Herrmannesque moment of zen

From an (unpublished) interview with the wife of violinist Louis Kaufman…

Louis came home from a recording session on The Magnificent Ambersons, the first day and he was just enchanted with Bernard Herrmann who he’d met for the first time, who was the conductor and the composer of the score. Herrmann was very enthusiastic and he loved to talk to the orchestras about the things that he knew.

And that same night, I would say about 10:30, a knock on our front door, seemed unusual, we didn’t have many night callers. And Louis opened the door and there was Bernard Herrmann. He had rented a house that was not far from ours. He saw the lights on and he decided to come in. He said “I just wanted to tell you, Louis, you did a terrific job today. And I was walking around and I just thought I’d come in and tell you.” And he talked till about 2:00 in the morning. It was fascinating.

One of the things that he talked about - he ended up talking about space. The infinite sort of size of what the universe might be. And he made a simile, that was the last thing he was talking about. He said, “If an ant were in this room could imagine another room in the house, could it imagine there were other houses on the block, could it imagine there was such a thing as Los Angeles or Los Angeles County or the state of California, or that there were 50 other states, or that there was an Atlantic Ocean and a Pacific Ocean and there was Asia and there was South America,” and he said “We’re sort of like that. We can’t have any idea of the extraordinary size of the universe,” and he said “I think of that when I’m not happy about a performance or something goes wrong. I think it’s not awfully significant, it’s not worth getting all upset about, as I often do.”

What’s What’s new in your collection?

Maybe it’s the gender gap rearing its head, but I honestly cannot understand the appeal of this old mainstay of online film music conversation… “What’s new in your collection?”

I used to think these types of threads were for people to talk excitedly about their new acquisitions, but I obviously just don’t get it. They are simply meant to be raw lists, apparently. No descriptions are offered, nor required for this thread to satisfy. This seems to be some kind of important ritual. One collects in order to have, to amass, and to make that amassing known. Occasionally there is talk of shelving and organization.

It’s not as if the collectors are unable to articulately talk about the CDs themselves, but this is usually done in other topics. Never in “What’s New in Your Collection.” Strange.

The Family Stone

I fell in love with Michael Giacchino about 1/3 of the way through The Incredibles. Like my (metaphorical) ongoing love affair with Patrick Doyle, it happened in a theater. I hadn’t wanted to run out and buy an album from an unknown composer like that since… well, Dead Again. How else can a film music love affair start, but with notes in the dark? (It can happen to you!)

The admiration continues with The Family Stone. I guess I just like my composers confident, bold, full of dramatic turns of phrase, and able to make the very most out of a short cue. You know, having a pulse. I don’t understand how anyone could not hear through the spy-pastiches of The Incredibles and call it only that; to not discern the quick musical mind behind them, the effortless way the tropes were tossed off… It’s no wonder that Giacchino has distinguished himself as a TV composer as well as a game composer, and that in part, composed music is becoming fashionable again for TV because of popular shows like Alias and Lost. (I really can’t stand either show, by the way, but the music is distinctive.)

Giacchino, unlike so many other Hollywood-based composers, seems to like to use the whole orchestra in colorful, textured strokes when he really gets going. He also never spends too much time on one idea, which I love. He has lots of stuff in his dramatic and orchestrational bag of tricks and doesn’t hesitate to use them even in cues like “Try It On” and “Main Theme.” His style is quite distinctive (some of the slow and more reflective sections are indeed decidedly Lostlike, which is slightly not my style, but I really appreciate someone who’s got his own musical point of view).

It’s really frustrating that so many film music fans have no time for this kind of “lighter” score. These are actually the sort of scores that separate the mature composers from the rest of the pack, when they are done well; yet they are always ignored by the reviewers, who after all have so many action-adventure opuses to plow through. Anyhow, I give Giacchino my Not-Phoned-In Light Comedy-Romantic Score Award for the year. Very much looking forward to hearing more. (Oh, by the way, Lost is coming out on CD from Varese as well later this month.)