Film scores occupying the middle

[koganbot]

Tom's soundtracks poll starts later today, and for the hell of it I'm jotting down some thoughts about one reason I'm looking forward to it. I'm deliberately overstating and simplifying for the sake of clarity, so leaving out my usual thicket of caveats and asides and parentheticals. Bear in mind that modernism kind of throws a spanner into the

Comments

Film Scores

[ext_6266389]

I think Radio did much to alter the status of Classical Music - certainly in the UK - as it opened up the experience to a wider audience. Symphonies and Operas were also edited to broadcast the memorable movements and arias - the ‘bangers’.
There’s some insights here (although you may not be able to access) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001dd8y
IIRC intellectuals like Virginia Woolf lauded Highbrow Culture, indulged Lowbrow Culture (Jazz, Ragtime?) but disdained the Middle Brow - which might have included film soundtracks.

Re: Film Scores

[koganbot]

One of my caveats would have been to point out that it's fairly ridiculous not to call Beethoven and Carmen (etc.) "popular music."

Think it's been fairly common in the last 100 years to disdain the middle while plumping for low and high.* I'm an heir to that kind of attitude, a lot of the time. The thing is, the high and the low eventually become the middle, thanks to all the popularization and to people like me, and there's a constant never-ending churning. Contradictorily I'm also an heir to middlebrow social-do-gooding folk music and TV shows (The Defenders and The Virginian, when I was 10 years old; don't know if they crossed to Britain). And of course faves of mine like the New York Dolls and fave of lots of people David Bowie were head deep in sentimental save-the-childern do-goodery, and good for them.

The BBC show does play here. May take a while for me to get to it though.

Do you mind if I post your comment and this response of mine over on the Dreamwidth version of this entry? Or, if you have a Dreamwidth account of your

There's a riot goin' on

[koganbot]

Whoah! Right on cue the Peoples Pop Poll runs classically trained Elmer Bernstein's "Frankie Machine" from The Man With The Golden Arm. "Frankie," 1955, just 4 years after "Sixty Minute Man," not only swims deep in Latin jazz, but it lifts the riff from Muddy Waters's "Hoochie Coochie Man."

Did a Twitter thread on this, starting here:

https://twitter.com/koganbot/status/1624827333310832642

Thom Bell

[koganbot]

Don Allred writes:

Speaking of R&B and classical, the gap and bridging it, here's a good interview with Thom Bell, who was raised hardcore classical, already training to be a concert pianist at 6, didn't hear pop music on the radio 'til he was 14, think he says-listening to these excerpts on headphones, I'm picking up more detail in his arrangements than recalled from back in the day-stream. download, read: https://www.npr.org/2021/06/04/1003245978/celebrating-50-years-of-philly-sound-with-songwriter-producer-thom-bell