Tall Guy
Forumsvar Lagt Inn
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Innlegg
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According to iTunes I have 18 different versions of “Jingle Bells” in my collection, including two by John Williams.
Including King Lear? That could be ten of them.
(Haven’t quite sorted out my feet yet when replying to posts…)
Many years ago I used to wake up to the CD of Once Upon a Time in America via a very boxy music centre. I no longer play it very much, as it makes me feel that I should pull on a cheap suit and drive to the office.
If you can bear another one (regret inviting me yet?), Yuri Gagarin sang Shostakovich’s song “My Homeland Hears” to the Soviet Space Centre on the inaugural orbital flight, making it the first space music.
Back to your topic, Mike Oldfield’s Killing Fields appears to fit.
I know you like odd detail, Thor, so Shostakovich is generally accepted as being the first composer to use a theremin in a score, for 1929’s “Odna” (“Alone”). At the time, he was 23 years old and the theremin was 10. It portrayed a snowy wasteland, and the score is on Naxos, as much brilliant Soviet era music is (see also their Weinberg releases).
Shostakovich’s film career stretched from 1927 (New Babylon) to 1971 (King Lear)- although in my opinion he should have been given a posthumous credit for Escape to Victory…
During that period, certainly up to Stalin’s death in 1953, almost everything any Soviet artist did in any genre could be described as propagandistic. If it didn’t follow the (sometimes wildly inconsistent) party lines, it either didn’t get done, or nothing further would be heard of that creator. Many of his almost forty film scores would fall into that category, being written simply to put food on the table during the various times he was classed as an enemy of the people.
After the Pravda denunciation of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, for instance, he withdrew his 4th symphony just before the premiere and worked on puff pieces to commemorate Lenin such as The Man With The Gun and The Great Citizen (parts one and two!) whilst building up to his rehabilitation with the fifth symphony. World War Two relieved the pressure somewhat, and with the Seventh Symphony and the various legends surrounding it Stalin realised his worth to the state and he was back in favour, at least tentatively.
His new found fame led to Dmitri Tiomkin’s adapting his music for Frank Capra’s The Battle of Russia in 1943, and Bernard Herrmann was approached to play the composer in a biopic, which failed due to Herrmann’s refusal to play “a cut-rate Shostakovich”.
Life for everyone got easier after Stalin, but Shostakovich was still prey to state demands for the rest of his life. You could look at the 11th and 12th symphonies as being propaganda, but he buried phrases in them that the audience would recognise as being symbolic of resistance. The 13th and 14th were song cycles wrapped up as symphonies using texts that could still have got him “disappeared”, even into the 1960s.
As you often find with Shostakovich, his public and private faces were very different when you look at his film scores. A great book on this is John Riley’s “Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film”, published in 2005 by I.B.Tauris.
Thor, I appear to have just added to that conversation, but only because I was looking back at earlier threads, not because you told me to… 🙂
Late to the party on this, but I’m sure I’ll be forgiven…
I was vaguely aware of the music from one or more Dollars films in the early 70s as a kid, including the 1972 album of an English rock band called Babe Ruth which included a cover of the main title from the first film. It’s easily found (and worth seeking out) on YT.
A few years later I picked up the budget Pickwick LP that others have referred to and played the grooves out of it. I think I bought it three times in all for various reasons. Then in (I think) 1976 I sent away for the 2-LP set “I Film Della Violenza”, and it blew me away. Why it’s never been released on CD is a complete mystery to me, but I’ve spent the last 50 years collecting the individual scores from which each track was taken.
The urban crime Morricones immediately took over from the Western Morricones (although I still love them of course) and Revolver, A Man to Respect(The Master Touch in the US), Wake and Kill, Milan Odia (Almost Human) and others became indispensable.
Scores I love from other genres include The Humanoid, Nostromo, Moses the Lawgiver, Orca Killer Whale, Exorcist 2, Frantic – too many to name. I enjoy the Giallo scores notwithstanding the amount of dissonance usually present, and in fact they led me to a fascination with that type of film to the point where I have over 100 on Blu-ray, only a fraction of them scored by Ennio.
I saw him at London’s O2 arena in 2015, a forty-year ambition realised.
Nick, the opportunity for being ignored on a cross-forum basis was what finally tipped the balance in favour of joining this group.
Congratulations on qualification, Thor. It’ll be great to see Leeds United fan Erling Haaland play on a big international stage.
England stormed through qualifying, with eight wins out of eight, no goals conceded. That said, I expect we’ll be flying home from the World Cup after the first knock-out game we have to play against a half-decent team.
Morricone has plenty of this type of music in his catalogue. As well as the genuinely spiritual stuff in his various scores to films about popes, the original “What Dreams May Come” and similar, you can find tangentially religious tracks in Moses the Law Giver and The Mission.
There’s also grotesquerie in The Temptress (Il Sorriso del Grande Tentatore) where liturgical chanting merges with hard rock and abstract jazz.
Thanks, Sigbjørn. Thor kept his jacket on at all times, so who knows…
Thor, I’ll try not to disappoint.
