I adore Jack Levine. I love hearing his voice so much that I almost resent the music in the movie, though I like Henry Brant's music and I always love to know composers and musicians are getting work. I'd have hired Brant to write music for a movie about his music and had more Levine narrating his working. Levine's timing was more appropriate. I love seeing and hearing him explain how he developed the painting.
I remember once when the Portland Symphony in Maine did a piece of his - I can't remember which one - and Brant showed up. Someone said one of the teachers at the University said he reminded him of me. It was kind of dumb, he was about eight hundred years old by the time, I was not, and he was dashing around very eccentrically wearing a cape. I wore the drabbest work clothes comfortable for practicing, less fashionable than a Mao jacket would have been and didn't dash around. It's funny, I remember the time Barbara Kolb was there better. Her piece was called Grisaille, after the classical technique of painting that I thought was going to be where Levine went at the start. As I recall, at a rehearsal she had the sudden inspiration to have about seven snare drums around the front of the stage playing together to end the piece. I remember it being very effective, though I haven't heard the piece since that night.
Funny how things form associations in your memory. I wonder what year that was.
Update: I looked up the scoring for Grisaille at the Boosey and Hawkes websites, as of now there are 5 snare drums listed. I only recall knowing two of the drummers at the premier so my memory might be faulty.
Update 2: Auto spell check is being especially artificially unintelligent right now so I've got to be more careful than I got used to.
The 2 watt bulb of musical enlightenment is bringing up the sword and sandal movie Spartacus again, I didn't know why till I looked at the Wikipedia article on Brant. Apparently, as happened not infrequently, a show biz tune writer needed help on the orchestration - you'd be surprised at how much of the show biz-movie music that they push as great depended on orchestral effects that they had to hire better composers with better training to create. Apparently Alex North, credited as composing the score for the movie Spartacus, needed Brant's help with the scoring in his movie stuff. Something that if I remembered about Brant, I didn't have any reason to remember it. Even the Wikipedia article states the obvious, that one of the major influences on Brant was Charles Ives. Before I realized whose music it was in the film I thought "someone was listening to Ives, weren't they."
Just for fun, I'll remind you that we have only a few scanty records of the Spartacus rebellion, all of them written by upper class members of that slave-owning society, the modern story of it having anything to do with the abolition of slavery is modern invention. We have no record of what,if any, motives Spatacus and his fellow slaves had, for all we know they intended to keep right on with slavery, them being the slave masters. I think it would have been a lot better if they'd invented characters and didn't present it as ersatz history, though in that case it's so remote in time that it probably is innocuous.
I do have to say, the time we went over that before did make me grateful for one thing, it led to me reading the NOVEL, not the history but the NOVEL by one of those dear old commies, Howard Fast, who I hadn't remembered as being as good a writer as he was. It's sad that the lower end of show-biz has led us into post literacy and no one reads those books anymore.
I was recently reminded of how good another writer of his general vintage and milieu, Laura Z. Hobson was - though as often happens, it was her occasional pieces I found online and not her dated novels that led me to remember she was a very good writer. I remember reading Consenting Adult and being annoyed at it's upper middle-class values, though she handled the scene where the kid loses his virginity better than I'd have expected a straight writer to. I'd have at least had it happen in bed among men who knew each other. Her analysis of what was bad about All In The Family was one of the best pieces of TV criticism I've ever read.
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