Valentine's Day, Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 10:20 am

_______________________________________________talkingherrmann mailing list**********************10-29-09:Talking Herrmann: Herrmannesque SteinerNew topic by: Bill Wrobel ()______________________________________________________________________In various other posts (including one recently about Lion & the Horse) I have discussedhow Max Steiner music has a certain affinity to the music of Bernard Herrmann. It's notoften but it shows fairly enough so that I remark to myself, "You know, that sounds reallyHerrmannesque" or ""I bet Herrmann could really relate to that piece as to similar styleand sensibility."Another example is from one of my favorite Steiner movies, a fun "B" family westernfrom 1954 titled The Boy from Oklahoma" starring Will Rogers, Jr. It was recently oneither TCM or the Westerns Channel. Several times in the movie he had a dramaticstatement motif normally associated with the bad guy in the film (Anthony Caruso).In theimage below he has a brief first statement of it at Reel 3/4 in the movie when the old mantells the hero about the mail being stolen in a stagecoach robbery, "No luck connectedwith this son, good or bad." Terrific music employing the rinforzando brass especially buthe effectively mixes the effect with the woodwinds and strings. It ends on a powerfullyheld fermata deep D maj (D/F#/A) resonance chord. Herrmann would be proud! The firstimage is my own personal research copy. We have Bars 21-25, skipping to the end of thecue with Bars 28-30 of that motif figure I like so much.The second image is towards the very end of the picture when the boy says inexasperation, "Women!" and then we have the repeat villain motif repeated in spades asCaruso is driven slowly down the street. Except for a few annotations by me, this imageis a reproduction of the first four bars of Reel 10/6.I believe the tonalities are E maj(E/G#/B) to C maj (C/E/G) back to E maj to the D tutti tone to (Bar 2) C min (C/Eb/G)and so forth. Steiner seemed to employ more major and Dominant chords in his musicthan Herrmann. Herrmann loved the half-diminished 7th but Steiner did not use themanywhere as much as Herrmann (or even Rozsa) but there is a special cue in The FBIwhere Steiner does a multiple descent of just half-diminished chords. I'll have to find thatone in my box somewhere. Rather Herrmannesque too.At any rate, these top film music composers had this strong tendency to REPEAT amusical structure or thought-form rather frequently so that it really impresses thelistening audience, ingrains or registers a certain mood thru this almost hypnotic deviceof repeating over & over again (ostinatos were a favorite of Herrmann). Of course, thismethod is a time-saver as well, rather like water flowing along thru a pattern of leastresistance. Just repeat some motif or short phrase and then go a half tone or whole tone149