Mancini Magic (Songbook)

Mancini Magic (Songbook)
Author: Phillip Keveren
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
Total Pages: 65
Release: 2011-02-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1458439070

(Piano Solo Composer Collection). Features Phillip Keveren's expert arrangements of 15 Mancini masterpieces, including: Baby Elephant Walk * The Days of Wine and Roses * Dear Heart * Moon River * Peter Gunn * The Pink Panther * The Thorn Birds * Two for the Road * and more.

Easy Listening and Film Scoring 1948-78

Easy Listening and Film Scoring 1948-78
Author: Jack Curtis Dubowsky
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-05-27
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0429997671

Composers, arrangers, conductors, session musicians, and executives worked in easy listening and scoring, complicating an academic focus that lionizes film music while ignoring or deriding easy listening. This book documents easy listening’s connections with film music, an aspect overlooked in academic and popular literature. Fueled by the rise of the LP and home entertainment, easy listening became the largest midcentury commercial music market, generating more actual income for the record business than 7- inch singles. Easy listening roped in subgenres including classical, baroque, jazz, Latin, Polynesian, "exotica," rock, Broadway, and R&B, appropriated and reinterpreted just as they were for cinema. Easy listening provided opportunities in orchestral music for conservatory- trained composers. Major film composers such as Henry Mancini and Michel Legrand had a prodigious output of easy listening albums. Critics fault easy listening for structural racisms, overlooking its evolution and practitioners. Easy listening helped destabilize a tripartite record business that categorized product as race records, old time records, or general popular music. Charlie Parker’s with Strings records altered the direction of jazz, profoundly influencing other performers, encouraging bold crosspollinations, and making money. The influence of technology and historical contexts of music for work and leisure are explored. Original interviews and primary sources will fascinate scholars, historians, and students of cinema, television, film scoring, and midcentury popular music.

Film Music at the Piano

Film Music at the Piano
Author: H. Stephen Wright
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2003
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780810848924

Printed versions of instrumental film scores can be quite difficult to find, and in many cases the arrangements cited in this book are the only available printed manifestations. The text presents virtually every major film composer, including Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Hermann, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams."

Moon River

Moon River
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 32
Release: 2018-08
Genre: Children's stories
ISBN: 9780192746399

Follow a little girl on a magical journey along the Moon River. It flows from her bedroom and out into the big wide world just waiting to be discovered. She's soon to be joined by other children who are all excited to be exploring the beautiful world together. There is such a lot of world tosee!Moon River is a song composed by Henry Mancini with Lyrics by Johnny Mercer. It recieved an Academy Award for Best Original Song for its performance by Audrey Hepburn in the iconic movie Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961).

The Henry Mancini Easy Piano Collection

The Henry Mancini Easy Piano Collection
Author: Henry Mancini
Publisher: Hal Leonard Publishing Corporation
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781617740527

(Easy Piano Composer Collection). Easy arrangements of 22 classics by Academy Award- and Grammy Award-winning composer Henry Mancini. Songs include: Baby Elephant Walk * Charade * The Days of Wine and Roses * Dear Heart * Inspector Clouseau Theme * Moon River * Peter Gunn * The Pink Panther * Whistling Away the Dark * The Thorn Birds * and more.

Henry Mancini

Henry Mancini
Author: John Caps
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2012-02-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252093844

Through film composer Henry Mancini, mere background music in movies became part of pop culture--an expression of sophistication and wit with a modern sense of cool and a lasting lyricism that has not dated. The first comprehensive study of Mancini's music, Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music describes how the composer served as a bridge between the Big Band period of World War II and the impatient eclecticism of the Baby Boomer generation, between the grand formal orchestral film scores of the past and a modern American minimalist approach. Mancini's sound seemed to capture the bright, confident, welcoming voice of the middle class's new efficient life: interested in pop songs and jazz, in movie and television, in outreach politics but also conventional stay-at-home comforts. As John Caps shows, Mancini easily combined it all in his music. Mancini wielded influence in Hollywood and around the world with his iconic scores: dynamic jazz for the noirish detective TV show Peter Gunn, the sly theme from The Pink Panther, and his wistful folk song "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's. Through insightful close readings of key films, Caps traces Mancini's collaborations with important directors and shows how he homed in on specific dramatic or comic aspects of the film to create musical effects through clever instrumentation, eloquent musical gestures, and meaningful resonances and continuities in his scores. Accessible and engaging, this fresh view of Mancini's oeuvre and influence will delight and inform fans of film and popular music. John Caps is an award-winning writer and producer of documentaries. He served as producer, writer, and host for four seasons of the National Public Radio syndicated series The Cinema Soundtrack, featuring interviews with and music of film composers. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland. A volume in the series Music in American Life

Conductors and Composers of Popular Orchestral Music

Conductors and Composers of Popular Orchestral Music
Author: Naomi Musiker
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2014-02-25
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1135917701

World-wide in scope and focusing on the second half of the 20th century, this work provides biographies and discographies of some 500 composers and conductors of light and popular orchestral music, including film, show, theatre and mood music. The book is arranged in two sequences: 1) Biographies and select discographies, both arranged alphabetically, of the well-known and better-known conductors and composers. These entries also include a list of suggested reading for those wishing to further their studies; and 2) Select discographies of conductors about whom little or no biographical information is available. The bibliography at the end of the book covers discographical sources, popular music and film music. This is the first time that the lives and recordings of such artists as Kostelanetz, Faith, and Gould as well as the orchestral recordings of such great popular composers as Gershwin, Kern, Porter, Rodgers, Berlin and Coward have been documented and presented in an encyclopedic form.

Skylark

Skylark
Author: Philip Furia
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2004-12-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1466819235

Skylark is the story of the tormented but glorious life and career of Johnny Mercer, and the first biography of this enormously popular and influential lyricist. Raised in Savannah, Mercer brought a quintessentially southern style to both his life in New York and to his lyrics, which often evoked the landscapes and mood of his youth ("Moon River", "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening"). Mercer also absorbed the music of southern blacks--the lullabies his nurse sang to him as a baby and the spirituals that poured out of Savannah's churches-and that cool smooth lyrical style informed some of his greatest songs, such as "That Old Black Magic". Part of a golden guild whose members included Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, Mercer took Hollywood by storm in the midst of the Great Depression. Putting words to some of the most famous tunes of the time, he wrote one hit after another, from "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" to "Jeepers Creepers" and "Hooray for Hollywood." But it was also in Hollywood that Mercer's dark underside emerged. Sober, he was a kind, generous and at times even noble southern gentleman; when he drank, Mercer tore into friends and strangers alike with vicious abuse. Mercer's wife Ginger, whom he'd bested Bing Crosby to win, suffered the cruelest attacks; Mercer would even improvise cutting lyrics about her at parties. During World War II, Mercer served as Americas's troubadour, turning out such uplifting songs as "My Shining Hour" and "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive." He also helped create Capitol Records, the first major West Coast recording company, where he discovered many talented singers, including Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. During this period, he also began an intense affair with Judy Garland, which rekindled time and again for the rest of their lives. Although they never found happiness together, Garland became Mercer's muse and inspired some of his most sensuous and heartbreaking lyrics: "Blues in the Night," "One for My Baby," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Mercer amassed a catalog of over a thousand songs and during some years had a song in the Top Ten every week of the year--the songwriting equivalent of Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak--but was plagued by a sense of failure and bitterness over the big Broadway hit that seemed forever out of reach. Based on scores of interviews with friends, family and colleagues, and drawing extensively on Johnny Mercer's letters, papers and his unpublished autobiography, Skylark is an important book about one of the great and dramatic characters in 20th century popular music.