Scoring Some More Respect

For its seventh annual edition, the UC Santa Barbara New Music Festival, which has previously concerned itself with such locales as Mexico, Asia and Britain, turns its attentions closer to home, focusing on the movies and the fine art of film scoring. More to the point, the festival, which includes screenings, concerts and seminars over five days, seeks to emphasize the fact that film scoring is a finer art than it is sometimes given credit for.

Festival director William Kraft, a composer, former Los Angeles Philharmonic percussionist and an occasional studio musician, knows all about the uneasy dialogue between concert music and film music. Kraft devised the festival, with the help of veteran film composer and teacher David Raksin, as a forum for composers who have made their mark in Hollywood, and who have also felt the sting of ostracism from art music circles.

"It's ridiculous," says Raksin, who composed the scores for "Laura" and "The Bad and the Beautiful," and is now a film professor at USC. "We've been condescended to over the years, and our only partisans have been people like Aaron Copland. As someone who wrote for film, he knew something about it, and Shostakovich did, too. I found out that Toru [Takemitsu], who wrote 90 film scores, knew a lot of my music."

Besides Raksin, the festival roster includes big-name veterans Elmer Bernstein, 76, ("The Ten Commandments," "Thoroughly Modern Millie," "The Age of Innocence"), Leonard Rosenman, 73, ("East of Eden," "Barry Lyndon," "Bound for Glory") and Laurence Rosenthal, 71, ("The Miracle Worker," "Requiem for a Heavyweight," "Raisin in the Sun"), as well as younger film composers Stephen Endelman and Cliff Eidelman.

The four "elder statesmen" will get together during the festival for a panel on the state of their art. In separate interviews, they previewed that colloquy for us.

Question: Conductors like Esa-Pekka Salonen are recording it, the record companies are hyping it: Is this a golden age for film music?

Raksin: Yes, and it's a big kick. Two or three of my scores have been issued on CD--one is the music from "The Bad and the Beautiful" and one is music from "Forever Amber." I did a thing about a month ago for the Society of Composers and Lyricists at the Director's Guild Theater. We expected 60 or 80 people, and the place was absolutely jammed to the doors.