Masters of Movie Music

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Schoenberg demanded that the movies be edited to fit his music. Shostakovich wrote music for more than twenty pictures, composing scores for everything from silent films to King Lear. These titans of musical modernism were willing to write movie music not only for the money but also because they realized that although film music is certainly a different medium from concert music, it is by no means intrinsically lesser music. The melodies, harmonies, colors, rhythms, and forms of movie music can be every bit as effective and affective as music for the concert hall. The quality of the music is determined by the composer and not by the medium.

On Saturday, November 15, Arie Lipsky and the Ann Arbor Symphony will offer ample proof of the aesthetic validity of movie music by performing an entire program of music composed for films. The list of composers is a who's who of international modernism — the American Aaron Copland, the Russian Sergey Prokofiev, and the Englishman William Walton — plus a couple of the great Hollywood film composers, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and John Williams, and one very wild wild card — Michael Daugherty, Ann Arbor composer and American postmodernist sui generis. The music on the program is technically no easier to perform than concert music; indeed, with its vivid, chromatic melodies, its evocative, sharp-edged harmonies, and brilliantly Technicoloresque orchestrations, the music on the program is every bit as demanding as the most difficult scores by Strauss or Mahler.