I was noticing how great the scores of Quo Vadis and Ben Hur are.
Rozsa seems not as well known today as he should be. The "March of the Charioteers" and also the march from Quo Vadis are two of the most powerful marches/heroic pieces for film.
181,878 users have contributed to 42,190 threads and 254,622 posts.
In the past 24 hours, we have 3 new thread(s), 17 new post(s) and 59 new user(s).
And of course he wrote the "Dum-da-dum-dum" from Dragnet that was originally from one of his film scores, The Killers. His other notable scores include Thief of Bagdhad, Lost Weekend, Hitchcock's Spellbound (with famous theremin part imitated endlessly after that film), The Power (very little known but great sci-fi film featuring a Hungarian cymbelon in the orchestration), Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Time After Time. He alternated beween epic\historical and downbeat contemporary film noir very effectively.
He was great at composing this epic thing...but he didn't do as much innovative things like some of his colleagues did. And especially in the mid 20th century you had to do something new to attract some attention...
I like the Rosza sound, but it can also be a bit boring at times...
Here is a list of his film scores -
http://www.mrs.miklosrozsa.info/filmdiscography/discpart2.pdf
The ones I have seen are spectacularly great - Thief of Baghdad and Jungle Book are loaded with fantastic melodies and orchestrations. If you hear entire new recordings of the scores it it like listening to a phantasmagorical symphony, with its musical depictions of all the crazy elements of the stories.
it is interesting and most impressive how he was able to range so widely and intensely from the ultra-colorful fantasies like those films, to downbeat, contemporary film noir like Double Indemnity and The Killers, and to the huge, majestic Ben Hur and Julius Casar scores. El Cid is also one of the most spectacular, with a powerful use of pipe organ combined with huge orchestral forces. There is a great new recording of it available -
http://buysoundtrax.stores.yahoo.net/elcidwoprmub.html
he was also a very serious classical composer with many great works.
I think he was a great writer and Ben Hur is a monumental effort. The cue to just before the opening of the Chariot Race is better than most people could have achieved. He did repeat himself in films at times stylistically but so what - every good writer does that.
He was regarded as the best writer of the 'epic religious experience' feel and I seem to remember King of Kings. Another trademark of Rozsa is the use of a solo violin with great aplomb. One immediately thinks of Billy Wilders film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.
The chariot scene in Ben Hur is a good example of something you wouldn't see in a modern movie anymore. It's really the complete song underneath this first round of honour.
King of Kings, now that's one I do like a lot, especially the religiously heroic choir theme.
I once listened to Ben Hur with headphones and was astonished at the detail that was very subtle and hidden in a way. For a composer to do that in a large score like that was quite a feat on one hand and extraordinary writing in any case. You rarely hear anything close to that today with the many dumbed down overly simplistic scores in mainstream film.
I noticed the same thing with the Thief of Bagdad. The recording I heard (besides in the movie) was conducted by Elmer Bernstein as part of his "Film Music Series." He brought out all of the nuances that get covered up in the sound effects. It is as great an orchestration as Ravel or Rimsky Korsakov and influenced by both, as well as Korngold.
One other thing I was thinking about Rosza is that he was probably the leading exponent of the leitmotif style after Korngold, along with Max Steiner, and prior to John Williams (and today Howard Shore in his Lord of the Rings score).
It is interesting to think about the use of leitmotif in cinema, compared with Wagner in opera. Wagner's leitmotifs often get lost in the huge, unwieldy mess of his operas. Compare that to the use of the leitmotif in Rosza's score to Ben Hur. Cinema has always had to reinstate itself as an art compared to more- approved form of opera, and yet this particular example shows its awesome power. The main Ben Hur motif, which recurs at the dramatic climax of this very skillfully done film, has an impact like a sledgehammer. Also, the "Christ" and "Brothers" motifs in their recurrences throughout the film are tremendously powerful even if you are not a musician, and are simply watching the film. You are immensely affected by this music, whether or not you know it.
I just realized that talking about leitmotifs, Rosza, Wagner and cinema as an art has very little to do with Hans Zimmer and the other current film composers that everyone wants to be.
As long as you get a rhythm track and loud enough stingers that's all you need for film music today. Like Dark Knight, which is a non-entity of a film score.
Well as long as we have John Williams.... we still have a respected composer who uses leitmotifs like wagner did.
Just for fun you should listen to Zimmer's Gladiator and subsequently to Holst's The Planets, Mars
There's more than just one resemblance...[:)]
@bartdelissen said:
Well as long as we have John Williams.... we still have a respected composer who uses leitmotifs like wagner did.
