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In the current thread on Jasmine's new release of the original ST albums of Ben Hur (the re-recordings), user "babbelballetje" made this point:
"This would have been a nice cd for me when I first watched the movie in 1997. I loved the score and it got me fall in love with the golden age music. "
This made me think about what first got me interested in Golden Age music, because my initial few years of focus and purchases were all current and recent-release scores in the 1970's. And it hit me that it was Rozsa for me too, but because of his then-new score for Time After Time, which made me start focusing on his earlier scores. And at about the same time, Herrmann, because I bought his Hitchcock and Fantasy Film suite recordings (my first Herrmann was the wide release of E. Bernstein's recording of Torn Curtain, but I don't think we're supposed to count 60's scores as Golden Age.)
So in other words, for me, falling in love with GA music wasn't so much about the films as the composers - though that's changed over the decades. That started with Korngold's score for Adv. of Robin Hood, which was the first Golden Age score I fell in love with in the movie itself.
What about you?
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I didn't.
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Well, umm, thanks for playing. Next!
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I always had favourite tv themes since a pre-teen, and recorded them all the time with my little cassette recorder. Eventually I was to become pretty keen on the Dollars trilogy music of Ennio Morricone. But it was with a double bill of Harryhausen films at my local cinema that did it 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. I absolutely loved the themes to both.
At a later date, I decided to record on audio, Jason from a tv channel that I could only get sound on, no picture (well, 'snow'). Listening to this movie I couldn't believe how good the rest of the music was.
From there, I bought the Phase 4 release of The Fantastic Film World of Bernard Herrmann, simply because of Sinbad. As you can imagine I then discovered the rest of the films on there. Then noticed the other albums in the series. Then, every time I watched a favourite film, including the Errol Flynn swashbucklers always shown in those days on Sunday afternoons in the UK, and various epics I just simply got into much of the classic period of film music. I got into all the greats including Rosza, Korngold, Steiner.
All before I left school. Not long after school, I attended my first concert, Filmharmonic 80 at the Royal Albert Hall, London in the company of John Williams. Never looked back.
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The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes by Miklós Rózsa - I'm still spinning this with great frequency.
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Joan, your post reminded me that I was knocked out when I saw Airport in about 1976 on TV - the main theme was one of the best I had ever heard. Weirdly, it took me a long time to follow up on that, and even longer to understand both the importance and the greatness of Alfred Newman's music.
But jeez, that opening to Airport was one of the most exciting movie-music experiences I've ever had. One of my clearest earlier recollections of really noticing and loving the music - and it was a Golden Ager! Never noticed that before.
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One way or another, it's always about apes with you, eh, Rory? 
I'm going to follow CinemaScope's example and identify my relation by age. I was born in '61, so for me there were far fewer instances of going to the theater for movies that were not current. When I was in single digits, I lived for a few years in a smallish metro area that had Saturday matinees at the big old classic brick theater. I distinctly remember seeing The Courtship of Eddie's Father there, and some kind of 50's wide-screen adventure, but can't recall much else, and the music didn't stick. Then.
And of course there was the color/b&w divide. Growing up in that transition period (esp. for tv, where I saw a lot of old movies), b&w meant "old, ooolllddd" and color meant "new! current! better!" Took some time to shake that bias.
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Like the gentleman above, I was born mid-century (1949), and grew up with melodic film scoring everywhere. It was a given. You just expected movies to have melodic film scores. At the time, I took them completely for granted.
I guess the first scores I was aware of as scores were for the classic Disney animated features. As I recall, the first movie lp's I got were the old Disneyland releases of SNOW WHITE and CINDERELLA, which also included background score cues. Then, when I was about 10, I saw the original roadshow release of BEN-HUR, and was blown away by the whole experience. My older brother got the lp, and I ended up getting my own copy later; played that thing until I could probably recite it. Still can.
It saddens me to have observed the gradual decline and fall of film music. When I first experienced it, music was a valid contributor to the movie it accompanied. Now, it's little more than generic wallpaper, used to amp up whatever car chase or gun battle going on. Gone are Love Themes. (Remember them?) Gone, for that matter, is love, replaced by fashion-clad quickies. Characters nowadays don't seem to care about much of anything nowadays, let alone each other.
And the music is really meager. Even favorite composers, like James Newton Howard or Patrick Doyle, occasionally write unmemorable scores. I've been observing Michael Giacchino's work, and like a lot of it, particularly JOHN CARTER, which I love. But these are wanderers in the wilderness of noise.
And the question to really ask is: are today's composers even capable of writing melody? I wonder.
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Posted: |
Apr 26, 2015 - 10:01 AM
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By: |
Graham Watt
(Member)
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Here's my potted history again, which I've just noticed has some things in common with the majority of those who have posted so far.
