Unsung 'Cinematic Symphonies': Symphonies which sound like film music

[sdtom]

I know that Andrew would love to see the work performed. I tried to get the Minnesota to perform it and they politely laughed at me.

[Mark Thomas]

Well at least they were polite, Tom.

[ancestralvoices]

Joaquin Rodgrigo

Symphonic Poem  -- Per la flor del Lliri blau(For the Flower of the Blue Lily)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY6tWfN1Mc0

[Alan Howe]

With respect: that's not a symphony!

[ancestralvoices]

No, it isn't. I asked the question in my first post if the OP would also want other symphonic works.

I'll wait for a response before continuing with other suggestions.

[Alan Howe]

Let's stick to symphonies, please, otherwise the thread's about any old music that sounds like film music.

[sdtom]

I'm sorry that Andrew didn't post as I told him about it and he read the comments, quite flattered with Alan. He has moved on and writes material that doesn't require $40,000 to perform. Again we get back to all about money, very sad.
Tom

[jerfilm]

I'm listening to the Pearce right now on Spotify and it doesn't sound like anything romantic - late or otherwise.  Am I missing something?

Jerry

[Alan Howe]

With the greatest of respect: you're missing something... 

[Mark Thomas]

I'd say that it's as romantic as the later Mahler symphonies: spiky and dissonant in places, but basically melodic and tonal. Pearce is certainly a master of orchestration, making the work very atmospheric, but his melodic material tends to be rather short-winded and commonplace. Given the cinematic idiom, one does yearn for a big John Williams tune but, that said, it's an impressive work and I enjoyed it.

[Alan Howe]

Yes, the one thing the symphony lacks is a great tune. But I can forgive Mr Pearce for this as the piece is clearly a proper thought-through symphony as opposed to a series of film themes stitched together into a glorified suite.

[sdtom]

http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.559017

Grofe wrote a hollywoood suite which depicts Hollywood in a different way. You can get this release for under $10.00.
Tom

[chill319]

A few random thoughts on a fun subject.

The artists at Disney showed in two "Fantasia" movies that, given enough visual imagination, the right music from virtually any period of history can be rendered genuinely cinematic. (Whether it _should_ be so rendered is another matter.) Perhaps the most intricately interwoven collaboration of animation and music I know was achieved when animator Don Bluth and composer James Horner collaborated on a film called "The Land before Time" that is essentially a multi-movement late-romantic symphony.

But such collaborations are rare. In most films, including those scored by Korngold, music is used especially for its power to define scenes, or set pieces, not to create large structures. Not surprising since film music surely started in the silent era as an extension of incidental music for stage plays. Speaking of Grieg ( ), whatever one might say in favor of his early symphony, as a work by a talented Leipzig graduate it is surely far too busy ringing the changes expected of a mid-nineteenth-century symphony to sound as cinematic as, say, the soaring, long-lined "Morning" or the demonic "Hall of the Mountain King" from Peer Gynt -- set pieces borrowed more than once for cinema.

Opera, particularly Wagner, is an obvious second model; ballet an obvious third. During the period that Korngold was importing the sweeping soundscapes of Strauss into cinema set pieces, his fellow countryman Hollander was perfecting another kind of film music as comic, often balletic, commentary on screen shenanigans, different in tone but not intent from various passages in, say, Siegfried. This, of course, is not what is meant by 'cinematic' here, any more than is Copland's Red Pony score (though perhaps the first brooding 20 minutes of Herrmann's score to Psycho might be).

Overall, I have to agree with those who would say that while whatever is symphonic in a symphony can be combined with whatever is sweepingly 'cinematic' in scores for set-pieces, that linkage is entirely arbitrary.

And speaking of Glière ( ), I can't hear the opening of his Symphony 2 without seeing a team of galloping horses pulling a sleigh across frozen wastes. And speaking of Stravinsky (ever so briefly), he confessed to Craft in his old age that his own putatively abstract Symphony in 3 Movements was written to a cinematic scenario.

[sdtom]

I didn't know that. I understand he was approached by Hollywood but it never worked out.

Herrmann wrote a 20 minute or so "Concerto Macabre" for the film "Hangover Square". Any thoughts on this?

Tom