Film Composers And Me!

Poster. Fair Use.

 Recently I have been buying music in downloads, to add to my  vast CD collection. I have classical, Renaissance, early music, folk of various kinds, which I play when writing, to put me in the mood - for example, Irish music when writing about bushrangers. 

But most inspirational for me in recent years is film music.

Actually, I’ve been a lover of film music from childhood on. When I got a kid brother, he joined me in the love of film music. He still has his double album from the first Star Wars movie, only it’s called The Star Wars. I found myself able to identify a composer when I heard a snippet of music that I hadn’t heard before. I’m not kidding! 

I would be surprised at anyone who didn’t know John Williams, composer of Star Wars, three Harry Potter movies, Jaws and much more, but if you have seen Lost In Space as a child, you heard his music before any of those. In those days his credits showed him as Johnny Williams. 

In the 2000s we got Howard Shore, whose music for the Lord Of The Rings movies was the closest we got to John Williams in style. 

However, in my early years, I was loving the work of Miklos Rosza, a Hungarian composer who came to Hollywood in the 1940s, to score The Thief Of Baghdad, and stayed. Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis were his, as was King Of Kings and El Cid. I’ve even found some of his music was used in the 1950s Adventures Of Superman!

I grew up with the epics and their composers. I loved Alex North’s score for Spartacus, but only later found out he wrote one for 2001: A Space Odyssey, before it was decided to keep the temporary classical music score that was just supposed to give the composer an idea of what they had in mind. I have to admit, however good Alex North’s music was, there is just nothing like the beauty of Thus Spake Zarathustra as the opening theme.

I discovered Ennio Morricone not through the spaghetti westerns for which he is best known, but through a telemovie, Moses Lawgiver, for which he composed tunes I’m still humming to this day. Of course, I also love the more famous tunes. I’ve heard them played by orchestras on YouTube and they are glorious. 

There are so many amazing composers from the earlier years of cinema, such as Elmer Bernstein and Erich Korngold, but we will leave it there for now, because I want to talk about some more recent ones, especially those who have been composing for Marvel films and TV. I’ve bought some to play over and over.

Christophe Beck and Michael Paraskevas wrote a delightful score for Hawkeye, the Christmas themed mini series, in which superhero Hawkeye - archer Clint Barton - has to come out of retirement to help Kate Bishop, a fellow archer who might be killed without it. In the course of the series, we have character themes, but also adapted carols and Nutcracker music. I couldn’t help laughing when the villains’ van drove along to a sinister version of “Dance Of The Sugarplum Fairy”. I discovered that Christophe Beck also wrote for Buffy The Vampire Slayer. 

In the same show, there were two more composers, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who created a delightful song, “Save The City”, supposedly from a show called Rogers: The Musical. You can see a 37 minute complete version of the show on YouTube. It has half a dozen songs. 

British composer Natalie Holt wrote some gorgeous music for Loki, including a string quintet version of the main theme, and all the music except the main theme, for Obi Wan Kenobi - that was by John Williams, of course. 

I’ve recently discovered Laura Karpman, who did the music for The Marvels, Ms Marvel and What If…? I particularly enjoyed The Marvels, which had some very over the top themes and music to match. One scene had our heroines, Carole Danvers, Kamala Khan and Monica Rambeau arrive on a planet where people communicate in song, so you have a Broadway musical world and they are welcomed with a massive chorus. Carole is actually married to the Prince and has to dress as a Disney Princess and dance with him, singing along, to be able to warn him about the coming villain. 

A totally hilarious scene in that film showed alien kittens chasing down the crew of a space station and swallowing them so the entire crew can be evacuated in one small shuttle. And what was the music here? “Memory” from Cats! Sung by Barbra Streisand. I suppose the composer could have created her own tune here, but this one truly worked. 

The first woman to score a massive superhero movie was Pinar Toprak, who composed the score for Captain Marvel, in which we first met Carole Danvers. 

So, why do I enjoy film music so much? It adds to the story I’m watching and when I play the score by itself, it takes me back to the film. These days, so many film scores are mostly existing songs that don’t require a composer to interpret the story. Sometimes that works, as in 2001, but I mostly prefer those that are created especially to help tell the story. 

What about you? Do you have preferences? A favourite film score or composer? Let me know in the comments. I may consider writing about this theme in the A to Z this year.

