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MillimeterThe Sampler
Jan 10, 2005 5:12 PM
Production Music Library History: The Fab ’50s and Beyond
Stop. Put your pencils down. Close your exam book and, without talking, pass it to the person to your right. I will collect them, grade them, and post the results on the wall outside the door. Unfortunately, some of you WILL be repeating this class next year.
Remember last time we talked about how sometimes TV producers would re-record film music to get around the prohibition of re-using film cues? And remember how some producers circumvented the rules by simply lying about the origin of the music they were using for TV programs? Well, then you need to know the name Alexander Lazlo.
Lazlo was a Hungarian musician who wrote film scores for German silent films and then for various European sound films. He moved to the U.S. in the late 1930s and by the mid-’40s had migrated from the East Coast to Hollywood, where he went into the film scoring business, beginning with a Charlie Chan film called The Chinese Cat. Later he started the Guild-Universal Library of production music based on recycled versions of cues he’d written for European films, and it was used widely in the television industry--the theme from the popular program Racket Squad was Lazlo’s (uncredited). Another library he created, called Structural Music, was developed specifically with TV producers in mind. Between 1950 and 1960 he put out 38 volumes of Structural Music, about half of it consisting of cues from more than 50 American films he scored during that period and some TV work he did as well (such as This Is Your Life). It’s estimated that some 25 TV series tapped Lazlo’s discs for either opening or closing credits, with dozens more employing the library for other cues.
Meanwhile, David Chudnow, who had been a music editor at such studios as Republic Pictures and Monogram Pictures, and also worked in that capacity for The Lone Ranger TV series, became a major player in the production music business when he started the MUTEL (Music for Television) Music Service, based largely on cues from movie cues he’d accumulated through the years. Like other libraries of this era, he often took themes and cues that had already been used, made minor variations in them, and then had them re-recorded (in Europe) to get around the U.S. Musician’s Union bans we discussed last time.
Like Lazlo’s Structural Music series, the MUTEL discs were widely used on American TV through the 1950s, on programs ranging from The Adventures of Superman to Sky King. (If you remember either of those shows--as I do--it’s time for your Geritol fix.) However, beginning in 1954, part of Chudnow’s library was also licensed to Capitol Special Products as The Capitol “Q” Series. The 78s were supposedly intended to be used on live broadcasts, but of course there was no mechanism in those days for checking how the cues were employed.
Throughout the late ’50s, more composers found ways to market their music to television and film producers, and eventually, of course, the Musician’s Union came to realize that production music sessions would actually bring more work to their members, so recording studios in Hollywood and other music centers started turning out home-grown production music without fear of reprisal. By the mid-’60s, tastes in music had changed so much that there wasn’t much call for the recycled film themes from the ’30s through ’50s. Increasingly, library companies created original music that was in tune with the times, and the old guard quietly gave way to young composers who had their fingers on the pulse of modern film and TV. There would be changes in the delivery method of production music from 78s to LPs to CD to online, but that’s a tale for another day down the road…
Opening Up the MusicBox
The bi-coastal library company MusicBox Music is an outgrowth of the work of its busy co-founders, Joel Goodman and Dan Stein. Friends since they attended the Berklee College of Music together, they had been writing commissioned music for TV and films for many years, and starting a library company seemed to be a natural progression for them. They started MusicBox Music three years ago, putting out several thematic discs of their own music; now it encompasses the work of numerous composers. “We’ve built a 50-CD, 1,000-track stock musical library,” Goodman says. The releases are coming fast and furious--about one each month.
Goodman says that the move into library music was partially dictated by the new economics of the TV scoring business. “I’ve always tried to keep an eye on what’s coming down the road in the TV world, and what I saw is that music budgets were dwindling, and people wanted more material for less money. How were we going to succeed in that type of market? We’d been looking at the library business from afar for a number of years, but it took us a while to get enough material that people would take us seriously as a library. We didn’t want to do it until we knew we had a lot to offer. I know some people get into the business when they have three or four discs worth of material, and they do fine, but we wanted to have more available.
“There are so many libraries and so much material out there, and I’d say 75 percent of it has a very similar sound. So hopefully we can differentiate what we do from the others by taking a fresh approach.” Goodman notes that “one of the great parts of doing this been working with other composers because everyone excels at something or is inspired by some particular style or wants to try their hand at something.”
As for himself, “I love scoring [specific projects],” Goodman says. “It’s what I grew up with, and I still love it and that would always be my [first] choice, but on the other hand, to be able to write a piece of music without a client looking over your shoulder can be a very rewarding experience and a great way to spread your wings and experiment. Obviously if you’re writing library music, it still has direction, but within those parameters, if someone tells you to go out and write a five-horn funk chart and do it in a paryicular style, that can be really exciting. I’m enjoying doing both kinds [commissioned and library]."
Both Goodman and Stein have Pro Tools-based studios in the L.A. area, and they’ve also opened an office in New York. "We do a lot in our studios," Goodman says, "but we also do a lot of live recording, depending on the project, in all sorts of different studios."
With titles like Stereophonic Martini, Flower Power, Electrolounge, and Twisted Public Domain in their catalog, Goodman and Stein are clearly having fun with their library venture--and that’s one reason their boutique operation has been growing steadily ever since it started.
For more info go to www.musicboxmx.com.
Ann Kroeber, FRAPs, and the AFI SFX Library
If you don’t know Ann Kroeber’s name, you certainly have heard her work. She has supplied sound effects for such diverse films as The Black Stallion, The English Patient, Gladiator, the Lord of the Rings films, Hidalgo, The Horse Whisperer, the recent Star Wars trilogy, and many others.
Although she is often called upon to supply sounds from her huge collection of animal noises/vocalizations, she is also renowned for her unusual recordings of sounds from everyday life, many recorded with a FRAP (Frequency Response Audio Pickup) contact microphone custom-made many years ago by an English audio guru named Arnie Lazarus. In fact the Hollywood Edge FX library (www.hollywoodedge.com) even put out a disc of her FRAP recordings--Common Sounds Heard in Uncommon Ways--as part of a three-CD set called Sounds of a Different Realm. The other two of the discs are dominated by the work of her late husband, Oscar-winning FX designer/editor Alan Splett, who did groundbreaking work with Carroll Ballard, David Lynch, and other directors before his untimely passing in 1995.
I checked in with Kroeber recently to talk about her sound design work on Ballard’s forthcoming film Duma, about the adventures of a young boy and a cheetah in South Africa (set for mid-February release; the article will appear in the March issue of Mix), and while I was admiring her wall of hundreds of SFX audio tapes in her office at the Saul Zaentz Film Center in Berkeley, she revealed that many of the reels were from Alan Splett’s one-of-a-kind collection of sound effects compiled by the American Film Institute through the years.
“Alan worked at the AFI when he was doing [David Lynch’s] Eraserhead,” she says. “He was hired to catalog their sound library, and he also made copies of the tapes for himself as part of their arrangement. Then there was a flood in their basement and [the AFI’s] copies were ruined, so then Alan had the only copies. And it’s just amazing stuff. There’s all sorts of World War II airplanes that were done for old movies. There’s traffic in the ’40s and ’50s in different cities--it just sound so different that what you hear now. There’s people’s voices--old walla; it’s different, too. And the sound quality on a lot of it is awesome. I’d love to work with the AFI to make it available.”
Ideally, Kroeber could get a grant to pay for digitizing the entire collection and putting it up online, making it available to students and sound professionals for the first time. Nothing is in the offing at the moment, but perhaps something will materialize sooner than later. We’d all be the better for it. Stay tuned.
