Double Lives in Music: Cultural Mobility Between the Silver Screen and Concert Stage

Description

To hear excerpts from a John Williams film score in a concert hall is not extraordinary anymore. Many of the most lauded contemporary American composers who established their reputations in the concert hall have scored films and increasingly television: Philip Glass, John Adams, Steve Reich, John Cage, John Corigliano, George Crumb, William Bolcom, and Elliott Carter to name a few. But composers who were writing for both the concert stage and silver screen, did not always have it easy in negotiating both these realms.
In the 1930s, “serious” composers writing for the concert stage in the United States often still looked to Europe for validation. Simultaneously, as silent movies made way for the talkies in the late 1920s, Hollywood actively courted European composers to score films. Through a cacophony of revolutions, wars, and developments in the film industry during the first half of the twentieth century, an influx of Russians, Hungarians, French, Swedes, Germans, Austrians, Italians, and other Eastern Europeans made southern California a mecca for old world talent. By the time the Second World War was raging in Europe, Los Angeles had established a close-knit émigré community that included for instance conductors, composers, and musicians. A certain amount of friction emerged within this community, specifically concert composers condescending towards those who, according to Aaron Copland, “sold out” to Hollywood. A small group of composers, among them Richard Hageman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklós Rózsa, and Bernard Herrmann, were the first to attempt to bridge this divide by forging careers as composers in Hollywood while continuing to write for the concert hall.
This presentation focuses on the cultural mobility, and at times musical exile, in the mid-century compositional careers of Warner Bros.’s poster boy Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Paramount’s answer to Korngold, Richard Hageman.

Period	15 Aug 2025
Held at	University of Melbourne, Australia
Degree of Recognition	International