpani grounding the ensemble in successive strikes. After a cascading cadence, the dark opening theme again returns, but this time, the hopeful theme intertwines itself with the darker theme, symbolic of the hope that has emerged through the dark, discordant eras of history. The piece notably ends on a major chord.
The piece seems initially reminiscent of Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings, though that comparison quickly falls by the wayside. Leshnoff’s work is less brooding and, I think, more meditative than the Barber piece, blending as Leshnoff indicates hopeful passages along with the darker ones and ending on a more peaceful note. Still, it is a very compelling work, and the odd instrumentation gives it a unique sound-world and emotional life.
Continuing a few weeks of featuring music from the films of James Cameron, who just turned 70 last month, we have a selection from a score I don’t like all that much for a movie I don’t all that much care for. It’s Aliens, his mega-hit from 1986 that was a thrill-packed sequel to the Ridley Scott original horror film. I know that my reaction to these movies is deeply contrary to the geek culture in which I grew up, but hey, we all diverge from the norm sometime. For me, the original Alien is effective once, and after that it’s basically like riding Space Mountain with the lights on, when you know the gross-out stuff is coming and you can anticipate the jump-scares. It also didn’t help that I never found myself caring about the characters.
Cameron did get me caring about the people in Aliens, so that’s props to him. This film, though, is for me something else; when you give me all flow and no ebb, I eventually check out. My feelings for this movie turn out to mirror Roger Ebert’s almost perfectly, so I’ll just quote his original review of the film:
It’s here that my nerves started to fail. “Aliens” is absolutely, painfully and unremittingly intense for at least its last hour. Weaver goes into battle to save her colleagues, herself and the little girl, and the aliens drop from the ceiling, pop up out of the floor and crawl out of the ventilation shafts. (In one of the movie’s less plausible moments, one alien even seems to know how to work the elevator buttons.) I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long; it’s like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops.
I don’t know how else to describe this: The movie made me feel bad. It filled me with feelings of unease and disquiet and anxiety. I walked outside and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was drained. I’m not sure “Aliens” is what we mean by entertainment. Yet I have to be accurate about this movie: It is a superb example of filmmaking craft.
As for James Horner’s score, it’s not marked by memorable themes much at all; there’s some moody stuff that mostly mirrors the Khachaturian ballet music used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then there’s a lot of very intense action music that’s mostly rhythm and not a whole lot of build. The best cue is probably the one titled “Bishop’s Countdown”, so here it is. Sorry for my lack of enthusiasm, but I don’t think any artist has ever hit ’em all out of the park for me; after all, George Lucas did make More American Graffiti.
Luigi Cherubini is a composer with whom I am almost completely unfamiliar, except by reputation…and that reputation is via the impressions left behind by another composer with whom I am very familiar. Unfortunately for Cherubini, that composer is Hector Berlioz, who found Cherubini a conservative and pedantic obstacle in his youthful efforts to pursue his own philosophies of music and composition during his time at the Paris Conservatoire.
Now, how accurate Berlioz’s feelings about Cherubini might have been is an open question, as frankly is how accurate Berlioz’s depictions of those feelings in his Memoirs might have been. It seems likely that the two were in fact in conflict, and that Cherubini did in fact find this young and arrogant composer-in-waiting too brash and his music too harsh and unfocused. Those charges are not entirely unfair, after all, when one has listened to the early output of Berlioz, and when one has read a bit about the details of his life.
Cherubini was essentially a classicist, living as he did during the shift from music’s Classical era into the Romantic, and he is one of those figures who is not performed a great deal today, perhaps a bit unfairly; if his music presents certain challenges to contemporary ears, there is still reward to be found within, as Cherubini’s Classical influence can still be detected in Berlioz, who for all his bombast still preferred a degree of balance in his eruptions (Berlioz loved Gluck, for example), and surely a composer shouldn’t be relegated to second-rate status if he was counted as an influence by the likes of Beethoven and Rossini.
Cherubini’s opera-ballet Anacreon premiered in 1803 (the year of Berlioz’s birth!), whereupon it was greeted with complete indifference. The work failed utterly, likely due to the story (about the love life of a Greek poet) being completely out of style at the time, and from what I can tell, the work was pretty much forgotten entirely until the 1970s when it was finally recorded. The overture, however, did survive, being praised by many composers (including Berlioz!) and basically being one of the few pieces to keep Cherubini’s name alive into the 21st century. The overture is thrilling and lyrical in the best “classical” way (meaning in the manner of the Classical era), and listening to it now I find myself slotting it, stylistically, into exactly where it goes: between, say, the overtures of The Magic Flute and Der Freischutz. Chronologically, that’s pretty much where it falls, too.
