Weinzweig: Essays on His Life and Music

5. Music for Radio and Film

103 Chapter 5 Music for Radio and Film elaine keillor John Weinzweig regarded 1941 as“the turning point in my career. I was invited by Samuel Hersenhoren, violinist-conductor, to compose the incidental music for a series of CBC radio dramas.”1 Over the following five years, Weinzweig produced incidental music for at least ninety-eight radio drama programs. Moreover, until 1965 he continued to accept occasional commissions to write scores for radio dramas as well as National Film Board films. If the 1941 invitation was a major turning point in his compositional development, did the techniques that he developed for creating functional music remain a major part of his vocabulary? By examining his approach to his radio-music assignments, especially as exemplified in The Great Flood (1948), this writer will endeavour to ascertain if there were influences still evident in his mature concert music, even as late as the instrumental chamber works of the 1990s.2 In 1941 writing original music for radio dramas was a new concept. The usual musical backgrounds in both radio and film consisted of stock recordings created for silent film, labelled “thunder storm,” “angry,” “frustration,” “hurry,” and so forth, and mass-produced for this purpose. Sometimes the producer would select portions from an extant concert-music recording.After Weinzweig came on board as composer for radio dramas, Allister Grosart, then a CBC script writer, said he was delighted to have the appropriate mood created with newly composed music rather than yet another snippet from Respighi’s The Pines of Rome.3 Composers had found writing music for movies and radio a possible career outlet since the 1920s, but they learned the craft 104 biographical themes by trial and error. Describing the techniques and structuring programs to teach them were as yet unexplored avenues in Canada and had scarcely begun in the United States.4 The CBC’s First Radio Drama Series with Original Music Weinzweig described how he received his instructions: “I was given a script. And there would be a meeting to discuss the music cues marked in the script by the scriptwriter. Sometimes they were added by the director. The first one I did was called ‘New Homes for Old.’ Now that sounds like a real estate program . It was really about people who had fled persecution in their country and had come to Canada. At the end of the program they were on live and spoke briefly to confirm the truth of the dramatic events.”5 The CBC paid fifty dollars for each musical score for a thirty-minute program . Weinzweig’s notebook reveals that he usually received the script at the beginning of a week. By Wednesday or Thursday he would complete the music and then would hear it played on Saturday. Most broadcast content was “live to air”in the early 1940s. The CBC would hire an ensemble of fifteen to twentyfive players. Weinzweig would rehearse with the musicians, prior to the live broadcast, often conducting himself. He called it“the most wonderful opportunity for a composer. Usually [composers] have to wait years to hear what they have written.”6 The preserved programs in script or recording of the series New Homes for Old include stories about Canadian residents from the former Czechoslovakia , Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Poland, Netherlands, Iceland,Austria, India, and the then Yugoslavia.7 The program on 25 June 1941 dealing with the Polish immigrant Stanislaw Brzyski (Stanley Brisky) may have had special significance for Weinzweig, since his own parents and his wife, Helen, originally came from Poland. Sketches and a full score, preserved in the Weinzweig Fonds at Library and Archives Canada, provide insights into his compositional approach.8 In June 1938 Weinzweig had devised a twelve-tone series as the basis for his short piano piece Spasmodia.9 By the early 1940s he was using twelvetone technique on a regular basis. It is therefore no surprise to see in his notebook , among sketches for the program “Poland (1)” of New Homes for Old, the series G, C, F, F, A, D, G, G, E, B, B , E . This is actually an elevennote series: G occurs twice, and there is no C. The full series does not appear in linear sequence during any of the Polish cues; however, Weinzweig has bracketed the F-F dyad and the trichord G-G-E, and these two cells do occur frequently. Although there are dissonant combinations from...