City Of Fairfax Band Goes Hollywood.

 

Conquest (Alfred Newman, 1901-1970). Alfred Newman was a child prodigy on piano. His youthful talent led virtuoso Jan Paderewski to arrange a recital for him in New York City. By age 12, he began playing in theaters and restaurants on a schedule that often had him playing five shows a day. At 13 he played the vaudeville circuit, billed as “The Marvelous Boy Pianist.” On the tour, he was sometimes allowed to conduct the orchestras, leading him to make conducting his career goal. By age 15, he was regularly conducting performances for matinees. By 19, he began conducting full-time, the start of a 10-year career on Broadway. Irving Berlin invited Newman to Hollywood in 1930 – and the rest is history. Newman’s work with Samuel Goldwyn’s studio led to his development as a towering figure in the history of film music. He won nine Academy Awards and was nominated 43 times. He was among the first musicians to compose and conduct original music during Hollywood’s Golden Age, later becoming one of the most respected and powerful music directors in the Hollywood history. Newman and his fellow composers Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin were regarded as the three godfathers of film music. In 1947 Newman composed the music for Captain From Castile, a historical adventure movie about the Spanish conquistadors. The score includes the famous Conquest March. (The march was adapted by the University Of Southern California as the official theme song for their sports teams, the USC Trojans.) The concert band arrangement ofConquestis by David Bennett. (Note adapted from wikipedia.org )

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Film Music from Titanic (James Horner, 1953 – ). James Horner was born in the USA (Los Angeles) but was in Britain as a child, studying at the Royal College of Music. Back in California, he received a bachelor’s degree in music from USC and a master’s from UCLA. Horner’s first major movie score was for the 1979 film, The Lady in Red. His work steadily gained notice in Hollywood, leading to larger projects. Horner’s breakthrough was in 1982, when he scored Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which established him as a mainstream Hollywood composer. Through the 1980s, he scored 48 Hours(1982), Krull (1983), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Commando( 1985), Cocoon (1985), Aliens (1986), Willow (1988), Glory (1989), and Field Of Dreams (1989). Horner’s greatest financial and commercial success came in 1997 with the film score for Titanic. The album became the best-selling primarily orchestral soundtrack in history, selling over 27 million copies worldwide. The movie won 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. James Horner took home two Oscars – for Best Original Dramatic Score, and for Best Original Song for “My Heart Will Go On” (with Will Jennings, who wrote the lyrics). The concert band arrangement by Calvin Custer features “Southampton,” “Take Her To Sea, Mr. Murdock,” “Hard To Starboard,” and “My Heart Will Go On.”

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Excerpts From Far and Away (John Williams, 1932 – ). John Williams created an expansive score for this 1992 feature film about an Irish immigrant couple seeking their fortune while heading west in 1890s America. It was the composer’s first movie collaboration with Ron Howard as film director. The narrative sweep of the film gave Williams an opportunity to write for several genres at once. The story has an obvious and significant Irish tilt, and Williams embellishes upon the the film’s ethnic elements with depth and beauty. The music also marked a return to Hollywood Western scores for Williams, who had written frontier adventure music for The Cowboys (1972) andThe Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973). Far and Away displays Williams’s special knack for generating distinct themes for particular dramatic situations in the film, with three major themes and an equal number of supporting motifs that uniquely enrich the on-screen drama. (Note adapted from filmtracks.com )

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Symphonic Suite From Jurassic World (Michael Giacchino, 1967 – ). Michael Giacchino was educated at Julliard in music and film production. His first major composition was for DreamWorks Studios for the video game adaptation of the 1997 movie Jurassic Park, The Lost World. That made him a natural choice for soundtrack composer for the 2015 revival of the Jurassic Park series, which needed a boost after several years on the back burner, not to mention the 2008 death of Jurassic Park author and creator Michael Crichton. To a degree, Giacchino approached Jurassic World’s music as a tribute to John Williams’s score for the original 1993 Jurassic Park feature film, making complex use of Williams’s chords, tone, orchestrations, and stylistic flourishes, in addition to introducing some new musical themes. Giacchino gained new admiration for his ability to work creatively, with tact and enthusiasm, within a style and tone established by all three earlier films that led up to Jurassic World. Regarding his score’s inclusion of material derived from John Williams, Giacchino said, “It was a really targeted approach as to where to where it would make the most sense and where would we most appreciate it, as fans ourselves.” The Jurassic World Symphonic Suite was arranged for concert band by Jay Bocock. (Note adapted from filmtracks.com )

