Looking Over Its Shoulder At The Giants

“Ladies and gentlemen, because I am working in this town for 25 years, I like to make some kind of appreciation to very important factor that makes me successful and adds to the quality of this town. For my award, I would very much like to thank Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss ... Josef Strauss, Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner, Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Rimsky-Korsakov ...”

In 1955 film composer Dimitri Tiomkin, who had been
a student of composer Alexander Glazunov,
was accepting one of his many Academy Awards
and although he was working in the most pop
of all pop media, he tried to acknowledge his debt
to classical music by naming the great composers
he looked to for inspiration. He got that far,
and then the audience was laughing so hard that
Bob Hope walked over and interrupted him and
helped him exit gracefully.

For today’s post I’m just recommending another blog post.

That story about Tiomkin is part of the introduction to a blog post by John Bailey, over at the American Society of Cinematographers. Bailey is a cinematographer and he comments on a recent essay about great composers, and he comments on the role non-pop music plays in pop media. He speaks of the great film composers of yesterday looking over their shoulders at the giants of the past.

He says today some do, too.

It’s great stuff. It is over at:

Tommasini’s Top Ten, March 7, 2011 by John Bailey, ASC

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



Fire Maidens From Atlantis Via Russia