Hollywood’s “No Man” Leonid V. Raab (1900–1968)

Leonid Raab was one of Hollywood’s most prolific orchestrators of Golden Age film music. However, his profile is absent from standard reference works on the cinema. Raab’s career is examined using contempora- neous sources including a journal in Russian belonging to his friend Boris Artzybasheff, translated here for the first time. Emphasis is given to Raab’s alliances with fellow émigré studio musicians, artists, and expats in thewider community in Hollywood. Born in Tiraspol, Russia, Raab started his career in New York City as a copyist and arranger with the music publishers T.B. Harms, working under Robert Russell Bennett on musicals such as Show Boat (1927). He moved from Broadway to RKO Radio Pictures in 1929 and, following the Great Depression, was employed by MGM orchestrating Herbert Stothart’s scores for The Merry Widow, David Copperfield, and A Tale of Two Cities. From 1936 to 1967, Raab collaborated mainly with the composer Franz Waxman, orchestrating some 100 scores, including Rebecca, Edge of Darkness, Objective Burma, Sunset Boulevard, A Place in the Sun, and Taras Bulba. A comprehensive filmography (~400 scores) is presented, together with some rare family memorabilia and, among other things, an orchestral score which Raab arranged of the song “Glory to God” composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff.

B. V. ASAFYEV'S UNPUBLISHED NOTES IN THE MARGINS OF M. P. MUSORGSKY'S ORCHESTRAL SCORE FOR "BORIS GODUNOV"

This article is devoted to the initial stage in the history of studying M. P. Musorgsky's orchestral style. The first researchers who gain access to the composer's autograph of the orchestral score were B. V. Asafyev and P. A. Lamm. The musicians edited the score of the opera "Boris Godunov" for the premiere, which took place at the State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre on February 16, 1928, when after a half-century interval, the author's original orchestration was performed. Two short, but fundamentally important articles by B. V. Asafyev, as well as his notes in the margins of the handwritten score, opened a new stage in the scholarly and artistic understanding of Musorgsky's orchestral dramaturgy and orchestral stylistics.

THE PROJECT OF STAGING "KHOVANSHCHINA" BY M. P. MUSSORGSKY IN B.V. ASAFYEV’S ORCHESTRATION

The article is devoted to the history of an unrealized performance of M. P. Mussorgsky’s opera "Khovanshchina" orchestrated by B. V. Asafyev. On the basis of archival documents, stored in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts, the Russian National Museum of Music, Central State Archive of Literature and Art of Saint Petersburg, the Bolshoi Theatre Museum, most of which are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, studied the circumstances under which the opera was planned to be staged in the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (nowadays — the Mariinsky Theatre). Fragments from the reports of the Artistic Council of Opera at the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet meetings, the correspondence between B. V. Asafyev and P. A. Lamm, the manuscript "P. A. Lamm. A Biography" by O. P. Lamm and other unpublished archival documents are cited. The author comes to the conclusion that most attempts to perform "Khovanshchina" were hindered by the difficult socio-political circumstances of the 1930s, while the existing assumptions about the creative failure of the Asafyev’s orchestration don’t find clear affirmation, neither in historical documents, nor in the existing manuscript of the orchestral score.

Maturity, the Second Cadence

This chapter details Mancini's musical evolution in the late 1970s. It may seem odd to associate “maturity” with the music of Mancini at this stage in his career, when clearly all of his most influential work was already past, having been produced between, say, 1958 and 1969. Maturity in this case does not mean a permanent evolution away from jazz-pop and toward exclusively large-scale formal symphonic scoring. Maturity now means that Mancini had learned to deal with all kinds of music: to be able to write, in the same year as those resolute songs for the film 10, an anti-thematic orchestral score for a thriller film set in the American Southwest that mixes Indian tribal lore, modern political intrigue, and the spooky science of vampire bats—and to “mean” them both.

Landed

This chapter focuses on the score created by Porter for a ballet-pantomime premiered by the Ballets suédois in 1923. The archive of the Ballets suédois is kept at the Dance Museum in Stockholm. The museum also houses the orchestral score of the Porter ballet, which was completed by Charles Koechlin under the title Within the Quota. The score can be described as a marvel—a modest one perhaps, but much bolder in its substance than Koechlin's cleaned-up, highly Europeanized orchestration. Porter endorsed that orchestration, and the impulse behind it, which finds Koechlin seeking to abstract and estrange Porter's American idiom, to give it a kind of expat identity. Judging from the reviews, however, Koechlin's scoring did no favors for the Ballets suédois, or for Porter, who turned back to Broadway. Although the score did not survive the organization that commissioned it, Within the Quota became known, even in absentia, as the first “jazz” ballet.