Just for fun you should listen to Zimmer's Gladiator and subsequently to Holst's The Planets, Mars
Which is why it was settled out of court. [:$]
DG
John Williams is the only current composer in Hollywood who is comparable to Rosza in the quality of his work. Danny Elfman and Howard Shore may be as good as Rosza, but they will have to work at the same level for another thirty years to do as well. That is part of Rosza's greatness in being able to keep working for so long. (Though it is true his later scores were somewhat similar.) de la Rue, Jarre and Morricone are equally prolific and great outside of Hollywood.
All these guys though seem very old-fashioned, and why? Because they do something fundamentally different from hans Zimmer and his type. He scores film scenes with what are essentially pads. Rhythm pads, harmony pads, timbral pads. In other words, there is no actual piece of music involved. And further - it is not really music at all. It is a slightly musical sound effect, and can be mixed in perfectly along with the explosions and gunfire.
Those old-fashioned composers did not do sound effects. They did music. Full-tilt composing with melody, thematic development, harmonic movement, counterpoint, form and orchestration. We are now in the era when none of that is needed.
Vibrato,
Not a hijacking at all - I agree completely with the shock reaction. Hollywood may seem like a place where great things happen, but it is only technical greatness. It is craftsmen, and skilled laborers. But the artistic side is so pathetic it is embarrassing. Consider that a tiny country lke Sweden produced films that absolutely obliterated all of American cinema in artistic quality with the work of Bergman, which was heavily financed and appreciated (though not by the taxmen). And this was in the past, when some artistic quality was possible here because the Harvard business school graduates had not yet taken over. America is now absolutely controlled by moneymen, to the utter extermination of all other values of human existence. And the so-called composers who now abuse film music by the path of least resistance are craftsmen, not artists - skilled laborers - who have learned the technique of doing a film-pad-score. All those great composers like Korngold and Tiomkin and Steiner - not to mention the greatest of all, Herrmann - were able to do what they did because despite commercialism in the studio era it was not totally controlled by "players" who know how to exploit everything, coldly and scientifically.
You now live in the world of Big Brother. But it is not the Big Brother of a sinister government that was always forecast, but the Big Brother of the Dollar.
@William said:
But the artistic side is so pathetic it is embarrassing.
That's a good way of putting it. The thing about films is this. They are a sort of mirror representation of society at the time they are made. For instance, To Kill a Mockingbird was shown on ITV3 (a crappy commercial load of bollocks with adverts every 10 minutes) at 10.00 am this morning. What would you rather watch - Mockingbird or Benjamin Button? Benjamin Button for instance, is a very clever technical film - but as a film it's a load of total bollocks.
A film like Mockingbird is hardly ever shown these days at peek viewing hours due to commercial constraints - because of the mental demands it would make on audiences aged between 13 and 40. When you watch a film like that and listen to the score while the film is playing, if that's your idea of fun, you soon realize that there's going to be no way of scoring anything like that again - ever. Films of great quality are not made with the regularity they were made years ago. Every now and again a film comes out that's great like the recent Batman film(again a film that reflects the times) - but this is a very rare occurrence. A film of great quality does not need to be arty or have a profound message either - but can still be artistic. Take something like North by Northwest, Swingtime, Night of the Demon or Cat People as examples. Beautifully made gloss that you can watch time and again. The biggest mistake directors always make in films is when they forget about character development.
Peek viewing films today are usually anything that requires very little input from the audience. Audiences today are not required to do anything other than to sit there like some dreadful moron from an Aldous Huxley novel. Many, many films today are the equivalent of a lottery scratch card in terms of the audience they try to attract.
I don't understand why anyone would want to compose music for films unless their livelihoods were completely dependent on it.
That is absolutely right about the artistry of the big commercial films in the studio days, like Hitchcock first of all, and others like the excellent ones you mention. I think the reason that films of that quality are not made as much now as then is that the business of providing "product" in the form of films had not been perfected then as much as it has now. For example, compare a current satellite TV-shown low budget movie to a typical B-movie of the 40s. These current films do not allow anything good to be done, absolutely. If someone had a good idea it would be instantly stamped flat. In the 40s, a B-movie unit like Val Lewton's, or any number of film noir productions, could make great films "under the radar" as long as they used studio-assigned titles. In other words, they were left alone by the idiots in charge. Today the idiots are in total control.
Yeah, althoguh I feel that alot of good easter composers are overlooked, specifically composers such as Joe Hisaishi, his sweeping and emotional scores really can be breath taking. I find it a refreshnig change from modern western orchestral music, his work on Howl's Moving Castle is a personnal favourite.