Music Preferred by Lorraine Byrne Bodley

Author:Lorraine Byrne Bodley [Lorraine Byrne Bodley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783990124031
Publisher: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag

POSTLUDE

Alex North was active as a film score composer from 1951 to 1993, receiving fifteen Academy Award nominations over this period. While none of these proved ultimately successful, in 1986 he became the first composer to receive an honorary Academy Award. North was disappointed not to receive a nomination for his adapted score for Huston’s The Dead. This is recorded in correspondence between his agent Michael Gorfaine and John Addison on behalf of the Academy Board, the latter stating that music based on work by other composers could not be included in nominations for best original score.60 As Sanya Shoilevska Henderson records in her monograph on North’s life and music, the composer would suffer the same form of disqualification following his score for Prizzi’s Honor, an earlier collaboration with John Huston that was released in 1985.61 Indeed, throughout the 1980s North and other Hollywood composers publicly expressed their concern that the Academy did not recognize the category of musical adaptation in film.62 The term “adaptation” merits some consideration here since both The Dead and Prizzi’s Honor were adapted screenplays of literary works, the latter after Richard Condon’s 1982 novel. Although the correspondence referred to above more obviously relates to musical ideas of adaptation (and especially so in the case of the soundtrack for Prizzi’s Honor which features overtures by Rossini and arias by Donizetti and Puccini) negative or indifferent appraisals of North’s “originality” in these films failed to take into account the composer’s intellectual and creative engagement with the literary sources and adapted screenplays involved – and this chapter has highlighted North’s consideration of Joyce alongside his response to Tony Huston’s screenplay and John Huston’s overall direction. Moreover, in the case of The Dead, the assertion that North had simply arranged other composers’ material could be robustly challenged. The historical Irish music sources he consulted would include Moore’s Melodies – settings that themselves “borrowed” extensively from traditional tunes first notated by Edward Bunting in his first publication, A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music63– as well as George Petrie’s collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland.64

Compared to previous and subsequent forays by American composers into imaginary Irish sound worlds – from Max Steiner to Victor Young to John Williams – North’s score is singular in its combination of historical ethnography, literary associations and understated compositional craft; furthermore, and in a manner very much in keeping with the overall spectral tonality of Joyce’s “The Dead”, the American composer has occupied what up to the point of this published article can be described as an anonymous presence in Irish cultural history – a double irony perhaps, given the origins of most of the melodic materials he would use for the film. In fact, North’s studied arrangement of The Lass of Aughrim has retained its own ghostly presence by way of its becoming the preferred, performed version of a song that has undergone many variations in Ireland following its original migration from Scotland in the seventeenth century. Through what might best be

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