MUSIC CHRONICLE
TWO FILM SCORES
Music in the concert hall is usually heard, but frequently not
felt; music with a film is rarely heard and always felt. This gives the film
composer opportunity to project his ideas while the audience isn't
listening, so to speak, and easily brushing past aural prejudices engen–
dered by conscious perception, he makes his appeal directly to the feel–
ings on an almost psychological level. An elementary kind of appeal, to be
sure, yet quite basic
in
the nature of art. Owing to its functional value
and large audience potential, in a society where new music has had
neither function nor audience, film music should provide a fertile field
for creation, and has been receiving growing emphasis. Lavish but
hackneyed in the Hollywood film, its artistic importance in the docu–
mentary has reached a point where, in sponsoring
Louisiana Story,
Stan–
dard Oil devoted a good portion of its budget to the procuring of two
of America's most successful music makers-Virgil Thomson and the
Philadelphia Orchestra.
My impression of R.
J.
Flaherty's
Louisiana Story,
hailed by both
film
and music critics as a significant advance in the purposeful combi–
nation of the two arts, was that its effect is unclear and disjointed. Its
two themes never seem to come to fruition, and are joined in a highly
contrived fashion by over arty cutting, and a flimsy, meaningless story
which
has no place in a documentary. Willard Van Dyke's postulation
that a documentary by its very nature involves delineation of a problem
may
be
purely arbitrary, but in this film's scrupulous avoidance of all
problems, the relationships among boy, bayou, and oil derrick emerge
as purely idyllic. This may
be
quite pleasing to the film's sponsor, but
as
art
its effect is amorphous.
Virgil Thomson's suave music becomes party to the film's disjoint–
edness in that it proceeds largely in short, regular phrases, and steers
the same idyllic path emotionally, which fails to bring sense to the
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