Elmer Bernstein's Film Music Notebook [antikvár]

Foreword This collection of the original thirteen issues of Elmer Bernstein's Film Music Notebook is the realization of a long-held dream for both film-music aficionados and trustees of The Film Music Society. These booklets were available only to the few hundred subscribers to the composer's Film Music Collection of limited-edition LPs of classic film scores during its brief period of existence from 1974 to 1978. Their contents, however, deserve to be much more widely disseminated. During his term as president of The Film Music Society, Elmer Bernstein generously granted permission to reproduce all of them as a single book. It is not an overstatement to claim that this may be one of the most important collections of research, interviews and commentary ever published in the field. The 1970s was a key period in the rediscovery of the classic film score, given the publication of Tony Thomas's landmark Music for the Movies, the release of the RCA Classic Film Scores series, the launching of the Society for the Preservation of Film Music (now The Film Music Society) and the widely publicized legal action by the Composers and Lyricists Guild of America— then headed by Bernstein—against the Hollywood movie studios over the rights to their music. Every issue of the Film Music Notebook contained an interview with a major composer. All were conducted by Bernstein, who turned out to be as thorough and thoughthil a questioner as he is a composer. Some of them, specifically those with orchestrator Leo Shuken and composer Daniele Amfitheatrof, are believed to be the only lengthy interviews those individuals ever gave. Others, such as those with composers David Raksin and John Green, contain marvelous details about their pre-Hollywood history that cannot be found elsewhere. Still others, such as those with Jerry Goldsmith, Henry Mancini and Richard Rodney Bennett, enable the reader to glean insights into the craft that would be possible only with two composers sitting across a table from each other. The score analyses, particularly those of composer and musicologist Fred Steiner about Psycho and The Wild One, are seminal works in their field. The esteemed orchestrator Christopher Palmer contributed well-written looks at Miklós Rózsa, Alex North and Dimitri Tiomkin. And other pieces, by such respected film-music writers as John Caps, Jay Alan Quantrill and William H. Rosar, set and maintained high standards of writing and research. Given the importance of this material to the written history of American movie music—and the fact that these booklets were all typeset during the pre-computer, pre-spellcheck era—the occasional typographical error, misspelling, less-than-perfect punctuation, or inconsistency in italics versus boldfacing can