Didn't Frank Comstock write arrangements for the Les Brown Band?

Dalvin Boone

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
John Howell
Sent: Friday, May 28, 2010 1:24 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Finale] O.T. Secco recitatives

At 10:56 AM -0400 5/28/10, David W. Fenton wrote:
>
>They may not have physically studied with Schoenberg, et al., but the
>film composers in Hollywood definitely studied and absorbed many
>aspects of the sound (if not the specific techniques) of then-avant
>garde composers, and used them in film. I have read, in fact, that
>different film composers were known for being good at imitating
>particular composers/styles and were the "go-to" composers when a
>film score needed a particular atmosphere.

Isn't "a particular atmosphere" a sine qua non 
for film music?  I'm constantly knocked out by 
the totally different concepts John Williams has 
come up with over a long career, each one 
seemingly crafted specifically for the movie at 
hand--which of course they were!

The name Frank Comstock isn't especially 
well-known even among musicians.  (I was aware of 
him and his creative writing from his work with 
The Hi-Los starting in about 1960.)  But he was 
also a film composer, AND one of the ones who 
would be called in to "fix" badly-conceived music 
that didn't work in setting "a particular 
atmosphere," sometimes having to write a patch 
from the end of one cue to the beginning of 
another after the final cut, exactly matching the 
style of the existing music.  And such superb 
craftsmen often got no screen credit at all, just 
large and very welcome paychecks!  That's an 
industry that pays for results, not for your 
resumé or a list of your teachers.

John


-- 
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411  Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[email protected])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html

"We never play anything the same way once."  Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.

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