This music man set a classy tone

David Raksin, the great film composer who died this week, once told me about traveling to Russia in the 1980s with his avant-garde colleague John Cage and the musicologist, conductor, lexicographer and all-around musical maven Nicolas Slonimsky. When they arrived at the airport in Moscow, there was a problem: Cage didn’t have a valid visa. Slonimsky, who had been born in Russia, tried to explain to the authorities just how important a figure Cage was and that he had been invited to Russia by people in high positions. But the situation looked bad.

Then one functionary, pointing to Raksin, asked, “And who’s that?” He, Slonimsky replied, is also a major composer -- he wrote “Laura.” That did it. The officials couldn’t have been more impressed and let all three men pass.

The story sounds a little fishy, as David’s stories sometimes did. What is not fishy is that he would be traveling with Cage and Slonimsky. The reason I knew David was that such men were his preferred compatriots. He was utterly devoted to new music and wrote some of it himself. We frequented the same circles, went to the same concerts.

David was one of Hollywood’s finest composers and one of its finest artists. When he wrote a film score, he didn’t just write atmospheric music (although he could write atmospheric music with the best of them -- he was the best of them). He classed up the joint. I have seen only a fraction of the more than 100 films he scored, but the ones I know -- the famous ones such as “Laura,” “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Forever Amber” -- would not be nearly what they are without the music.

And the reason his scores gave those films added depth and texture, I am convinced, is that David connected with a broader world of music. During the years I knew him, which admittedly were long after his heyday in Hollywood, he was avidly interested in the music of his time. He counted among his friends not just Cage and Slonimsky (with whom he was quite close) but also Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio and many other leading progressive composers. David was a regular at the Monday Evening Concerts and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella series. If Boulez was in town conducting the Philharmonic, David would be at rehearsals and concerts alike, especially if Boulez had programmed a work of his own.

That didn’t mean David liked all this stuff. In fact, no one was more opinionated than David. He had a ready crack for everything, and often a not very nice, though highly amusing, story. But he knew what was going on in music -- really knew what was going on -- and that informed everything he wrote. Not in an obvious way. “Laura” is a marvelous, moody tune, and everybody recognized it as such. But it is not simple; none of Raksin’s music is simple. Subtle, shifting layers of rhythm and harmony invariably make his melodies unpredictable. His thinking was always, whatever the musical means, 20th century.

Given his devotion to new music, it is not surprising that David was also a serious concert composer. And it was, I always suspected, a cause of bitterness to him that he never received much recognition for that. His fame rested primarily on one song of genius. That the song was inspired is not to be questioned. That the song was a fluke is to be questioned, and I’ve long wondered about his concert works. David spoke proudly of them, but they are rarely done, and I’ve heard few of them. I often asked him to give me tapes. He never did.

But even if these works prove not worth reviving, they cannot take away from David’s accomplishments. His relationship with Hollywood was marred by his appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and things were never the same for him afterward. But that was long, long ago. In the large picture, David was one of Hollywood’s most admirable musical citizens, his music enhancing all it touched, in part because it was touched by such an inquiring mind.

Monday morning, before I learned of David’s death, I was, by sheer coincidence, reminded of that magical touch. Thinking about Nino Rota -- the Italian film composer who also had a difficult life in the concert hall and the theater, and whose opera “The Italian Straw Hat” I had seen the day before -- I dug out a CD, “Le Cinema,” featuring the violinist Gidon Kremer. It has a couple of Rota numbers on it that I like, but I hadn’t heard it in years. The disc starts out with Kremer’s heart-rending performance of “Smile” from “Modern Times,” which brought a tear to my eye.

David’s first job in Hollywood was as Charlie Chaplin’s musical assistant. “Smile” was Chaplin’s song for the picture, but there can be little doubt that its realization was entirely thanks to David.

In the booklet for “Le Cinema,” the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli recalls once standing next to Chaplin’s grave near Geneva.

“Chaplin,” he writes, “could not possibly be lying there under the ground, but must be soaring aloft on a cloudless sky -- just like ‘Smile.’ ”

David began by giving Charlie his wings. Now he’s got his own.