Just Finished Reading…The Nubian’s Curse by Barbara Hambly. UK and US, Severn House, 2024

 

December 1840. Surgeon turned piano-player Benjamin January is looking forward to a peaceful holiday with his family. But the arrival of an old friend brings unexpected news - and unexpected danger.

Persephone Jondrette has found Arithmus, a Sudanese man with extraordinary mental abilities who January last saw in France, nearly fifteen years ago, during a ghost-hunting expedition to a haunted chateau. January and his friends survived the experience , but Arithmus' benefactor, the British explorer Deverel Wishart, did not. He was discovered dead one morning, his face twisted in horror, and shortly afterwards Arithmus vanished, never to be seen again.

Did Deverel succumb to the chateau's ghosts - or did Arithmus murder him and run away? January is determined to uncover the truth about the tragic incident from his past, and clear his old friend's name - but even he isn't prepared for what happens next . . .

This is the twentieth novel in the Benjamin January series of historical crime fiction. There are also shorter stories in this universe, self published by the author on Smashwords. Benjamin is an African American living and working in New Orleans in the 1830s and 40s, making his living mostly from music, but also as a sleuth. He has a cop buddy, Abishag Shaw, and a fellow musician friend, Hannibal Sefton, an Irishman with a Stradivarius violin, telling us his family background is more than we might think.

There is still a murder mystery lingering from 1825, and people who were there are in America, still suffering. When the Vicomtesse he knew as opera dancer Persephone Jondrette approaches him, Benjamin agrees to travel to Natchez to see his old friends and find out what happened. Meanwhile, his niece Zizi-Marie is about to get married and there is about to be another murder…

This is one of a number of novels in this series that has flashbacks to Benjamin’s time in France, and we meet his first wife, Ayasha. 

It’s amazing how this series is still going strong, after twenty novels and several short stories and novelettes. I have been thoroughly enjoying all of them. Most of them have historical events in the background and some even have historical figures, such as Edgar Allan Poe(Good Man Friday) and P.T Barnum(House Of The Patriarch). There aren’t any historical figures or events in this one, but the Nubian’s Curse title refers to a scholar who has a manuscript and a goddess figure proving the existence of the Nubian Dynasty of Egypt, something most whites really don’t want to believe. There is also mention of this new thing called chloroform…

If you haven’t read the series, it’s probably best to begin with the first two books, but you don’t need to read all of them in order. They have regular and semi regular characters, but, like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, can be read more or less stand alone.

Highly recommended! 

The series is available in both Apple Books and Kindle, also in Kobo, audiobook and print. 

Just Finished Reading … The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett

Here’s my first review for the year! 

This was my Jolabokaflode reading for Christmas Eve 2023, and it was great fun, perfect for Christmas Eve reading.

The Fairway Players, an amateur drama group, are performing their annual Christmas pantomime. This year, it’s Jack And The Beanstalk, and they have managed to borrow a Beanstalk prop from another drama group. Actually, the Fairway Players had performed this show before, about thirty years ago, using the same prop. 

And during this performance, a skeleton in a Santa Claus costume tumbles out of the Beanstalk. 

All this while all sorts of crazy things are going wrong. The plan is to end the show with Santa Claus handing out sweets to the children in the audience, as the company does every year, but the sweets they have ordered turn out to be something else, not remotely suitable for children. 

Mind you, the children in the audience seem to think the show is hilarious, just what they want to see.

The title is based on the fact that they are trying to raise money to fix the roof of the church where they are performing, because it was wrecked by bat poo during their last show. 

The novel is entirely written in emails, text messages and extracts from police interviews. It feels very real, because everyone is slanging off and backstabbing everyone else in the company, whether it’s over getting to play a plum role or over who gets to make the decisions on what plays are chosen. The author has done amateur drama herself, and I suspect she has experienced at least some of this behaviour. 

And meanwhile, they have a skeleton to deal with. Who could have done it? Somehow, that is less important than who gets to play the lead in the next production, or even what the next show is going to be - farce is so out of date…except, maybe, the farce happening around them?

Definitely worth a read, if you enjoy your cosy mysteries funny - which I certainly do. 

The novel is easily available from any good book web site. If you want it in ebook, it’s available in both Apple Books and Kindle. You can also buy it in Audible audiobook. 

