People |
||
|
||
Talking to Howard Lucraft in 1997 I
was born at Leeds, Yorkshire in 1924. My parents had a shop that sold
jewellery, silver plate, watches and clocks . My earliest musical
memory was of sitting on the floor surrounded by records of the bands
of Jack Payne and Henry Hall and playing them on our enormous wind
up gramophone. My dad played the ukulele-banjo that he used to let
me tune for him, using his pitch pipe, to either G-C-E-A or A-D-F#-B.
My mother had a contralto voice and sang: ‘There is a Lady Passing
By’ and, her favorite, ‘Big Lady Moon’. When
I was eight years old my dad bought a brand new Challen upright, that
had pride of place in our over-the-shop Sunday sitting room, and sent
me to an elderly lady a few streets away for piano lessons. Three
months later, my dad became ill and very unexpectedly died at the
early age of thirty-nine. My piano lessons were immediately stopped
and never recommenced. They are the only piano lessons that I ever
had. A year later, my mother, who had no head for business, sold the
shop and we went off to live with her parents. At
age ten, I had a month-long love affair with the violin but my grandfather,
a prankster who didn’t like the violin, smeared butter on my bow and
very effectively brought my career as a violinist to an end.
At eleven, I started to play the accordion, had lessons and
won a couple of competitions. A judge from the BBC advised my mother
that there was no future in the accordion, and that I should learn
a band or orchestral instrument, for instance the clarinet or saxophone.
My mother bought me a clarinet at the local pawnbroker’s for one pound
($4 at the time). It was built all in one piece; it was a simple system
instrument that was ‘high pitch’ and had a broken mouthpiece. I had
lessons on it and started to play in the school orchestra. Several
months later, a doting mother bought me an alto saxophone that said
‘Pennsylvania’ across the bell. How could I fail with such an instrument?
Quite recently, I was told that it was a cheap instrument made in
Czechoslovakia. I started to play, unpaid of course, in a local semi-pro
band. I left high school at fifteen and went on tour with ‘Archie’s
Juvenile Band’ for ten shillings a week ($2 at the time). On joining
the band I was asked to name my favorite band. ‘Ambrose’ I said. Whereupon
they all laughed themselves silly and said: ‘What, you’ve never heard
of Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey? I confessed that I hadn’t, and
my education was taken in hand that very moment as we all headed off
to the nearest record shop. I started to take down arrangements from
records about this time under the tutelage of the pianist, Eddie Taylor,
who was an old hand at it. World
War II started and created a new dimension to my life that was anything
but a hindrance. Suddenly, with all the bands starting to lose musicians
to the ‘draft’, a fifteen-year-old musician who could sight-read was
eagerly sought by every band leader in the UK. Before I was seventeen
and a half, I’d gone from band to band in quick succession until I
found myself playing lead alto with Oscar Rabin’s Band, still touring
alas, but broadcasting and making records too. It was during this
period that I graduated from taking down records to writing arrangements
for pay. At twenty, I
joined the Geraldo Orchestra, arguably the best band in the UK at
the time. The Geraldo Band practically lived at the BBC doing several
radio programmes a week. The great bonus for a developing arranger
was that the band might be a ‘swing band’ on Monday and then be augmented
to symphonic size on Tuesday and on other days be various combinations
in-between and, sometimes even adding a choir. Since I got to arrange
for all these programmes, was there ever a better arranging academy?
I doubt that anything like that exists today. During
this period, I started to study harmony, counterpoint and composition
with a Hungarian composer, resident in London, Matyas Seiber. I also
was an enthusiastic participant in a conducting course taught by the
German born conductor, Walter Goehr. Both Robert Farnon and Bill Finegan
had written many of the arrangements in our repertoire, and I fell
under the spell of both of these great talents and remain, today,
greatly indebted to them. At
age twenty-six I decided to give up playing to concentrate on writing.
