Cinema (Hollywood) (1947)

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By LAWRENCE MORTON Arturo Toscanini (center) is explained the next camera set-up by Producer Irving Lerner (left) for the OWI film. Hymn of the Nations. "Hollywood" Music If it is true that music has powers to soothe the savage breast, one would think that it might have been employed more generally than it has for purposes of social therapy. Yet the Carnegie Halls from coast to coast service only a tiny segment of the population. Only the mass media of communication — films and radio — have been distributing this healing balm with largesse. But there is considerable doubt about its therapeutic value. Film music in particular is held suspect by its examiners. They warn against it as though it were a new patent drug attempting to evade the safety regulations laid down by the Federal Trade Commission. Such eminent doctors as Igor Stravinsky regard it as a mere placebo, as "primitive and childish" in concept. Other observers seem willing enough to tolerate it, if it will only take the trouble to be composed by Europeans like Prokofiev and Auric (they conveniently ignore the Lev Schwartzes of Russia and the Hubert Baths of Elstree) , or if it will confine itself to the modest fulfilment of its lowliest functions. But let it not try to break out of its functional frame, pretend to be Art. Art is strictly the business of the graduates of Juilliard and Curtis, or of the pupils of Hindemith and Boulanger. The defenders of film music, and there are many, answer quickly that so-called "serious music" has held itself economically and esthetically aloof. When it does come down into the market place, it keeps its price high and advertises for a restricted clientele. It has produced more snobs than geniuses, and it is a safe refuge for poseurs, mystics and conductors. Worst of all, it has submitted to the stewardship of the Judsons and Huroks and their retinues of stylish ladies, under whose auspices all decent people are relegated to sitting below the salt. This exchange of cordialities cannot be said to have produced any noticeable change for the better, either in the quality of film music or in the ethics of the concert hall. Both the cinema and the concert hall seem to be here to stay, and it would be to their mutual advantage to arrange some way of getting along together. The atomic bomb will not distinguish between them; in smithereens they will be identical. Meanwhile both are living in glass houses and they would do well to mend their manners or draw the blinds. One does not need to be a Peeping Tom to discover what goes on among these Montagues and Capulets of music. Most of the issues are plain, and, for the most part, insignificant. To begin with, film music is an interloper, and it made a bad choice in the selection of its birthplace. Hollywood has the reputation of being a cultural slum, and it appears that its inhabitants will never quite live down that ignominy, no matter how many Wilsons and Mice and Men are produced, fine musical scores written. Hollywood is too full of "copy" to be allowed to lapse into quiet respectability. Publicity agents and a press corps second only to those of Washington and New York make good livings by peering into every corner, reporting every scandal and every deal. Besides, censors and preachers and Congressional investigating committees like to keep the spotlight burning brightly enough to illuminate their apprehension of sex, sin and socialism. Of course, no one is obliged to pay any attention to the gossip and chatter emanating from Hollywood. The printed page can be turned as rapidly as the radio dial. But columnism, with its stress upon the bizarre, has converted "Hollywood" from a place name to a generic term adequate for the complete enumeration, description and damnation of whatever goes on in film studios. In respect to music, it includes everything from the score of the cheapest Monogram western to the touching lyricism of Our Town. It includes all the composers from Axt to Zeisl. It includes all the functional musical devices from the leitmotiv to the mickey-mouse. In fact, it includes so many things that the term has even been used to describe the music of composers who never set foot inside a studio gate. It is amazing how much "Hollywood" music is being composed by people who despise the place. In short, "Hollywood" is an invective, most frequently found in the mouths of "serious" composers in the act of describing the compositions of their colleagues. Cilm music's second sin, they say, is in having been as unselective about its parentage as it was about its birthplace. It was sired (spawned, some say) by the nineteenth century. All of it, it is averred, is derivative from the romantic and post-romantic masters — from Tschaikowsky and Rachmaninoff, from Wagner and Brahms and Strauss, from Franck and Debussy, from Sibelius — and frequently seasoned with the condiments so AUGUST, 1947