A New Visibility for Film Music Society

The Society for the Preservation of Film Music, which has been credited with saving the archives of composers Hugo Friedhofer, Aaron Copland, Herbert Stothart, Scott Bradley, Jacques Ibert and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, has traditionally kept a low profile with its activities. One hears about the group usually only every fall, when it puts on its annual fund-raiser honoring one of its own for career achievement.

With the recent appointment of music historian Jeannie G. Pool as executive director, however, the 16-year old group--which started as an informal committee in 1974, but became an official, nonprofit organization only in 1982--may now start to become more visible in the larger musical community.

Pool’s appointment at this time comes about because the society has received a grant of $30,000 from the L.J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation, a two-year gift that requires matching funds.

According to Pool, the society has several current projects of import, two of which are negotiating with the Walt Disney Co. to catalogue and prepare the Disney Film Music Library for donation to a university library, and preparation of the Alfred Newman archives.

Pool, basically an academic with a special interest in, among other areas, women composers, says, “I’m a music person who keeps in touch--but I had no idea all this was going on.”

She refers, of course, to the society’s pioneer efforts in preserving the artifacts of film music: scores (including sketches, orchestrations and instrumental parts); recordings (discs, tapes and music tracks); documents (cue sheets, contracts, correspondence, etc.). Another important part of the society’s work is the coordination and dissemination of film music collections to libraries and institutions for preservation and access.

The society began with a disaster, what the organization’s official biography calls “The MGM Holocaust”: the destruction in the early 1970s of all the studio’s original sketches, orchestrations, orchestral parts and much of its collection of acetate disc recordings, all of which documented more than four decades of film music to that time. Today, an important part of the group’s work is educational and informational and is accomplished via its quarterly journal, the Cue Sheet.

The annual fund-raising event, a banquet honoring a leader in the field, has previously paid tribute to Ernest Gold (in 1989), Miklos Rozsa, David Raksin, Alex North, George Duning and Elmer Bernstein, among others. The 1990 recipient will be John Williams; the exact date (in November, presumably) and location of the event have not been chosen.

CHOREOGRAPHERS: The United States premiere of Glen Tetley’s “Tagore” will be given during the upcoming engagement of San Francisco Ballet in San Diego (Oct. 2-6). The Bay City Co. will then take the year-old work--set to Alexander Zemlinsky’s “Lyric” Symphony--on tour to Washington and Minneapolis. . . . Bella Lewitzky will be honored for her “lifelong fight for freedom of expression” at a reception sponsored by the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, next Sunday in Beverly Hills. Information: (213) 759-6063. . . . A whole program of works by Bronislava Nijinska makes up the second program of the season at Oakland Ballet, performing at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, Oct. 26-28. The agenda: “Le Train Bleu” (music by Milhaud), “Les Biches” (Poulenc) and “Les Noces” (Stravinsky). According to the company, this will be the first time that these three works have appeared on the same program.

PEOPLE: Soviet soprano Makvala Kasrashvili and American tenor James Hoback will appear together in the season-opening “Cavalleria Rusticana” at Seattle Opera, beginning Saturday night in the Opera House. Kasrashvili, who has visited this country before as a member of the touring Bolshoi Opera, replaces the originally announced Dolora Zajick, who withdrew “because of exhaustion,” according to Ernesto Alorda, press officer of the company. . . . Ormsby Wilkins, who conducted the recent engagement of Australian Ballet at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, has been appointed music director of the National Ballet of Canada, effective immediately. A native of Sydney, Wilkins has formerly conducted for the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet and Opera Ballet de Lyon. . . . Pianist Christopher Taylor, 20, a student at Harvard University, was top winner in the recent University of Maryland International William Kapell Piano Competition; Taylor took home $20,000 in cash, plus the prize of a New York debut recital in Alice Tully Hall in November. Runners-up were Ilia Itin, 23, of the U.S.S.R. and Oleg Volkov, 32, also of the U.S.S.R. Among the other nine semi-finalists was the Soviet emigre Leonid Kuzmin, 26, who has appeared in Southern California a number of times.