Frank Skinner at Universal, part 2

In a previous post I wrote: "Skinner worked to formula in a musical style that was the lingua franca for Hollywood in the 1930s but had begun to sound a bit old-fashioned when paired with high-quality widescreen image tracks in the 1950s. His music for action scenes (sword fights, battles, etc.), in particular, sounds dated, as if it were stock music taken from 1930s B-films."

Although the generalization stands -- one need only compare Skinner's scores with contemporaries such as Alex North (examples: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or The Misfits) or late-career masters like Franz Waxman (Spirit of St. Louis) to get the point -- the specific statement about music for action scenes needs qualification. Under Joseph Gershenson, who had been a producer but became music department head in 1949, Universal maintained the practice of collaborative scoring much longer than did other studios. This was by no means always the case, especially later in the 1950s (except for the title song, for example, Skinner wrote all the underscore for Written on the Wind), but even when one composer wrote most of the music, action scenes were often scored by someone else -- or drawn from Universal's large music library, whose holdings stretched back to the mid-1930s.

Action scenes were particularly prone to being shunted off to someone other than the principal composer because they were almost always generic -- that is, they rarely involved thematic material from the film; they were there to increase excitement and tension. Furthermore, unless there was some reason for close synchronization, most any "hurry" would do -- then, pulling something out of the library often made sense and also saved time (hurries are note-heavy) and money (especially if a recording could be re-used).

You can get information about a film's music from Clifford McCarty's Film Composers in America: A Filmography, 1911-1970 (2d ed., 1999) -- he made a thorough study of studio cue sheets, conductor scores, and other archival sources. His results, however, don't always match those given on IMDb, whose information about music seems to be taken mostly from the databases of rights organizations like ASCAP and BMI.

A simple example: McCarty credits Skinner and Hans Salter for the music to The Rawhide Years (they do both receive screen credit), but IMDb adds Eric Zeisl as composer of "stock music, uncredited." Zeisl's name appears in the ASCAP records for the film.

An example of collaborative work and re-use: Herman Stein received screen credit for The Unguarded Moment. McCarty lists Henry Mancini under "additional composition." ASCAP has an entry for Mancini but also one for Skinner. Stein's theme for the film was re-used in Imitation of Life (Skinner) and two of Mancini's cues were re-used in The Tattered Dress (also Skinner). In both cases, I took the information from the studio cue sheets.

Frank Skinner at Universal

Frank Skinner's career at Universal spanned nearly thirty years, from 1938 to 1966. The composer did yeoman's work, as did others ranging from Hans Salter in the '30s to Henry Mancini in the '50s, under the music department's head, Joseph Gershenson. Like Paramount, but unlike Warner Bros., orchestral underscore for a film was often a group job, for which Gershenson alone received screen credit for music supervision.

I am currently finishing up a project to digitize more than 60 films for which Skinner himself composed an orchestral underscore. The films are mostly from the late 1940s through about 1960, VHS dubs from television a decade or so back, when the American Movie Channel (AMC) was still showing a large number of Universal-International films without commercial breaks. A majority, unfortunately, are in widescreen format that has been reduced by pan-and-scan, but AMC clearly had access to excellent prints and, apart from the formatting changes, image and sound track quality are quite acceptable, even when passed through television and VHS to mpg files.

Skinner worked to formula in a musical style that was the lingua franca for Hollywood in the 1930s but had begun to sound a bit old-fashioned when paired with high-quality widescreen image tracks in the 1950s. His music for action scenes (sword fights, battles, etc.), in particular, sounds dated, as if it were stock music taken from 1930s B-films. On the other hand, his main title cues stand out as remarkably tuneful: Skinner often gives a perfunctory nod to the clichéd opening maestoso, then quickly drops into a soaring melody whose style may or may not be directly related to the film's setting or story. These tunes are generally too intense ("heavy") to be associated with the female lead--they typically recur in dramatic emotional situations between the principal male and female characters. In that sense, one might say, they mark an advance on the 1930s-era two-part main title cue. (See HtM, chapter 6, for discussion of the design of establishing sequences.)

Week 1 lectures (2010)

This post was ported from the defunct blog Hearing the Movies II. These are Jim's description of class lectures and activities for the beginning of spring semester 2010. Later entries can be found under the "pedagogy" tag.

