Veteran Marketing Consultant Recalls How Legendary Hollywood Composer Alfred Newman Inspired Him

ARDSLEY, N.Y. - May 6, 2013 - PRLog -- This year marks the 80th anniversary of legendary Hollywood composer, arranger and conductor Alfred Newman creating the iconic fanfare theme that accompanies the animated criss-crossing spotlights of the Twentieth Century-Fox logo .It is also the 60th anniversary of when Frank Pagani, a 10-year-old in the South Bronx, experienced the musical genius of Newman for the first time, an event he says inspired his passion for classical music.

The defining moment occurred when Frank and his family saw in a neighborhood theater the much-anticipated biblical spectacle, The Robe.  The excitement for movie lovers like Frank was that this was the first film to be photographed in the wide-screen CinemaScope process. Because the Spooner, the neighborhood theater on Southern Boulevard that had been closed as workers installed the giant screen and stereophonic sound speakers in advance of the film’s opening, expectations were very high that The Robe would be the movie experience of a lifetime.

“Little did I know my life was about to change,” recalls the veteran public relations and marketing consultant of Ardsley, New York.  “Hearing Newman’s powerful and moving score unquestionably set me on the path to discovering the joys of classical music. What struck me about the score was its symphonic-like orchestration and use of a large chorus, elements I would come to love in the works of classical composers.”

"I can trace my love for Mahler, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Copland, Shostakovich, Britten and so many others.to the inspiration I felt hearing Newman's score sweep through the movie house. On the way out of the theater, I looked at the large poster for The Robe in the lobby to see in the credits who had written this amazing music. And there it was, the phrase: Music composed and conducted by Alfred Newman. I was determined to find out all about this composer.”

Ironically, it wasn’t the silver screen where Frank learned about Newman’s amazing contributions as a pioneer film composer but on the small black and white TV screen at home. In the 1950s, WNTA’s Channel 13 aired for the first time many of 20th Century-Fox’s productions from the 40s and early 50s.  “Just about all of them included original scores composed and conducted by Newman who I learned had begun his long tenure as music director of Darryl Zanuck’s studio, starting in 1940. The sheer diversity and range of this composer’s talents enthralled me and enhanced my enjoyment of such film classics as All About Love, Leave Her to Heaven, The Song of Bernadette, The Keys to the Kingdom, Captain from Castile, How Green Was My Valley, The Mark of Zorro, Gunga Din, Wuthering Heights and others.

As it would turn out, The Robe represented the near mid-point in Newman’s remarkable and prolific career. In the ensuing years, Newman would compose scores for Anastasia, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, The Greatest Story Ever Told, How the West Was Won and the deeply moving The Diary of Anne Frank which became Frank’s personal favorite Newman score.

In the 1950s, Frank also fell in love with Rodgers and Hammerstein (R&H) musicals, thanks to Hollywood’s striking adaptations of their Broadway hits, beginning with Oklahoma! in the amazingly wide-screen process of Todd-AO. When he went to see Carousel, he noticed in the opening screen titles that Newman arranged and conducted the score. That revealed another Newman talent—adapting and conducting the scores of other composers.

Newman’s signature scoring for a R&H musical— richly symphonic in ways that cannot be replicated by the smaller orchestras that are used in Broadway performances—continued with The King and I, South Pacific, Flower Drum Song, and the remake of R&H's original film musical, State Fair. Although he did not score R&H’s The Sound of Music,, Newman captured the last of his nine Oscars (a record for a Hollywood composer and music director) for Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot three years before his passing in 1970.

The discovery of Newman was critical in Frank’s appreciation for the art of film scoring and opened the doors to other Hollywood composers he came to admire, notably Bernard Herrmann for the striking scores he created for Alfred Hitchcock’s  masterworks of the 50's: The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho and The Wrong Man.

Newman’s music is forever and vividly embedded in some of the most unforgettable images that flickered before Frank’s young eyes: Christ carrying and dying on the cross in The Robe;the heartbreaking embrace of Anne Frank and Peter when they realize the Nazis have discovered their hiding place in The Diary of Anne Frank; the seeming endless numbers of Eve Harringtons taking their bows before the mirror at the end of All About Eve; the doomed lovers on the moors in Wuthering Heights; the innocent young peasant girl encountering the Virgin Mary in The Song of Bernadette; the insanely jealous and murderous woman throwing her father’s ashes to the wind as she rides horseback in Leave Her to Heaven and the King of Siam whisking Anna off her feet in the rousing Shall We Dance? segment from The King and I.

It has been 43 years since Newman passed away. Frank notes that the Hollywood community has never given Newman the tribute he deserves for the richest soundtrack musical legacy he left to movie goers to enjoy for all time comprising more than 200 scores in every conceivable genre. “Naturally, next year’s Academy Awards ceremony would be the perfect venue to honor Newman with a performance of selections from some of his most outstanding scores. And how fitting it would be that the orchestra would be conducted by his two enormously talented sons, Thomas and David—and nephew Randy who have carried on the Newman legacy in their own unique ways. As for the overture, I cannot think of a more rousing way to start the evening’s proceedings than to play the most recognizable theme every composed for a motion picture studio—the 20th Century-Fox fanfare."