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Article - A
Chat with The Composer
BY
ARTHUR KNIGHT
ca.
April 1972
LONDON
- The lights dimmed in the fashionable Leicester Square Odeon, and
from behind the glowing orange stage curtains came a blast of thumping,
amorphous sound that purported to be music. Soon it was joined by
a thin, childlike voice that kept singing, "Curiouser and curiouser"
. . . and some other words that got lost between the forced volume
(obviously based on someone's notion that more is better) and the
inadequacy of the theatre’s sound system to reproduce in the
higher registers.
All
this was the prelude to a midnight screening of excerpts from a
forthcoming, multistarred production of Alice's Adventures In
Wonderland, due here around Christmas. For a preview, as well
as a glimpse of the actual shooting, American National, which opens
the U.S. and Canadian rights to Alice, flew to London
a planeload of about eighty prospective exhibitors, some sixty press
and TV people, and perhaps thirty-five of its own key executives.
The screening was intended to be the highlight of the trip.
Unfortunately,
as was soon apparent, it was anything but. To be sure, one
could recognize in the excerpts such luminaries as Sir Ralph Richardson
as the Caterpillar, Peter Seller's as the March hare, Sir Robert
Helpmann as the Mad Hatter, and, if one looked very closely beneath
the make-up, Michael Crawford as the White Rabbit. The excerpts,
however, were studded with printed slugs reading "Scene Missing,"
the editing was still rough, the colour and the sound unbalanced.
The underscoring, so important to a film of this sort, had yet to
be written and many in the audience stated that they found the songs
themselves uninspired.
As
it happened, I had purposely sought out John Barry, Alice's composer,
during my visit to the rambling Shepperton studio the day before,
mainly because his was one of the few behind-the-camera names with
which I was familiar. Also, I have consistently admired his work,
from the rock variations of The Knack to the medieval classicism
of The Lion In Winter, and from the pungent guitar concerto
that accompanied Boom! to the blaring, driving rhythms of
the James Bond pictures. I was curious to discover the kind of man
who composed so effectively in so many different idioms.
There
is probably no more endearing introduction to an artist than a display
of familiarity with his work. In any case, before the afternoon
was over, Barry - a lean, tall fellow who looks at least a decade
younger than his thirty-nine years - had auditioned the entire score
for me on the superb stereo system installed in his sleek white
Citroen '72. "Actually," he said, half-apologetically, "the sound
here is far better than the studio's sound system, and the tracks
for my cartridges are properly mixed, while the film tracks won't
be finally mixed until September."
I
found John Barry's music for Alice - all twenty-one numbers - utterly
charming, ingeniously orchestrated, and wholly different from any
of his scores that I was familiar with. For one thing, it was more
tender, more romantic, much in the spirit of Prokofiev's nostalgic
modernisms in the Romeo and Juliet or Cinderella ballets, although
interspersed were Elgaresque fanfares, and a hilarious patter song
between Sellers and Helpmann that owed more to the Twenties' music
halls than to Gilbert and Sullivan. Somehow, Barry had managed to
make an orchestra that never numbered more than fifty sound like
twice that many. And the lyrics by Don Black - often witty, sometimes
poetic - always seemed to ride effortlessly just above the surface
of their accompaniment.
Next
day, over a kipper mousse at Burke's Club, Barry somewhat diffidently
began to talk about composing for films. Although he had a classical
education in music, his entrance into the film field was through
association with a rock group, the John Barry Seven, and a period
as accompanist to a rock singer named Adam Faith (who seems to have
been the British Elvis Presley). When Faith went into the movies,
Barry went with him. The duo did not remain together very long.
"We had different ideas about music," said Barry, succinctly.
"I've
come to look on music as a voice, an attitude, that exists outside
the film itself," he continued. "If the music is saying the very
same thing as the pictures, then obviously it is being redundant.
If you begin to notice the music as an intrusion, then it is bad.
But if you become aware of the music emotionally and are responding
to it along with the film itself, then it is a good score. I feel
that the film composer should be, first, a good dramatist, and,
second, a good composer. He should be able to expand, through his
music, what the film is saying, not merely repeat or underline it."
Barry
rejects emphatically the notion that movie music should be bland
or neutral, or simply-as Aaron Copland once put it - "a small lamp
placed beneath the screen to warm it." According to Barry, "If music
doesn't sing, or dance, or have an interesting harmonic concept,
then it shouldn't be there at all. A film score should burn with
its own fire, not merely glow in the dark like a pretty charcoal."
When he reads a new script, it is with an eye to what he can add
to it - and also to what he is not going to do with it. "Choice
is taste," is virtually his maxim, and it applies equally to his
choice of scripts and his choice of the musical forms to accompany
them.
What
concerns him most is the quality (or lack of quality) in most theatre
speaker systems. Barry became extra conscious of this at an early
age, because his father was an exhibitor. "It's absolutely pointless
to go for hi-fi sound in films when you know how it's going to sound
for most audiences," he said. "When I record a score, I go for the
highest quality that the studio can give me. But then I bring in
standard speakers and re-record for these. Actually, it's a recording
calculated to bring out the best in your average theatre installations."
By all odds, he admitted, the sound on his numerous LPs and tapes
was better than anything one might hear in the theatre, or, for
that matter, in the Royal Albert Hall, where the Royal Philharmonic
will perform an all-John Barry program on October 7 (including excerpts
from his score for Goldfinger, which he calls "Mickey Mouse
Wagner").
I
looked around for John Barry at the Leicester Square Odeon on that
last night in London, but failed to spot him. I hope he wasn't there.
What with the curtains that muffled his sound, the unbalanced tracks,
and the Odeon's tubby speakers, he would probably have been tearing
great handfuls out of his long, but already thinning hair. |
