Around this time, three years ago, I conducted an interview with the famous film composer/raconteur David Raksin (Laura), for the MA I was completing. He was in his nineties, and died some eight months thereafter, and was not as helpful (for what I was looking for) then he might have been when I first met him in the eighties when we both spent time at a Sundance film composing workshop.Shortly before the interview, I had come across the information that Raksin had "named names", during the McCarthy Hollywood witch hunt. The nature of my interview was technical and not biographical/political, so I didn't bring it up. I had known him for years before finding this out, and had found him charming and intelligent, if self centered and short fused (no tolerance for fools). I figured that I would not be his judge.
During the interview, due to his advanced age and deteriorating health, he had trouble remembering details of what once had been an encyclopedic knowledge of film music history. My knowledge at the time was not enough to be much help. He would look at me exasperated at my ignorance. This embarrassment led to an enforced diet of films over the last three years, closely watched, from the seventy-three years of recorded film music, with a special attention to the great names of film composing. Raksin would be much happier with me now.
Jerry Fielding (nee Joshua Feldman in 1922 according to Imdb, which I take with a grain of salt ever since someone inserted someone else's bio over my credits in their database!) was a composer who took the fifth, refused to name names and so was blacklisted in Hollywood for almost ten years. He could be outspoken, obviously (an interesting two part interview I recommend). He died of a heart attack at 58, in 1980.
Perhaps because of all the history, both were heavily consigned to television during the sixties and seventies. But Fielding's films were on a par (for my money) with Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein or John Williams of the time.
I met a man, once, who explained how when he was in college, hoping to expand his worldliness, he took a class in "Music Appreciation". You know, the three Bs, Mozart, Hayden, Schumann and Schubert etc. These were the things that one must know to fit in with the type of society that the college education was going to lift him into. After a course of great emotional uplifting, he came away with one thing... maybe. He had been taught what a "fugue" was, and how to count the entrances of the voices. Forty years on, he still spent his time at concerts, waiting for these voices to count.
Oh, there was one other thing he learned, and that was Wagner's use of leitmotif. The assigning of specific musical themes to specific characters or objects as a form of dramatic construction. And this brings us back to film music, for there are two dogmatic, knee-jerk terms learned by every film music dilettante, and one is leitmotif. Leitmotifs have become almost anachronistic in film, as films are no longer experienced as a through story, they are more experienced as a series of stories. How many times have you watched a film in parts on cable? Everything has to work unto itself now, and if history is required to understand the music of the moment, it may well be lost.
The other film music idiots dogma goes by the name of "mickey mousing". Almost anyone can imagine what that might mean, and proudly understanding and finding the name easy to remember, these numbskulls go off trumpeting it in almost any circumstance. Oh, curiously, considering how beloved cartoons and their music are, this is considered a derogatory term and technique by the film music neo-classicists.
The writer of Jerry Fielding's bio on the Imdb (someone who goes by the moniker Heathcliff Blair), tries to praise him by proclaiming that he never resorts to any "mickey mousing" no siree! But curiously, this is exactly what makes Fielding so spectacularly good. Every tempo he ever uses is always derived from something on screen. He musically accents almost everything (like a cartoon) but does it so subtly his music does seem (as his reviewer quotes a producer) "... like a man in a green suit walking in a forest". That is a good quote, that is.
Today I watched two of his films (both Clint Eastwood) Escape From Alcatraz and The Outlaw Josie Wales, but I would also heartily recommend Straw Dogs or The Wild Bunch. If you ever whistled the march of Hogan's Heroes, that was Fielding! Jerry Fielding was the shit, and he didn't name names! Right on!
(he is my current favorite, in case you were wondering, after Rota, and.. mmm thinking)