From watching TV as a youngster, plus cinema visits, I was aware of film music, and because of the genres I was interested in (Harryhausen, monsters) I was exposed to the music of principally Herrmann, and to a lesser extent Rózsa (GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD). I had all the compilations by both composers from an early age. As my awareness increased (thanks Howard) and I began to hear more and more scores from older films on TV, I decided that Rózsa "spoke" to me much more clearly than Herrmann did. And after years of Christmas telly, Rózsa's biblical epics - or just epics in general - had found their way into my heart.
So it was really film showings on TV which made me aware of "who I liked" from "The Golden Age" (although my dates are flexible with that term) - and I started picking up albums by those composers even without having seen the film.
But I was also growing up in "The Silver Age", so the new films and music I was being exposed to was quite different from Rózsa, Friedhofer, Herrmann etc. Goldsmith made a big impact, as did Rosenman, Fielding, and a lot of the more "progressive" names. So I'm more a child of the late '60s/ early '70s, but I really had one foot in the past and one in the future.
But without straying off-topic too much, I'd say that my love of Golden Age scores was Rózsa's fault. Cheers Miki. See what you've done? But it's still not an "unconditional" love. I'm quite cold on Steiner, Young and Korngold, and curiously lukewarm on a lot of Waxman. The "forward-thinking" scores seemed to strike a nerve most, and that carried me on to embracing the likes of Rosenman, plus those of under-discussed geniuses such as Gil Mellé and Basil Kirchin - but that goes beyond film music and we're into a new topic of discussion.
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Posted: |
Apr 26, 2015 - 10:50 AM
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By: |
RoryR
(Member)
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One way or another, it's always about apes with you, eh, Rory?
Far too many people don't want to accept it, but all of humanity is "always about apes." All of man's thoughts, desires, creations and faults are about apes, even his music.... because man is an ape.
Anyway, my love of Golden Age scores comes directly from a love of Golden Age films. Without the movies, I wouldn't know the scores. I was born in 1959 and through the '60s I lived on Long Island which meant that I got TV from NYC, perhaps the best television market in the country at that time, and what was there plenty to watch during the day and late hours back then? Broadcasts of movies from the '30s, '40s and '50s, and it was my mother, who didn't need to work outside the home during most of those years, who insisted we watch them instead of yet another Bugs Bunny cartoon or insipid game show or soap opera, so I was exposed to what's now called "classic movies" from a very early age. Spencer Tracy was my favorite actor when I was seven years old because of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, TORTILLA FLAT, and INHERIT THE WIND (yes, apes again!). I remember my mother's favorite movie back then was GIANT and she had the soundtrack album to that, but it never did anything for me. The first soundtrack LP I recall having was for Disney's THE JUNGLE BOOK (yeah, King Louis, apes again). There was an LP for KING KONG, but it was a recreation of the film story and didn't use Steiner's music, but I really didn't get into soundtracks until PLANET OF THE APES and a TV commercial one day for a record store somewhere in the NYC area that asked this question while it showed the album cover and music from one cue: "Have you heard the music from PLANET OF THE APES yet?" That was the beginning for me, but I didn't start buying LPs to classic scores, re-recordings all, until the early '70s.
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....but I really didn't get into soundtracks until PLANET OF THE APES and a TV commercial one day for a record store somewhere in the NYC area that asked this question while it showed the album cover and music from one cue: "Have you heard the music from PLANET OF THE APES yet?" That was the beginning for me, but I didn't start buying LPs to classic scores, re-recordings all, until the early '70s.
Some great stories being posted here, love 'em all. Boy am I jealous of your childhood, Rory. I can't imagine seeing a TV commercial for a soundtrack album as non-commercial as POTA. That would have gotten my attention, I can tell you!
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STAR TREK, the original series reruns in the 1980s.
I loved the music being tracked in the show, so I began to search for used records of film music by George Duning and Sol Kaplan (and all the others).
My initial purchases were in 1985, when I was age 18; I bought myself the RCA Victor album of Kaplan's "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold" and a re-issue of Duning's "Picnic".
Since then, I began to like and collect Golden Age soundtracks.
30 years now! 
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Posted: |
Apr 26, 2015 - 11:52 AM
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By: |
Graham Watt
(Member)
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Indeed Rory - the "taping onto cassette direct from the telly" story is common to many of us from that era. That's actually an important part of what got me into scores in general. I have probably hundreds of old tapes filled with what I labeled "Film Themes", and I recorded virtually everything. That's what probably, more than anything, taught me to distinguish between different composers' styles - and, of course, over time I got to know "who I liked."
It was a great education, no matter how geeky it sounds. One day you'd be taping SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (and punching the air in triumph when the name "Miklos Rozsa" came up, because you'd guessed it after the opening moments), and the next you'd be taping a "new" TV Movie and nodding in a self-congratulatory way on realising that you'd finally guessed Robert Drasnin correctly.
I'm probably sounding like an insufferable git, but I just wanted the pleasure of perhaps being mentioned in the "Offensive Threads" thread.
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