Torn Music

Just wanted to make a quick little post today to recommend a book called Torn Music by Gergely Hubai.  It's this enormously informative and detailed trawl through decades and decades of rejected music.  I'm not very familiar with the world of film scoring, so there is lots for me to learn.  Hubai clearly knows his stuff - there are a couple small errors I ran across doing secondary research, because if I read a book about music I want to hear as much of the music as I can.  I haven't gotten so much from a book on music since Robert Chase's Dies Irae.

(Who do the two books have in common?  Peter Sculthorpe, who had a late '60s/early '70s Australian film score replaced, and who in 2004 wrote a requiem mass prominently featuring the didgeridoo.  It was only a couple days ago that I managed to track down Sculthorpe's Requiem.  I don't much like it unfortunately.)

Anyway, it is an absolutely luxurious thing, to gorge myself on this knowledge.  I want to share all of it with you, because it is amazing knowledge and because I will remember it better if I write it down, but I don't know how fair that would be to Hubai.  Some of these I'd love to hear as much as I'd love to hear Charles Stepney's symphonic composition "Cohesion" (featuring Minnie Riperton, soloist).

Like, just an example:

This Columbo episode, The Greenhouse Jungle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPKufHu9TtE

Was originally scored by this composer, Paul Glass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9xCLPHtDYQ

As a concerto for this instrument, the heckelphone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBhkaL6z82M

Of course I would love to hear that.  Of course!  I also read of a score for a film on Gauguin written by a woman named Elizabeth Swados but rejected for sounding "too much like Stravinsky".  Couldn't find a recording of that, either, but I found that there was an animated film based on her picture book "My Depression" made in 2014.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy8ImYafS_s

This looks like a fantastic film.  I am going to try and watch it.

OK, here's something else I learned from the book today, I can't help myself.

Jimmy Webb was originally contracted to write the soundtrack to "Love Story".  What he turned in featured a composition for oscillator-repitched car horns.  They decided not to go with it.

He later reused the recording as the intro to "Music for an Unmade Movie: Songseller":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1k-B9NARG