I was busy from the start and three years later, at age twenty-nine,
a lot of good things happened to me. I became musical director of
the newly launched Philips Records (UK) arranging and conducting every
week for all the contract artistes and occasionally for American ones
like Rosemary Clooney and Mel Tormé as well as recording several instrumental
albums of my own. I started to score films under my own name (I’d
‘ghost’-written two scores the previous year) and I was writing all
the cues for a top BBC comedy show: ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ and doing
the same, plus conducting, for ‘The Goon Show’ which was probably
the most successful BBC radio comedy show of the 1950s. The
1950s was a very exciting time to be recording, because not only had
tape taken over from direct to disc recording and advanced German
microphones were in every studio, but stereo had magically added a
new dimension to sound. However, these advances had not found their
way into film studios and to go to a cinema to hear one’s latest score
was absolute torture. I was so depressed by these experiences that
by the time I was thirty-six (1960), I started to turn down any offers
to score films. During
the 1960s, although I had a very busy and interesting musical life,
including doing a lot of recording for Readers Digest Records, writing
arrangements for Benny Goodman and scoring some documentary films
about art for television, I regretted having turned my back on feature
film scoring and tried my best to get back into it. Finally, starting
in 1969, I scored ‘The Looking Glass War’ (from a John Le Carré spy
novel featuring a very young Anthony Hopkins), ‘When Eight Bells Toll’
(another Anthony Hopkins movie) and ‘Captain Nemo and the Underwater
City’. This led to my writing adaptation scores for ‘The Little Prince’
(collaborating with songwriters Lerner & Loewe) and ‘The Slipper
and the Rose’ (collaborating with Robert & Richard Sherman). In
1977, I scored almost all of ‘Watership Down’. I was officially credited
as the composer of this score but I had taken over the commission
from indisposed composer Malcolm Williamson, who had written six minutes
of very high quality music that is the first six minutes of music
in the film, and who was given the not very satisfactory credit: Additional
Music by Malcolm Williamson! In between scoring films I was also a
regular conductor of the
now, alas, defunct BBC Radio Orchestra and, from time to time, helped
John Williams with the orchestration of his scores for ‘Star Wars’,
‘Superman’ and ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. I
had been nominated for an Academy Award for ‘The Little Prince’ and
‘The Slipper and the Rose’ and went to California on both occasions
to attend the ‘Oscar’ ceremonies. The wonderfully warm and generous
way that I was made to feel at home there by my American colleagues
and friends resulted in my being rather seduced by the California
life style and I soon returned with intention of staying, if not for
ever, at least for some time. I
rented an apartment in Brentwood and set about getting permission
to work. With this I was soon scoring television at Warner Bros. By
1980, I had bought a house and became futher involved with American
TV. In the years from 1979 to 1990, I scored TV films and many episodes
of TV series like Dallas, Dynasty, Hotel, Falcon Crest, Cagney &
Lacey, Emerald Point, Wonderwoman, Island Son, Blue Skies and McClain’s
Law. I conducted at most of the Hollywood studios such as Warner Bros.,
Paramount, M.G.M., Universal and 20th Century-Fox. During
the summer, I used to write many arrangements for the Boston ‘Pops’
Orchestra during the fourteen years that John Williams was that orchestra’s
conductor, in addition to helping him with his scores for ‘E.T.’,
‘Hook’, ‘Home Alone’ I & II and ‘Schindler’s List’. I helped several
other very good composers with their scores such as: Milklos Rozsa,
Alex North, David Raksin, Bill Conti, Laurence Rosenthal, David Shire,
Ernest Gold, Johnny Mandel and Pat Williams. I was nominated six times
for an Emmy Award for TV composing and won three Emmy Awards for arranging.
