Movie Music

Alfred Wallenstein, sometime concert cellist, has been musical director of Newark, N. J.'s station WOR (Mutual network) for five years. Long ago he disabused the station's management of their theory that Bach was too high-brow for their listeners; long ago he began putting new compositions on the air. Last week Director Wallenstein for the 300th time gave a work its radio debut.

Though it did not sound like it, the music was from the movies: a suite compiled by French-Swiss Composer Arthur Honegger (pronounced hahnegger) from the score he wrote for the earthy French film Harvest. Detached from the cinema, Honegger's spare, simply scored melodies still needed the titles he gave them: Panturle (the peasant of the picture, who finds strength in the love of a woman from the city); Spring in the Hills; Gedemus the Knife Grinder (whom the woman deserts for Panturle); Harvest.

To most people, Arthur Honegger is the great locomotive man of music. He wrote Pacific 231, a huffing, whooshing, lickety-split program piece which has snorted down countless orchestral tracks in the past 16 years. "I love locomotives," says Composer Honegger, "the way other men love women or animals." A solid, massive-browed, bob-haired man, Honegger rode a New Haven locomotive, clad in beret and white overalls, on his last U. S. visit in 1929. Most of the time he lives in Paris. There Honegger shares a home not with a locomotive but a wife, Pianist Andree Vaurabourg. No Johnny-One-Note, he has written, besides Pacific 231, many a top-notch score, including two big, sombre Biblical works, Le Roi David and Judith. Among 20-odd cinema scores he did before Harvest, best-known in the U. S. were Mayerling and Pygmalion.

Throughout the world some 300,000,000 people every week hear symphonic music in the movies, whether they know it or not. Mostly they do not know it: Hollywood believes that music should be pure background. The European approach is different: its cinema music is supposed to compel the hearer's attention, to comment on the action of the film, to say things the characters leave unsaid. Briton Arthur Bliss's score for H. G. Wells's Things To Come has had concert performances (TIME, July 17). Some U. S. films, most of them documentary, have owed much to music of this sort. Virgil Thomson, long an expatriate, did wonders with a small orchestra for Pare Lorentz' The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River. Last year Aaron Copland contributed a lean, muscular musical commentary to The City. This year his music for Of Mice and Men was cut closer to Hollywood's measure.

For special jobs, Hollywood hires such composers as Sigmund Romberg, Kurt Weill, Werner Janssen, George Antheil. On the payroll is many a capable musician who writes tunes in snatches of so many seconds or minutes, to serve as background for titles, montages and for atmospheric effects. Studio musicians -- among them Alfred Newman, Max Steiner, Herbert Stothart, Erich Korngold -- compose with elaborate cue-sheets, sit in with technicians when dialogue, sound effects and music are dubbed together. The routine technique contains three standard elements: descriptive or "Mickey Mouse" music (an upward run when a character goes upstairs, etc.); emotional music ("the old gutseroo") for emotional situations; local or characteristic music to set a scene. Composers and orchestrators may be derivative: variants on Ravel and Debussy are good for fog; Pacific 231 for trains; Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel for anything roguish; Delius for walks in English gardens and lanes; Stravinsky's Petrouchka for carrousels; Rimsky-Korsakov trumpets for newspaper headlines. For a love scene between a roguish Frenchman and a Spanish girl in a fogbound train, Hollywood's tunesmiths could handle the atmosphere, gutseroo included, with perfect ease.

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