Henry Mancini
Reinventing Film Music
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- 11,99 €
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- 11,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
Through film composer Henry Mancini, mere background music in movies became part of pop culture--an expression of sophistication and wit with a modern sense of cool and a lasting lyricism that has not dated. The first comprehensive study of Mancini’s music, Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music describes how the composer served as a bridge between the Big Band period of World War II and the impatient eclecticism of the Baby Boomer generation, between the grand formal orchestral film scores of the past and a modern American minimalist approach. Mancini’s sound seemed to capture the bright, confident, welcoming voice of the middle class’s new efficient life: interested in pop songs and jazz, in movie and television, in outreach politics but also conventional stay-at-home comforts. As John Caps shows, Mancini easily combined it all in his music.
Mancini wielded influence in Hollywood and around the world with his iconic scores: dynamic jazz for the noirish detective TV show Peter Gunn, the sly theme from The Pink Panther, and his wistful folk song “Moon River” from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Through insightful close readings of key films, Caps traces Mancini’s collaborations with important directors and shows how he homed in on specific dramatic or comic aspects of the film to create musical effects through clever instrumentation, eloquent musical gestures, and meaningful resonances and continuities in his scores. Accessible and engaging, this fresh view of Mancini’s oeuvre and influence will delight and inform fans of film and popular music.
John Caps is an award-winning writer and producer of documentaries. He served as producer, writer, and host for four seasons of the National Public Radio syndicated series The Cinema Soundtrack, featuring interviews with and music of film composers. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
A volume in the series Music in American Life
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As producer-host for NPR's The Cinema Soundtrack, Caps interviewed film composers. Now, in this lively, syncopated survey of Mancini's movie music, Caps offers a comprehensive critique of the composer's film/TV scores and hit albums. Although Mancini died in 1994 at age 70, the book benefits from in-depth interviews Caps conducted with him in 1976 and 1992. Playing piano and flute as a youth, Mancini briefly attended Juilliard in 1942 before joining the army. After WWII, he was an arranger with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, wrote music for radio dramas and then landed at Universal Studios, where he learned "the clich s of Hollywood storytelling music." Scoring dozens of Universal movies, he received his first Oscar nomination for The Glenn Miller Story. An independent composer by 1958, TV's Peter Gunn launched his long association with director Blake Edwards, resulting in such classic tunes as "Days of Wine and Roses," "Moon River," and "Dreamsville." Tracing Mancini's evolution and melodic growth, Caps believes his early success happened because he captured common yearnings with themes "so directly personal, so honest... it was as though he were speaking to you."
