The Uninvited and Stella by Starlight

Here is a suggestion for a project/assignment that a student with jazz background might undertake. Victor Young composed the standard "Stella by Starlight" for the film The Uninvited (Paramount, 1944). This theme is treated in a number of different ways in the film, and charting and analyzing them can lead productively to interpretation.

As part of the backstory:

What the student will immediately realize is that "Stella" is not a song—it's a piano composition that is often treated like a concerto. In fact, Young himself created a 5-minute piano concerto version and recorded it in 1945 for Decca, with whom he had a long-term contract. Even after lyrics were added by Ned Washington, a song version was published in 1946, and then recorded by several well-known singers, "Stella" didn't really catch on (it was always on the B-side of the record). It was after John Coltrane included it in an album that it really took off, but still mostly with jazz instrumentalists. The best known set of changes for "Stella" are by Miles Davis. An interesting part of the project might be to compare Young's original harmonies with Davis's version (hint, though: they're surprisingly similar).

On the Beach (1959)

As of March 20, 2024, the content of this post, including discussion of "Waltzing Matilda" and two suggestions for exercises, has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs. 

Harmony series 2, postscript

As of March 20, 2024, the content of this post, including an example of music from the main title sequence for Mildred Pierce (1945; this film is discussed in Chapter 8), has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs. 

Harmony series 2, bass/treble dissonance

TAs of March 20, 2024, the content of this post, including an example of music from the main title sequence for Casablanca, has been moved to a file published on the Texas ScholarWorks platform: Film Music: Some Posts from Blogs. 

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.)

Film Music in Concert Redux

This is a follow-up to the post on film music in symphony concerts. The November issue of Discover magazine (available now) has a short column-qua-ad on Star Wars: In Concert, currently touring North America after strong reviews for performances in the UK. The event combines live orchestral performances of music from the films with large-screen video montages, including some material of the sort that would probably be found in the "special features" section of a DVD. The tour's website is Star Wars: In Concert.

To Have and Have Not--additional comments

I have posted a music cue list for To Have and Have Not on the supporting materials page of the HtM website: Supporting Materials.

Two additional pedagogical comments about music:

1. Franz Waxman's music for the establishing sequence is built in a sharply defined two-part design, with a dramatic opening for main titles followed by a more melodically profiled and rhythmically robust "native music." The elements are similar to the main-title music for Casablanca, which in turn is a reworking by Max Steiner of his music that opens The Lost Patrol (1934). In its somewhat crude directness, the "native music" (that's what it's called in the studio cue sheet) is uncharacteristic of Waxman, and one has to wonder whether he was asked to write "something like Casablanca."

In Casablanca, a brief dramatic opening is followed immediately by "native" or "Arab" music, then by La Marseillaise. In The Lost Patrol, the opening is identical, but the end is a British military march. The three main title cues make for interesting comparison, and they provide an interesting instance of reuse as well as a case of style-topic duplication.

2. The second comment is about music as sound advance. The Hotel Martinique is the central and primary location of action in the film. Although even the basement is used at one point (to hide the injured resistance leader), the primary locations are the main floor restaurant-bar, a second-floor corridor and rooms, and the street outside the Hotel. Several times music from Cricket's band is heard before the scene changes to the restaurant-bar area, and the effect is very similar to sound advances that bridge more radical breaks in both time and place. The first example occurs after 00:11:00, with the entrance of "Martinique." (See earlier blog entries for more information about Hoagie Carmichael's music.)