Cinema (Hollywood) (1947)

lavishly furnished by the scores of Ravel and the young Stravinsky. This discreet and genteel form of plagiarism is generally conceived of as taking place alongside of a swimming pool. The composer, with a highball in one hand and a score of Pctrouchka in the other, simultaneously refreshes his spirit and replenishes his dwindling stock of musical devices. Tune detectives will notice the Stravinsky influence in the carnival scene of the composer's next score. It is true that there are one or two of Hollywood's hundred-odd film composers who have private swimming pools. Another dozen have arrived at a state of affluence comparable to that of successful merchants. But the great majority are men of such moderate means that the average income of the whole hundred-odd is eight to ten thousand dollars a year. It is also true that some of them compose with the score of Pctrouchka in the other hand. But most of them compose from memory. In any case,' the relation between their incomes and their affection for the musical styles of the nineteenth century is a tenuous one. It is not at all certain that their music would be more modern if their incomes were reduced to college-professor size. No; it is not income but prevailing musical fashion that determines the character of film music. And in this respect Hollywood shows not its separation but its identity with prevailing musical mores. Its preference for late romantic music indeed represents the taste of a public that prefers Franck's symphony to any one of Roy Harris. On the whole, the public is conservative— at least, that small and elite portion of the public that patronizes symphony orchestras and buys phonograph records. It likes music that is comfortable, music that insinuates itself easily into the thalamus without disturbing the cortex. Such likes (and the corollary dislikes) are easily satisfied by conductors and recitalists afflicted with similar cortical sluggishness. Everybody plays safe, takes no chances. So do the film composers. So long as picture making is a commercial rather than an artistic enterprise, it would be folly to deny the public what it will spend money to hear. This is no doubt a cynical philosophy; but it is obviously shared by such "artists" as Iturbi, Stokowski, Melchior. Any notion that they are high priests of art who occasionally step down from their pulpits to mingle with common humanity via the movies is sheer nonsense. They were always of Hollywood, long before they were in it. Masters of the "wow" technique, and safe conservatives in their tastes, they fitted into the Hollywood scheme without tailoring, diet or make-up. This is not an attempt to excuse Hollywood's musical conservatism. Conservatism in the arts is inexcusable. It has always been the avant garde that has provided the materials for change, growth, evolution. Thus the young radicals of the nineteen-twenties provided us with nearly all the materials for modernity in music, even if they created no undying masterpieces of their own. But in film music there has never been an avant garde. Sound pictures, themselves revolutionary, generated no musical revolution except insofar as they challenged composers to find a suitable technique for satisfying the functional requirements of the film. Their idiom, on the whole, remained static. Music was one part of the old status quo that could safely be retained in a changing world. Screen writing, photography, recording and a thousand other technical approaches to film making had to be recast in the light of new conditions. But not musical sounds. The old familiar melodies, like the girl-meets-boy stories., were like an umbilical cord that kept films attached to their history and tradition, brief as these were. Com posers no doubt enjoyed their sense of esthetic security. And it was well for them that they did. For, as time has proved, producers and front-office personnel do not welcome revolution. They want stability; and their search for it quickly ended up in the discovery of formulas. Inescapably, their formula was the familiar. Musically uninformed, and with uncultivated tastes, they nevertheless presumed to set themselves up as experts, as barometers of public taste. And being bosses, their positions are unassailable. Thus revolution, even if it had been desired by the composers (which it was not), would have been suppressed at the first outbreak. Yet a very gradual swing toward modernity is observable. Anyone who has listened actively to recent film scores must have observed that the composers are not totally unaware of events such as those that transpire in Boston's Symphony Hall under the baton of Koussevitsky. The contemporary spirit has somehow squeezed through studio gates although, to be sure, she hovers wraith-like over the sound stages. Oscar Levent pointed out several years ago that the Hollywood boys knew Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, through the published score and the German recording, long before this landmark of contemporary literature was taken up by the symphony orchestras. The prevailing estimates of Hollywood's music therefore require further revision. The composer may have a highball handy, but he is not reclining by a swimming pool, he is not living in the style of an Oriental potentate, he is not paying more in income tax than most of us earn in salary. Now, it appears, he is no longer cribbing from Pctrouchka. The objects of his study are the scores of Hindemith, Harris, Copland, Prokofiev, Shostakovitch, Bartok. Here again he shows not his separation but his conformity with prevailing styles, even with the style of the young men from Juilliard and Curtis who are so noisily critical of Hollywood. They, too, are courting the "influence" of the contemporary masters. They have gathered themselves into little sects, each devoted to the supremacy of a Schoenberg, a Stravinsky, a Copland — or are building their carreers on a faith inspired by folk music. And they imitate a-plenty. Like the film men, they provide tune detectives with an abundance of incriminating clues. Any young composer, asked where he was on the night of June 21, would have to admit (unless he lied) that he had been rifling the warehouse of Contemporary Masters, Unlimited. This crime, however, is not a capital one; it is not punishable by death. One can only insist that whatever punishment is imposed, it be the same for the composer of film music as it is for the composer of symphonies and sonatas. Originality is indeed rare. PVery endeavor deserves to be judged by its best productions, not its worst. Every composer, including the classic masters, has produced his share of inferior merchandise. So the serious composer of today is peddling a large amount of second-class wares, and film composers have undoubtedly taken advantage of the privileges of mediocrity. Yet, at their very best, film scores have made handsome contributions to cinema art; and not all of them have been written by the "classical" composers who only occasionally work in films — Bernard Herrman, Aaron Copland, and recently Darius Milhaud. Hollywood's career men — especially the more adventurous ones like Hugo Friedhofer and David Raksin — have driven the confining barriers back, little by little. But insofar as Hollywood falls short of its best musical potentialities, the problem is not Hollywood's alone. It is everybody's. Chavez, in his (Continued on Page 19) 8 CINEMA