 

In Which I Fulfil A New Year’s Eve Tradition - The Rocky Horror Picture Show!

 

Tonight was New Year’s Eve, so I grabbed the chance to go out for a New Year’s Eve tradition: a viewing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

You can, of course, just play the movie on DVD or streaming. Disney + streams it, or you can buy and download it. But it’s not the same.

If you go to see it at the cinema, it’s a sing-along with a pre film show, an MC dressed as the main character, Frank N Furter, who calls out the “virgins” who haven’t seen it before and stages a costume parade for the cosplayers, with prizes for the best ones. I’ve been to a showing where people dressed as some of the characters turn up on stage to sing along. 

Tonight I went to my local cinema, the Classic. We were offered sparkling wine and a pack which contained a number of items that helped us do the traditional stuff, eg confetti to throw in the opening wedding scene and a newspaper to put over our heads during the rain scene(and were showered by people with spray bottles). During “There’s A Light Over At The Frankenstein Place” we all sang along and waved our phones using the torch app. When I first saw this film, with my cousin and his wife, people brought candles and lighters - how times have changed! I think the phones were much safer than candles.

Of course, there was “The Time Warp”, only this was the first time I saw everybody dance it! When I was going to the Year 12 Formals the kids danced it every year, as well as the Macarena and “Summer Lovin’” from Grease. 

And the film was just as much fun as always. In case you aren’t familiar, it has fun with old science fiction movies of the 1940s and 50s. You know the drill: the young lovers have a car breakdown and go to a scary house and ask to use the phone…

Richard O’Brien, the show’s creator, was in it. You may have seen him elsewhere in, say, Flash Gordon and Season 3 of Robin Of Sherwood, in which he played an evil sorcerer working for the villain. The lead, Frank N Furter, was played by Tim Curry, who is best known for this film, but has done plenty of other shows and films, such as a dashing Pirate King in a stage production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates Of Penzance. I’ve also seen him in The Life Of Shakespeare, in the title role. He made a  wonderful Shakespeare, but you wouldn’t recognise him between this and Rocky Horror.

If you’d like to see the stage show, with Richard O’Brien, here is a link to it on YouTube. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rYZOFZrghqE&pp=ygUWcm9ja3kgaG9ycm9yIHNob3cgbGl2ZQ==

 

Anyway, I had a great time! I haven’t seen it since before the pandemic, so I was glad to go tonight.

Just Finished Reading… Wages Of Sin By Harry Turtledove. Perseus Books, 2023

 

This is the latest novel by the “Master of Alternative Universe”. In this case, the “what if…?” is “what if HIV arrived in Europe in the 16th century?”

In 1509, some Portuguese traders buy slaves in Africa, to take back to Lisbon. One of them is a beautiful teenage girl, who is passed around the crew. She has been raped by her captors before being sold. So… 

In 1851 - not the Victorian era, but the reign of King Michael III - England is very different from the one we know. AIDS, known as the Wasting, is common enough that strict measures have been  taken to control its spread. Victims are branded with a W as a warning to others not to sleep with them. Women are forced to wear burqas when they go out, to avoid tempting men - which doesn’t stop them from being groped and catcalled in public. England is still Catholic, because Henry VIII died of AIDS  - no surprise there - before he could break from Rome.

Not a world we would like to live in!

The novel is seen through the eyes of engaged couple Peter and Viola. It is an arranged marriage, but the young couple are willing. She is a doctor’s daughter in Salisbury, he is studying law in London. Most of the novel is about what is happening with each of them. Peter is trying to avoid temptation despite his randy room mate’s regular brothel attendance. Viola is frustrated by having no freedom, though her father is very supportive of her. 

She writes a book. 

I found it very readable and finished it quickly, but if you are expecting adventure like that in such other books as The Guns Of The South, you won’t find it here. There is no uprising, no cure found for the disease, no change of society. It’s just a story about what it might be like to live in that one. 

Interestingly, Viola’s novel, inspired by the travel tales she loves to read since she can’t actually travel, is about what it might be to live somewhere where the Wasting hasn’t taken hold.

Recommended. The book is available in both Apple Books and Kindle ebooks, or in print.

Some Book Based Shows I’m Watching!

 I have just watched the first two episodes of Percy Jackson And The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, which is now showing on Disney +. The first two episodes are up, not sure when the rest will be in.