In addition, I wrote many arrangements for Julie Andrews and Mel Torme
and occasionally some for opera stars like Frederica von Stade, Barbara
Hendricks and Placido Domingo. I
never really tried very hard to find feature film commissions. In
Hollywood your recent track record is all important, and, in my case,
on my arrival from England, what had it been? A film about ‘a little
prince’; one about ‘Cinderella’ and an animated one (animated films
were, at this time, something that children watched on Saturday morning
TV) about ‘some rabbits’! No sex, violence, explosions! There had
been lots in of those things in my earlier films but they had not
been recent or high profile enough to count. In short,
I couldn’t ‘get arrested’ as they say. Big
changes were taking place in film music. 20th Century-Fox
was the only remaining studio that had a music department head, Lionel
Newman, who regularly conducted music scoring sessions. A far cry
from the ‘golden years’ of Hollywood when brilliant musicians like
Victor Young, Alfred Newman, John Green, Ray Heindorf etc. etc. ran
the music departments at all the studios. They had great power on
the studio lot and used it to promote and to protect composers in
their charge. I experienced this with Lionel Newman. With his passing,
music department heads are now, generally, former producers or executives
from the ‘pop’ record industry. Another big change has been the coming
of synthesizers. Producers long, and understandably, frustrated by
their inability to look into what the composer was up to and having
to wait until the scoring session to find out what the music was going
to sound like, discovered that the composer could make a synth. demo
and play it with the picture. The first time I heard about this practice
was in connection with the score for ‘The Color Purple’. I heard that
it took twenty-seven music writers to create that score and that nothing
could go forward to the orchestration phase until the producer, Steven
Spielberg, had heard a ‘polaroid’ (synth. mock-up) of a cue and heard
it played with the picture. Today, composers are given far less time
to write their scores than has been the practice in the past, and
to be distracted by the constant requirement to make demos of everything
must be a giant headache. To get through some of these assignments
must need a constitution of iron, one which, I will freely admit, I no longer have! Another
great frustration for composers is the ‘temp. track’. This is where
the director chooses a piece of existing music, very often from a
commercial recording of a classical work, which he dubs on to the
sound track to accompany an important scene as a temporary measure
until a composer is hired to write the original score. Very often
the director falls so in love with his temp. music that he can’t be
persuaded to give it up and accept the new original music. I remember
one extreme example of this: The composer’s drawn expression suggested
to me that he hadn’t been to bed for some time. In a weary voice,
he told me that a very long cue that we had recorded two days previously,
that he had very skillfully composed and that had worked wonderfully
with the scene, had been rejected by the director of the film because
it wasn’t close enough to the latter’s
beloved temp. track! My colleague had now reworked the sketch
which he offered me together with the pocket score of the classical
work that the director had used as a temp. track. My friend gave me
an imploring look that seemed to plead for my complicity as one thief
in the night to another, apologetically mumbling:‘You understand what
has to be done here?’ I understood, only too well, that I was being
required to incorporate the mercifully dead master’s engraved, published
notes into the new version of the cue. Only thus would the director
be satisfied. The thought crossed my desperate mind that perhaps the
plea: ‘I vos only obeying orders!’ might get me acquitted when the
case came up. I don’t know if this cue ended up in the released film
or whether cautious legal minds had prevailed to protect the company
from a possible action by the trustees of the estate of the dead composer,
but six months later
my colleague won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for this
film. As a composer, he certainly merited
this coveted award. In his acceptance speech, he was most generous
with his praise for all of us who had helped him through this nightmare
and, now a free man again, pointedly ignored the director. In
the last six or so years, life in Los Angeles had became less and
less appealing to me. As soon as the Cold War came to an end, we had
a bad recession in L.A.’s biggest industry, aerospace. Then we had
race riots followed by fires, then floods and very great demographic
changes caused by immigration. Finally, on Jan. 17th 1994,
we had a big, very scary, earthquake only six miles from my house.
I decided that I simply had to go and live somewhere else. The ‘somewhere
else’ had to be out of California, because there are earthquake faults
all over the state. I came and had a look at Scottsdale, Arizona (only
one hour’s flight time to L.A.) where there has been no history of
earthquakes. I loved what I saw. Several months later, I bought a
house here. Almost end of story. John Williams still seems to like my arrangements. I wrote three in the summer that he recorded with the LSO in London and three more that he recorded in early December conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony with Itzhak Perlman playing the violin solos. I’m very happy to be in that sort of company! |