How Hitler Helped to Create Hollywood Music

[Teasing the Korean]

Not a completely uncovered topic, but this article offers a concise account of the composers who fled Nazi-occupied countries in central and eastern Europe, and subsequently created the sound of golden-age Hollywood film scores.

Composers inclue Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Miklos Rozsa, and Dimitri Tiomkin. Indirectly, while Schoenberg had a limited career in film scoring, his students included David Raksin and Bernard Herrmann.

http://orelfoundation.org/index.php/journal/journalArticle/a_steppe_is_a_steppe_how_hitler_helped_to_create_hollywood_music/

[bertrand]

By that token, Hitler also enabled Blue Note records to be founded.

Bertrand.

[A Lark Ascending]

You could also do "How Hitler started the Mahler craze" - the music of those composers who wrote for Hollywood is often said to have created a context for listeners to connect to Mahler. I'm sure that's why I 'got' him long befor Mozart, Beethoven etc.

[Teasing the Korean]

By that token, Hitler also enabled Blue Note records to be founded.

Bertrand.

Of course, and Hitler probably allowed you and I to be born in some way or another.

The point of the article is that the sound of golden-age Hollywood film scores, as we know them, would not have existed, because it's primary architects were refugees.

[Big Beat Steve]

A subject that's indeed been covered well before - under all aspects imaginable, so I should think.

It is beyond doubt that the idiocy of Hitler and his cohorts have caused a brain drain to Germany in many (if not all) areas of science and culture that this country has never recovered from.

[king ubu]

out of print and german, but pretty good overview in this:

Möller, Horst: Exodus der Kultur. Schriftsteller, Wissenschaftler und Künstler in der Emigration nach 1933. Beck'sche schwarze Reihe; Band 293. München: Beck, 1984.

[mjzee]

A subject that's indeed been covered well before - under all aspects imaginable, so I should think.

It is beyond doubt that the idiocy of Hitler and his cohorts have caused a brain drain to Germany in many (if not all) areas of science and culture that this country has never recovered from.

France will soon experience something similar.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

By that token, Hitler also enabled Blue Note records to be founded.

Bertrand.

Of course, and Hitler probably allowed you and I to be born in some way or another.

The point of the article is that the sound of golden-age Hollywood film scores, as we know them, would not have existed, because it's primary architects were refugees.

Just as the 1905 pogrom of Odessa caused heaps of Eastern European Jews to flee to America, with the same impact on the Great American Songbook, which probably wouldn't have existed otherwise. (Well, there'd have been Cole Porter.)

Of course, I wouldn't have been born had my grandmother, in the company of her little sister and their Mum, NOT got out of Odessa before it happened

MG

[mjzee]

A corollary article could be written about directors in Hollywood.

[sgcim]

Not a completely uncovered topic, but this article offers a concise account of the composers who fled Nazi-occupied countries in central and eastern Europe, and subsequently created the sound of golden-age Hollywood film scores.

Composers inclue Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Miklos Rozsa, and Dimitri Tiomkin. Indirectly, while Schoenberg had a limited career in film scoring, his students included David Raksin and Bernard Herrmann.

http://orelfoundation.org/index.php/journal/journalArticle/a_steppe_is_a_steppe_how_hitler_helped_to_create_hollywood_music/

Schoenberg never wrote a Hollywood film score, although they begged him and Stravinsky to write one.I forget the story of why AS didn't do it, but as I recall it was pretty funny.

Herrmann never studied with Schoenberg! I don't know where that article got that from...

Raksin definitely did study with him, and used a twelve tone sequence for the confrontation with Donald Pleasance scene in "Will Penny"(probably the best place for serial music IMHO ).

I'm doing an all-Raksin gig sometime in Sept. Once I hit the lotto I'll make my all-Raksin CD.

Edited August 29, 2014 by sgcim