I used the following examples for my first week of lectures, which were keyed to Ch. 1 of Hearing the Movies:

I started with the scene from Catch Me If You Can (2002), discussed in the introduction to Part 1 (pp. 1-3) and again in Ch. 1 (pp. 7-8). I played the scene twice, with class discussion after each viewing. We then did a masking exercise, using the Second Botched Meeting sequence from Sleepless in Seattle, discussed on pp. 20-25. We first watched the sequence with no sound, and I had the students talk about what sort of sound they expected and why. We then watched the sequence with sound.

The second class—my class meets twice a week, 75 minutes for each class—we started with a masking exercise using the same scene from Sleepless, this time reversing the procedure, beginning by masking the image and then watching the sequence with image and sound. I led the class in discussion after each.

We then worked with part of the Waterloo Station sequence from The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), starting again with a masking exercise: first, no image (we did this twice); then, no sound track; then both together. In this case I divided the students into three groups and had the first group concentrate on the dialogue, the second group on the music, and the third on the effects. I instructed the first group to note the number and type of voices as well as tempo and dynamic of delivery; the second group to note the basic mood, tempo, dynamic and instrumentation for major points of change; and the third group to identify sound source or to describe sound as best as they could. I thought this example worked exceptionally well, and I would recommend the example.

The third example came from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), discussed on pp. 11-12. Here, I had the students discuss the five types of music in the sequence and how they differed in narrative function: 1. the atmospheric music as Frodo awakens (this music also appears at the very beginning of the film over the New Line Cinema logo); 2. the "mythic" music accompanying Gandalf's flashback; 3. pastoral music accompanying the appearance of Sam; 4. enchanted vocal music for Rivendell; 5. pastoral music accompanying appearance of Bilbo.

The final example was simply a viewing of Boston Common Scene from Good Will Hunting (1997), pp. 25-30. 

Masking Exercise

Here is a quotation from Dimitri Tiomkin that could serve to introduce the masking exercise:

To comprehend fully what music does for movies, one should see a picture before the music is added, and again after it has been scored. Not only are all the dramatic effects heightened, but in many instances the faces, voices, and even the personalities of the players are altered by the music.

Source: Dimitri Tiomkin, "Composing for Films," Films in Review 2.9 (1951): 21. (The full article runs pp. 17-22.)

Administrative Post

I've just discovered a stash of emails that were sent to the link on the site here. This spring and summer, Google has been transferring the accounts associated with the site, and during that transition, some emails seem not to have arrived immediately. I have now answered all the emails that have appeared in the inbox. If you have sent a message and not received a reply, please resend your inquiry.

We apologize for the confusion.

Studio Scene

A little self-deprecating humor from The Score, the official newsletter of the American Society of Music Arrangers.

Image Source: The Score, 2.7-8 (1945) (PDF).

Marlin Skiles Says...

The American Society of Arrangers and Composers has posted PDFs to four volumes of The Score, the organization's newsletter, from the late 1940s. At the time, the organization claimed membership by the prominent orchestrators and arrangers working in Hollywood. The following, short article by composer and arranger Marlin Skiles is typical of the materials to be found in the newsletter

Among the subscribers to THE SCORE, there are undoubtedly many people who wonder just how the arranger functions in the music profession. Consequently, I think it would be well to give a description of just what the arranger's place is in musical society.

Most of our popular music is written for voice with piano accompaniment. As there are many mediums of performance other than vocal, it is necessary then to have this music transcribed, or re-written so that it is possible to perform it in another manner.

This is the arranger's job. Every time a piece of popular music is performed in any other version than that of voice and piano, an arrangement or orchestration has to be made for the particular way it is to be performed.

The arranging profession came to the fore with the advent of the jazz era, and it is a singularly unique American development. It is a definite expression of the American way of life, caused by the desire for individualism, variety and the demand for something new and different.

A competent arranger is expected to be, among other things, an excellent musician, a clever "idea" man, an inventor of new styles or patterns, and a composer of sorts. He is supposed to shun the thought of imitating any previously employed devices in his idiom.

This, of course, is quite an assignment, and it is remarkable that so many thousands of music writers in this country pass the test. The arranger has become as necessary to our present popular music production as the mouthpiece is to the wind player or the bow to the fiddler.

It can truthfully be said that without the arranger, easily 80 per cent of our popular songs would never have been written. This estimates the percentage of popular songwriters who cannot so much as write their own melodies.

Hence jazz itself would never have risen above the cacophonous state in which it was born, had not the arranger appeared on the scene.

Source: "Marlin Skiles Says," The Score 1.3 (March 1944), 1. (Link is to PDF.)
Image source: Color masthead was excerpted from the cover posted here.