Here is the Overture to Anacreon by Luigi Cherubini.
In honor of James Cameron’s 70th birthday–which was just a couple weeks ago–I’m going to share some selections from the scores to his movies over the next few weeks. I’ll start with my favorite Cameron film, the often overlooked The Abyss, which kinda-sorta takes Close Encounters of the Third Kind and puts it underwater, with some Cold War subtext and the paranoid military turned up to 11. It’s a riveting film that I haven’t seen in quite a few years, so maybe I should see if I can track it down…meanwhile, here is a short suite from the film’s score, by Alan Silvestri. And I’ll have more to say about Cameron over the next few weeks.
Leonard Bernstein was born 106 years plus two days ago, on August 25, 1918. Oddly, I’ve never written much about him here, have I? I really should change that one of these days…maybe after I finally get Maestro off the “to-be-watched” queue…but for now, I feature a symphonic suite Bernstein culled from the score he wrote for the Eliz Kazan-Marlon Brando film On the Waterfront.
I’ve actually never seen On the Waterfront, for various reasons (I have to admit a distaste for Kazan owing to his naming names for HUAC, but mostly it’s that I’ve just never got ’round to it), but this symphonic suite is a fine work, pieced together into a single cohesive work from a score that Bernstein found frustrating to create: a film score is, by its nature, a subservient piece of music, and Bernstein was never one to easily suffer the pushing of music into the background. In his writings, Bernstein’s attitude toward film music does not seem to have been particularly positive, but his one attempt at film work resulted in a very fine American tone poem.
Here is the Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront by Leonard Bernstein.
There is an orchestra in Prague that specializes in concert performances of film music. I did not know this! It is called, appropriately enough, the Prague Film Orchestra, and they have a YouTube that is loaded with their performances. Here is one of them: a bit of Ennio Morricone, from Once Upon a Time in the West. I don’t know much about this film at all, but I do know that the Morricone score for it is highly regarded, even among Morricone’s general output. The setting is also interesting for this performance: it looks like they literally set up camp on the set of a movie musical to perform this.
I get asked all the time: “Hey, when you were a young musician, what was the first Sousa march you ever played?”
[RON HOWARD NARRATOR VOICE: This is false. Nobody asks him this.]
OK, fine, but anyway: when I was in 7th grade, and in the Junior High Band (consisting of 7th and 8th graders), we played a march by Sousa called The Free Lance. I assume that we played an arrangement for young players, but I may be wrong on that score. I don’t remember much of the music from the march at all, except for one segment halfway through which turns out to be notable because the march starts in one time signature, 6/8, and shifts to 2/4 halfway through. Also, the structure is slightly different, with three strains before the Trio.
The Free Lance March is a repurposing of melodies that Sousa wrote for an earlier operetta, also called The Free Lance. Sousa is known as a prolific composer of marches for wind band, but he was more prolific even than that: among his large non-march output were fifteen operettas, none of which are much heard today, but which were generally well-received in his lifetime. From what I’ve read, Sousa was influenced greatly by Gilbert and Sullivan, and he featured their music in his own concerts and even used some of their themes in his own marches and other works. While Sousa’s name lives on because of his marches, including the immortal Stars and Stripes Forever, he was a great deal more than that.
Longtime readers will recognize (I hope!) the name of Russian composer Vasily Kalinnikov, who was a deeply gifted composer who seemed destined to rise to towering greatness in late Russian Romanticism had he not sadly died of tuberculosis when he was just 35. His extant works reveal a powerful dramatic voice and a commanding gift of lyricism, and I firmly believe that had he lived, he would form a trio of late Russian greats with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Alas…but the works he left behind are wonderful and they really should be better known.
An amusing note here: I figured, as I listened to this piece on Sunday morning over coffee, that I’ve almost certainly featured it before, and indeed I have: almost six years ago to the day. Well, here it is again: The Cedar and the Palm, a symphonic picture. This is passionate and evocative music that seems every bit at home with Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, and all the other late 19th century Russian greats. Enjoy!
Sometimes you just need a bit of Bach, so…here’s a bit of Bach. This is Hillary Hahn, playing the third movement of the Partita No. 3 in E Major.
This is very likely the first work of Bach’s that I got to know fairly well, thanks to its prominent use in one of the most memorable segments from Carl Sagan’s teevee show Cosmos. Bach’s immortal combination of simple beauty and logic of the utmost rigor somehow forms the perfect aural backdrop for the tale of all of life on Earth.
