If I Only Had A Brain The Wizard of Oz (1939) dir. Victor Fleming, George Cukor (uncredited) Starring Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke, Margaret Hamilton Academy Award Best Original Song – Over the Rainbow Academy Award Best Original Score – Herbert Stothart Harold Arlen (1905 – 1986) Pianist/singer worked as an accompanist… Read more →
The Perfect Song – The Way You Look Tonight
Welcome to The Great American Songbook and notes on the crème de la crème ballad, Academy Award winner for Best Song, The Way You Look Tonight by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. From the 1936 Hollywood film Swing Time, directed by George Stevens, with screenplay by Broadway luminary Howard Lindsay, starring Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Victor Moore, and Helen… Read more →
Korngold vs. Williams – The Battle of the Film Scores
…and the film score battle rages on. Cognoscenti who find borrowing in John William’s film scores, would have found the same in Bach and Mozart. For Goddess sake, they all three used the same notes of the scale! Once again, a source I most admire – this time a Midwestern journalist who shall remain nameless – took a swipe… Read more →
May You Live In Interesting Times
The irony of the contemporary anonymous bromide, May you live in interesting times, a curse masquerading as a blessing, has never been truer during my lifetime than now, November of 2016. America’s former poet laureate Robert Haas has the eloquence and grace to offer a deeper context with Faint Music, especially this excerpt: “…When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is… Read more →
Atlas Shrugs or Removing the Chip on Your Shoulder
“I am distressed by the fate of my brother Atlas, who towards the west, stands bearing on his shoulders the pillar of heaven and earth, a burden not easy for his arms to grasp.” -Prometheus, from Aeschylus’, Prometheus Bound – 5th century BC “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders… Read more →
Spring has Sprung and sometimes Sprains!
The calendar may say it is SPRING, but the sideways sleet & snow in the Sandia foothills the first Sunday of May tells me otherwise. It is ironic that shortly after moving to New Mexico ten years ago, I heard the same oft quoted adage from my native Michigan, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait 5 minutes!” I… Read more →
Remembering Arleen Auger
With a nod to David Letterman’s entertaining bit, Brush with Greatness, I often recall my personal encounter with the lovely soprano, Arleen Auger, as a student at the Conservatory of Music, University of Missouri in Kansas City, at my part time job with The Friends of Chamber Music, the producing organization for her local concert appearance. As was typical for many of her American contemporaries, after… Read more →