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Colonel Bogey March (Kenneth J. Alford). The Bridge on the River Kwai cleaned up on Oscar night. Alec Guinness took home the Oscar for best actor. Besides that, the picture collected Academy Awards for Best Picture of 1957, for cinematography, film editing, writing, and directing, and for Best Score – an Oscar that went to the distinguished British composer Malcolm Arnold, whose scoring talents helped make the film such a success. The unforgettable tune whistled by the British POWs in the movie comes from the opening strain of a famous British military march that is still heard on armed service parade grounds throughout the world, “Colonel Bogey March” by Kenneth J. Alford (pseudonym of Major Fredrick Joseph Ricketts, Royal Marines, 1881-1945). Ricketts lied about his age so he could join the band of the Royal Irish Regiment in 1895. He continued in the army until 1927, when he was commissioned into the Royal Marines as a Director of Music. He retired in 1944 after nearly 50 years in uniform.

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Silverado (Bruce Broughton, 1945 – ). Film and television composer Bruce Broughton has written several highly acclaimed soundtracks over his extensive career, in addition to a number of instrumental solos and concert pieces for band, orchestra, and chamber ensembles. He is also a lecturer in composition at UCLA. Lawrence Kasdan’s 1985 motion picture production of Silverado marked a revival of Hollywood’s Western movie genre that lasted at least 10 years. Kasdan was able to assemble a remarkable ensemble cast by employing lead actors whose best years were still mostly ahead of them – Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Danny Glover, Brian Dennehy, and John Cleese. The story addresses nearly all the Western movie stereotypes, from rancher and sheriff disputes to outlaws who band together to defend frontier towns against violence and oppression. Silverado gave western movies a fresh new start, and the original score by Bruce Broughton was a big part of that, earning heavy accolades and an Academy Award nomination, and making Broughton a leading Hollywood voice for Western scores in the years ahead. The title piece was arranged for concert band by Randol Alan Bass. (Note adapted from filmtracks.com )

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Symphonic Suite From On The Waterfront (Leonard Bernstein, 1918-1990). Ranked 8th on the American Film Institute’s 100 all-time best American movies, On the Waterfrontalso ranks 22nd on the AFI’s list of the top American film scores. The music for On The Waterfront that Leonard Bernstein wrote during three months in Hollywood in 1954 was his one and only film score. (Other films using Bernstein’s music adapted it from pieces he had already written.) The trouble with movie music, Bernstein wrote, is that “it is a musically unsatisfactory for a composer to write a score whose chief merit ought to be its unobtrusiveness.” Lamenting the experience of the sound-editing studio, he described how the film composer “sits by, protesting as he can, but ultimately accepting, be it with heavy heart, the inevitable loss of a good part of his score. Everyone tries to comfort him. ‘You can always use it in a suite.’” So the next summer, that’s what Bernstein did, creating a stand-alone concert piece that develops the principal ideas from his film score into a finely integrated musical experience. The result is less a suite of separate movements than a single tone poem drawing on a technique of thematic transformation, beginning with a solo horn theme originally heard during the film’s opening credits. Mournful blues touches deepen the mood of a lonely city (Hoboken’s rundown dockyards), while the violent scenes are evoked by some of Bernstein’s most aggressive writing – a jazz mode that conveys nightmarish brutality instead of big-city exuberance. The suite’s emotional center is built on the score’s main theme (a variant of the opening horn solo), a characteristically yearning, widely spaced melody. After the violent music comes back, Bernstein transcends it with a glorious transformation which becomes an ode to the film protagonist’s defiant endurance. (Note adapted from kennedy-center.org )

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