Having read the book, I have to say I’m impressed. It feels very faithful to the novel, unlike the film. The show is well cast and the effects are amazing. It does help that the author, Rick Riordan, is involved and has written some episodes. Having the author involved is not always the best idea, but in this case, it works well. 

In case you aren’t familiar with the story, it’s about a young boy, Percy(Perseus)Jackson, who discovers he is a demi god, the son of sea god Poseidon. After some attempts to kill him, he is taken to Camp Halfbood, where children of the Olympian gods learn and train together. There, he makes some friends, Annabeth Chase(the cousin of Magnus Chase, hero of another book series, which I hope will be filmed some time) and satyr Grover, who had been keeping an eye on him at school. The three of them go on a quest/road trip to find the stolen lightning bolt of Zeus. 

I am thoroughly enjoying seeing this and looking forward to the rest! 

Another show I’m watching but haven’t finished yet is The Artful Dodger, about the character from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. In it, the Dodger - Jack Hawkins - has grown up and is using his hands for something better than picking pockets. He is a surgeon, living and working in  Australia during the convict era. One day, to his horror, Fagin arrives as a convict. Fagin is the last person he wants to see, especially as Fagin let him down back in England. Anyway,  Jack thought he was dead, but apparently Oliver Twist had saved him from the gallows. Neither of them is an Oliver Twist fan, by the way. Jack has his own secrets, so he reluctantly asks for Fagin as a convict servant and Fagin, who is a likeable rogue,  not a villain in this show, helps him with a big problem.

The role of Fagin was played by David Thewliss, whom I have only ever seen as Professor Lupin in the Harry Potter films. I wouldn’t have recognised him! 

I’ve just started watching Lovecraft Country, which I bought on Apple TV. It’s set in the 1950s and about Atticus, a young African American who has just returned from Korea and is looking for his missing father. There are supernatural elements, as you might have guessed from the title. I’ve read the novel, by Matt Ruff, and found it great fun, but the TV show seems to be a lot more serious. Only one episode so far. The star is Jonathan Majors, whose acting career is over, it seems, after he was found guilty of some violent actions. 

Another cast member, Wunmi Mosaku, was in Loki as Hunter B15. She is British, but does an American accent in both shows. Nice to see a familiar face, as well as Jonathan Majors, who was the villain in Loki, as well as a decent variant of the baddie.

It’s Christmas Eve, time to retire to bed and reread Susan Cooper’s masterpiece The Dark Is Rising. Good night! 

In Which I Show Off An Anthology I’m In

 The last few days have been fun and games with the courier working for Amazon. The courier is pretty hopeless, but when you contact Amazon they usually tell you that due to “privacy concerns” they can’t contact them and tell you to do it yourself. This particular bunch never pick up, as I have found in the past, and don’t even leave a card to tell you they have been there. Once, they left my parcel in someone’s back yard - no idea whose - with a photo to prove they delivered it. This time they said they hadn’t been able to deliver it, despite my being at home at the time! 

Never mind, I finally got through to a very kind and helpful  Amazon employee in Sydney, explained in great detail and he fixed it for me, letting the driver know to leave the parcel at my front door. 

And here it is!

I have a story in this anthology and got my contributor’s copy in ebook, but I like to have a print copy of anything I’m in. How else can I brag? Even to myself? 

It’s a Jewish-themed anthology, with stories about “rescuing ourselves”. Mine is set in Melbourne, where I live, and has a sort-of dybbuk in it. 

It was the first time I have been part of the demographic invited to submit to an anthology, so I finally wrote a story I’d had in mind, but never got around to writing.

Nice cover, isn’t it? Despite the cover title, it’s just called Days Of Awe. But I do like the cover title. “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat!” is basically what most of our holy days boil down to.

There are quite a variety of themes in these stories. 

If you’d like a copy, you can only get it on Amazon, but now you can get it both in Kindle and print. It’s edited by Aviva Blakeman, who mostly writes romance novels, but decided to try her hand at an anthology.

Here is the link to the Australian site because looking up books on Amazon is a bit difficult.

https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0CPVRZVD3?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

And here is the link to the US Amazon site.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=aviva+blakeman+days+of+awe&i=digital-text&crid=2ZNUBC4CLA0UP&sprefix=,digital-text,279&ref=nb_sb_ss_recent_1_0_recent