Sound of Movies: UNCSA chancellor will conduct works of 2 key Hollywood composers

John Mauceri, the chancellor of UNC School of the Arts, often conducts symphonic fare. And when he does, there's a good chance that classic Hollywood film scores will be on the program, along with his insightful commentary about them.

Such will be the case on Thursday when he leads the North Carolina Symphony in "Hollywood Émigrés and Protégés" at the Stevens Center.

The concert, part of "Six Days in November," has found its inspiration in "the journey to America by the two greatest Viennese composers in the 20th century: Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold," Maurceri said, and it will illustrate how they helped shape the Hollywood sound.

Listeners will hear music by Schoenberg, Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, Richard Strauss and John Williams, with selections taken from such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Psycho.

Maurceri gave local listeners a taste of what they'll hear Thursday when he participated in a symposium called "Tracking Sound: The Evolution of Hollywood Film Music." This was presented Nov. 3 at the UNCSA School of Filmmaking. Dale Pollock, who teaches at the film school, moderated a discussion that also included Grant Llewellyn, the N.C. Symphony's music director, and Scott Freck, the symphony's vice president for artistic operations and general manager.

During "Tracking Sound," Mauceri suggested that Korngold, who came to Hollywood in the 1930s, set the standard for film scoring, saying that he "could completely translate the length of a film clip to the amount of music he would write at a certain speed."

Llewellyn expressed admiration for this skill, calling the music Hollywood's earliest film composers wrote as good as "anything that was being produced for the serious symphonic platform at the time."

Mauceri suggested that these film composers were adapting techniques of writing for the European theater.

"There were lots of scores written for plays," he said. "It makes sense that (they) would … take to this idea."

Toward the end of "Tracking Sound," the symposium's participants explored through recordings how Schoenberg and Korngold influenced the Hollywood composers who came after them.

Before a minute of Schoenberg's atonal music was played, Mauceri said, "It's the kind of the music that generally makes people uncomfortable. But if you think about horror movies and science-fiction movies, you get some idea of the influence that Arnold Schoenberg had -- in spite of the fact that he didn't write any film music." Mauceri then played a clip of Bernard Hermann conducting the CBS Symphony Orchestra in Schoenberg's Second Chamber Symphony in the early 1940s and by the final bars from Hermann's Psycho soundtrack.

"It's almost the same gestures, as you can see," Mauceri said. "The influence of Korngold and Schoenberg continues today in the use of non-tonal elements in telling the story."

The recordings of two fanfares were played, fanfares that will open Thursday's concert. One was written by Schoenberg, for a Hollywood Bowl concert Leopold Stokowski conducted in the 1945; the other came from the soundtrack that Korngold composed for King's Row (1942).

Korngold's fanfare, which sounded much like Star Wars, prompted Pollack to say, "Do we wonder if John Williams was slightly influenced by that?"

Mauceri said that George Lucas, the director of Star Wars, had been listening to a temp track of the Korngold fanfare when he approached Williams to write the Star Wars soundtrack. A temp track, which is what a director hears during the editing process of a film, gives him an idea of the kind of music he'd like composed for it.

"Part of the great success of Star Wars is because of this gigantic Viennese score that accompanies this little puppet show, this cartoon," Mauceri said. "The idea was for (Williams) to write in the great Viennese tradition.… That's part of why the concert is called ‘Émigrés and Protégés.' John Williams worked in Hollywood in the 1950s when all the people who invented film scoring were still scoring.… He was very much influenced by them."

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The North Carolina Symphony will present "Hollywood Émigrés and Protégés" at 8 p.m. Thursday in the Stevens Center. "Hollywood" is a joint benefit concert to support the N.C. Symphony Music Education programs and the UNCSA School of Music Scholarship Program. Tickets are $25-$75, with discounts for students. Visit www.uncsa.edu/performances or call 721-1945.