Thursday, October 23, 2008

Page 56

Meant to do this yesterday. From A Heart at Fire's Center . . .

("When they see my name on it they'll throw bricks at you," [Ives] told Herrmann). The dedication remained.

Herrmann began three other concert works between 1936 and 1940, only the nonprogrammatic Nocturne and Scherzo (dedicated to Howard Barlow), written in the summer of 1936, was completed. The other, larger-scale pieces (another cantata, based on the story of Johnny Appleseed, and a "fiddle concerto") apparently never satisfied their creator. For Herrmann, the concert idiom was less rewarding, creatively and financially, than the more immediate challenge of dramatic scoring at CBS. Herrmann would spend most of the 1930s writing short, ingenious cues for radio dramas and conducting the network's expanding (and improving) concert orchestra.

2 comments:

Robin B. said...

Looks like you're being a good girl and reading your textbooks, huh? I find this really interesting. It's different for a non-musical person to think about the scoring and music that brings the words and the shows that I watch to life.

(I took lessons, but no skills. That and I have a tone free and seriously awful singing voice.)

Stacy said...

What's interesting to me about Bernard Herrmann was how much of a music geek he was (and I mean that in the best possible way). I'm going through his biography and downloading the composers that influenced him. So far I don't really get his admiration for Elgar, though.

It might interest you to know he was a big English lit fan—he collected everything he could on the Bronte sisters.

I have a terrible singing voice, too. It used be pretty good, with lessons, but I let it go to seed with too much coffee.