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chapter 17 Looking Back, Looking On I n the end, Henry Mancini should be remembered for three contributions to popular culture: first the reinventing, the freshening of film scoring in the 1960s. Before that a formal European symphonic style of music had served generations of movie soundtracks in the 1930s and 1940s until composers like Alex North and Elmer Bernstein brought city jazz and Leonard Rosenman and David Raksin brought atonal and chromatic styles to Hollywood in the 1950s. None of that music seemed quite right for the free-spirited, forwardlooking , optimistic baby boomer stories and movie stars that followed. For that young Kennedy-era generation, Mancini offered his own bright and clear sophisticated style—as clean and courteous as mainstream pop, but as cool and knowing as modern jazz. His second contribution was his repackaging of the melodic material from those colorful scores into jazz-pop record albums for home listening (coinciding with the invention of the stereo vinyl disc and high-fidelity recording techniques) that put his memorable tunes and orchestral inventiveness directly into people’s lives and gave him, unlike past film composers, fame under his own name. That also had the effect of making people notice for the first time multimedia music (film and TV scoring, even music in advertising) for the big cultural influence it would become. Third was his reintroduction of lyricism into popular music—of carefully composed, personally expressive, harmonically interesting melody writing (only sometimes meant to be sung songs) that had flourished once, then dried up in the 1950s when a cold war reigned between capitalism and communism as between i-xii_1-286_Caps.indd 240 2/10/12 2:46 PM Looking Back, Looking On 241 one war-torn generation and their anxious offspring. For that period, rock ’n’ roll was seized as an instrument of protest—or rather of release. But 1960s pop wanted more harmony, more melodic movement to speak to the baby boomers’ growing sense of conscience, emotionalism, and commitment. The music of the Beatles, Burt Bacharach, Michel Legrand, and Henry Mancini fit in there. Of those influences, Mancini was perhaps the broadest, if also the most traditional, because his own influences reached furthest back. His melodic writing was unique, though, characterized by a sense of empathy (the egalitarian impulse), optimism, self-effacing humor, yet a shared modern sense of being alone. This particularly appealed to baby boomers who were just starting out on their own, not quite sure their parents did not prefer the triumph of the war years to the doubts of raising a family. Mancini music spoke to all of that. “Lujon” is a perfect statement of it all, as is “Dreamsville,” as is “It’s Easy to Say.” Leslie Bricusse had this to say about Mancini and his songwriting: Very few movie composers are great melody writers, and Hank was prime among them. John Williams, John Barry, and Burt Bacharach share this gift, which is why this quartet has assembled well over a dozen Oscars from some eighty nominations! I could only name Gershwin and Rodgers and Porter as composers whose music was as easily identifiable as Henry’s. I think that’s the mark of a truly specific and special talent, which causes us to say, “Only Mancini could have done that.” I’m thinking of the humor of his jazz patterns and the rhythms underneath them. Just delicious! You smile as they start, like at the opening of the “Pink Panther Theme”—it couldn’t be anybody else. And then I love when his tunes go into those strange little melancholy side-waters where he sometimes sends them. I love that about “Two for the Road.” I think a good thing to do with a Mancini ballad, if you are lucky enough to be writing lyrics for him (or even if you are just listening), is to try and pick a moment in your own life when you’ve felt a particular feeling that would apply to that theme. It makes it very personal. I’ve done that more than once.1 And Mancini’s voice, as a genuinely self-expressive and honest melodist, was matched by—no, surpassed by—his skills as an orchestrator and arranger . Although he used melody structure as self-confession and sometimes those tunes became songs, he was even more a first-rate arranger in the jazz-pop field, a brilliant balancer of brass with winds and of blends within sections. He was a superb harmonizer of strings...

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