subscribe to this pagemarch for opening credits, military and sober (Broekman). diegetic music sung or whistled by characters. German volunteers sing patriotic songs. (Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music, 1990, p. 10).
According to Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music (1990, p. 12):
uses passages from Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Schubert during opening credits and scene in concert hall.
Call#: Van Pelt Library ML2075 .F448 1989
Fred Steiner, "What Were Musicians Saying About Movie Music During the First Decade of Sound? A Symposium of Selected Writings," 81-107.
Most frequently written about topics 1930-39 were "nature of film music and its integration with the other elements of cinema, problems of form and style, the status of the composer and his relationship with the film director, the attitudes of directors and producers toward music, the quality of current film scores, the opportunities for composers, and the pitfalls that might await them." (84) This selection focuses on functional and theoretical aspects and excludes "historical and biographical writings, discussions of composition methods or orchestration, special topics such as musicals and filmed opera, technical matters such as studio routine, recording and microphone technique, and, with a few exceptions, reviews of film scores." (84)
Darius Milhaud had written origianl scores for silent films, one of first to write about musical situation in earliets days of sound film.
Herman Closson in "The Case Against Gebrauchsmusik," Modern Music, 7/2, 15-19 (1930) discusses problem "It sometimes happens in the movies that the music suddenly asserts its rights, taking one away from the visual images into a blind world of sound." further mentions symphonic poem as regressive, mistakes of program music, hazardous impressionism.
Raybould, Britich composer for documentary films, complains of sound quality, banjo, plucked string and saxophone comee off ok but "There has as yet ben no film recording of an orchestra, or even a part of one, to my knowledge which can stand comparison with the standard tonequality of the best gramophone records." 1933 in Sight and Sound.
Virgil Thompson "To break the music with every shot or change of scene is an error and ineffective." MM: 188, 1933. echoed in coming years by Antheil, Calvocoressi and Sabaneev. problem of musical form/unity vs. visual/narrative variety.
Constant Lambert, British compower and conductor in book Music Ho! (1934): In spite of its ephemeral nature it is the only art whose progress is not at the moment depressing to watch...Films have the emotional impact for the twentieth century that operas had for the nineteenth. Pudovkin and Eisenstein are the true successors of Mussorgsky, D.W. Griffith is our Puccini, Cecil B. DeMille our Meyerbeer and Rene Clair our Offenbach. (260)
Maurice Jaubert, French composer of film music, and interesting character. "Into the raw materials of cinema - which acquire artistic meaning only from their relations to one another - music brings an unreal element which is bound to break the rules of objective realism...All its power of suggestion will serve to intensify and prolong that impression of strangeness, of departure from photographic truth, which th director is seeking." ("Music on the Screen" in Footnotes to Film, ed. Charles Davey, 1937, p. 109)
Hollywood composers Herbert Stothart (in Behind the Scenes, ed. Stephen Watts, 1939) and Ernst Toch (Modern Music 13/2, 1936) believed sound film could bring good music to "the masses." (102)
David Raksin's article "Holding a Nineteenth Century Pedal at Twentieth Century-Fox" an engaging tale of film scoring c. 1938.
Seven D. Wescott's "Miklos Rozsa's Ben-Hur:The Musical-Dramatic Function of the Hollywood Leitmotiv" a detailed blow-by-blow analysis.
Kalinak, "Mas Steiner and the Classical Hollywood Film Score: An Analysis of the Informer"
Rosar, "Stravinsky and MGM"
borrows from Johann Strauss (waltzes) during shots of hotel's main floor. Rachmaninoff love theme, jazz for Kringelein's liberation. Music separate from dialogue. (Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music, 1990, p. 13).
There is in fact copious underscoring of dialogue with music.
The ballerina's manager, lamenting the empty house, says after this he will do no more dancing, just jazz.
With the entrance of the maid into the ballerina's room (34:25) pop-jazz-dance music starts. It continues during the entrance of several more people, a subtlely comic sequence. When the ballerina returns and her manager dumps her the music turns briefly minor, ominous. A muted trumpet solo accompanies the ballerina's undressing. It stops when she exits the frame in the nick of time not to expose herself. There are then some moments of silence as the baron takes his gloves off. Then music reenters with the ballerina, this time Russian-flavored accompanying her phone call. It smoothely transitions into pop-dance music and continues quite incompatibly with her desperate monologue and the baron's intervention, and continues to the end of the scene with some nuances changes appropriate to the dialouge (end 42:46).
Sign for American Bar Jazz Band at 57:45.
1:39 - "The music has stopped. How quiet it is tonight. It was never so quiet in the Grand Hotel."
Innovative concentration of (7) stars in one film.
Novel (Menschen im Hotel) first translated to broadway. Also Vitaphone musical comedy picture Nothing Ever Happens (1933).
Call#: Van Pelt Library Ormandy Music and Media Center Naxos 8557700 CD
"Oriental" theme by drummer in street and native singer. Foreign Legion represented by marches as soldiers leave and return. waltz at high society party. "What Am I Bid for My Apples" symboizes heroine's sordid past. (Darby and Du Bois, American Film Music, 1990, p. 9-10).
Call#: Van Pelt Library ML3795 .K82 1996