Adaptasi Konserto pada Ensambel Gitar sebagai Upaya Pengayaan Bahan Ajar Matakuliah Ensambel

Penelitian ini membahas sebuah upaya pengembangan formasi ensambel gitar dalam rangka pencapaian suatu kesetaraan artistik terhadap penyajian sebuah konseto untuk orkestra dan solois instrumen tiup. Proses penelitian ini diterapkan dalam konteks pembelajaran dan pengajaran paket mata kuliah Koor/ Orkes/ Ensambel (KOE) pada kurikulum pendidikan tinggi musik di Indonesia. Permasalahan utama yang dibahas dalam studi ini ialah bagaimana menerapkan repertoar orkestra pada sebuah ensambel gitar? Tujuan dari pemecahan masalah tersebut ialah untuk memperkaya materi pengajaran ensambel gitar yang termasuk salah satu kelompok studi dari paket kelas-kelas KOE. Kontribusi hasil penelitian ini adalah rekonstruksi model pembelajaran ensambel gitar dari tingkat menengah hingga tinggi. Guna mencapai target yang telah ditetapkan, penelitian ini dilakukan dengan menggunakan kombinasi metodologis di antara metode transkripsi musikologis dengan metode tindakan kelas yang diadopsi pada studi material dan proses belajar ensambel gitar. Permasalahan yang teridentifikasi disimpulkan dengan pembuatan prototipe aransemen baru sebagai alternatif materi pengajaran melalui proses pengolahan editorial. Penelitian ini menyimpulkan bahwa keterbatasan gitar dalam menghasilkan kesetaraan terhadap kulalitas artistik orkestra dapat diatasi tidak hanya dengan mentranskrip reduksi pianonya tapi langsung dari skor orkestranya. Oleh karena itu, ensambel gitar dapat menjadi alternatif yang lebih baik dari versi pengiring piano dalam menyajikan sebuah konsert The Adaptation of Concerto on a Guitar Ensemble as the Enrichment Effort of the Ensamble Teaching Materials. This study discusses an effort in developing guitar ensemble formation in order to achieve an artistic equality to the performance of a concerto for orchestra and wind soloist. This is applied in the context of Indonesian higher music education’s curriculum for the class room teaching and learning of the choir/ orchestra/ ensemble (COE) subject package. The main problem discussed in this study is how to apply an orchestral repertoireire to an ensemble guitar? The purpose of this study is to enrich the teaching material of guitar ensemble, which is one among the COE classes. The result of this study is contributed to the reconstruction of guitar ensemble teaching model from middle to higher grades. To achieve the target that have formerly been set, this study has combined musicological transcription method and the class room action research which are adopted to research material study as well as guitar ensemble learning process. Problems that had identified was concluded by prototyping the new arrangement through transcription process from the concerto repertoire as the teaching material alternative, by editorial treatment. This study concludes that the guitar limitedness to result the equality with the orchestral artistic quality could be overcome not by transcribing from its piano reduction but directly from orchestral score. Because of that reason, guitar ensemble could be a better alternative to the piano accompaniment in performing a concerto for a wind solist, and at the same time it enriches guitar ensemble repertoire.

ABOVE AND BEYOND THE BASS: HARMONY AND TEXTURE IN GEORGE BENJAMIN'S ‘VIOLA, VIOLA’

George Benjamin's rich harmonic imagination was apparent from his earliest published works. A distinctive chordal sensibility is already evident in the 1978 Piano Sonata, with its glittering streams of five- or six-pitch clusters; in the hollow bell-chords punctuating the 1979 orchestral score, Ringed by the Flat Horizon; and in the supreme stasis of the A-minor pedal chord (a six-three triad) unveiled by the icy glissandi lines opening A Mind of Winter (1981). All three pieces share a fascination with degrees of chordal resonance – the interplay of upper partials above a fundamental – and a sensitivity to chords as sound objects. True, Benjamin's style, beginning at least with Antara (1987), has shown signs of a more linear-contrapuntal orientation, and less reliance on what one critic terms ‘purely coloristic phenomena’. Yet one could equally claim some continuity between the refined harmonic world of the early scores and the surprising richness of chordal sonority to be heard in a far more recent arrival, the 1997 duo Viola, Viola.