Reconstructing film music

A snippet from a film score sketch by William Alwyn.

When I tell relatives, friends or colleagues that I have been reconstructing old film scores, a polite if somewhat blank expression usually passes over their faces. I am sure they are conjuring up images of scissors and sellotape, and although I do use such things occasionally, they are not pivotal to my endeavours. What I do requires much more than pencil and rubber and a cassette machine, since what I am involved in is a series of extended aural tests.

Since the first question tends to be "Why?", I'll start there. When music was recorded for film no-one, not even the composer thought it would be required again, so the material was usually collected up and binned. There were obviously exceptions. Composers from the concert tradition, as opposed to those primarily involved in commercial music, sometimes saw their film music as just another composition and saved evidence of their work in terms of sketches, short scores or even the completed scores themselves. That is not to say that every 'serious' composer kept his scores and others did not. There were more factors in the equation. Remember that we are talking of a time before photocopying made it easy to keep a record of one's work. And too often the film companies saw the score of a film as their physical property and kept it. Pinewood Studios had a treasure trove of film material. 

I remember Muir Mathieson telling me, shortly before his death in 1975, of the day he received a call from the librarian there that he should come down and take anything he wanted because the building was being bulldozed the next day with the scores inside it. He did, and retrieved parts of Walton's Henry V, and others. Ernest Irving, musical director of Ealing Studios up to his death in 1953, had film scores he had commissioned bound on shelves in his flat at the studios. When the BBC bought the studio a few years later, they went in a skip; this accounts for the particular scarcity of Ealing material. I found a few scraps at the home of Irving's successor, Dock Mathieson, and returned them to their particular composers or estates, including Walton, Arnold, and Alwyn.

A CD of Alwyn's film music. Much of the material on here was reconstructed by Philip Lane.

I have been a fan of film and film music ever since childhood, but my first chance to be involved in reconstructing such music came when supervising the recording of a CD of Richard Addinsell's music, shortly after having been appointed his musical executor. In his case, there were published suites from some of the films, and he had managed to keep some scores either in full score or sketch form. However, one 'title' we had to have on the disc was the original version of Goodbye Mr. Chips, for which all that remained in the archives was a piano copy of the school song with words by Eric Maschwitz. So I taped the opening credits from my video and played it over and over again on a cassette player next to the piano until I had something down on paper. In this particular case what I had was a little short. There were strange repeats that were obviously done at the last minute (judging by the poor editing) and there was a choir singing that I knew we could not have at the recording. So I rewrote the piece to make it work as a separate concert item. I repeated the process more recently with Kind Hearts and Coronets on the Ealing albums. Since the majority of music in the film is connected with two pieces of Mozart, the record company agreed that the best way of representing the film and its music on the CD was for me to compose a mock-Mozart overture using the themes.

This is one form of working, but it is usually the rarest. Most of the time, the record companies (since everything I do is for immediate commercial recording) want a faithful transcription either of one cue, or a similarly faithful combination of a series of cues.

In the case of The Cruel Sea, the record company wanted the opening titles and the scene of the shipwreck's aftermath, as the various characters flashback in their minds to previous events. The obvious way of handling this was to make an ABA piece with an adjusted ending. Obviously I had only the soundtrack to work from and at one or two points in the 'Nocturne' section the dialogue and sound effects masked the music, requiring a few guesses from me as to what Alan Rawsthorne might have done. Only he knows how well, or otherwise, I did the job.

The process of film score reconstruction does not get easier, but some films are easier than others. The biggest enemy is the combination of dialogue and sound effects over the music, and just occasionally there are seconds of total inaudibility when a little guesswork has to replace authenticity. The greater the composer, the more difficult the work, on the whole, since the melodic and harmonic language tends to be more adventurous. In the case of recent scores, there are usually soundtrack CDs devoid of intrusive extraneous sounds to work from. And despite the change in status of film music, present-day composers still mislay scores. I have reconstructed music by Jerry Goldsmith, Randy Edelman and James Horner in the last year (1997) alone. So far, I have not received any negative mail from these gentlemen regarding my handiwork - but it cannot last forever!

Obviously if the composers are still alive, I try to encourage them to do the reconstruction themselves. So far they have declined for various reasons. However, I may have succeeded at last with one British composer whose experience is particularly sad. He had the full score to a film but was suddenly called up by Rank to return it to them; unwisely he did not make a copy of it, but dutifully returned the score as requested. A few years later, he asked whether he could have a copy of it because he wanted to make a concert suite, only to be told it had been destroyed - not by accident but by design.

Meanwhile, I am happy to be dipping my toe in the great sea of film music I have admired and loved for years. And when one is asked to work on absolute favourite films of all time, the job is even more rewarding. I have managed to do this with several projects - The Quiet Man (complete), The 39 Steps, and other Ealing productions, and Goodbye Mr. Chips. Whether they are favourites or not, the process is repeatedly satisfying - from scribbling down a piano score and orchestrating it, to producing the performance in the studio. The only bigger thrill is when the music is my own.

Copyright Philip Lane 1998

With many thanks to Philip Lane for permission to re-use his article  first published in The Creel, the journal of the Alan Rawsthorne Society, in Spring 1998 (volume 3, number 5, issue no. 12).

Philip is a composer, arranger, and record producer, who specialises in reconstructing classic film scores for CD release. He has been responsible for many Alwyn reconstructions (The Card, The Running Man, Swiss Family Robinson). More on this next month. 

Among his recordings have been a Hitchcock compilation, Greek film music, The Quiet Man, and 'The Ladykillers', dedicated to Ealing Studios films of the '40s and '50s. In addition he has produced discs of concert music, from English string orchestral works, through to Gilbert and Sullivan overtures and a suite from the late Paul Reade's last staged ballet score, Far from the madding crowd. More recent projects have included a CD release of his own lyric dances, a ballet for the National Youth ballet, and a commission from the Boston Pops.