Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2021 June 09 • Wednesday

For a while now, decades, I guess, we've been living in a golden age for soundtrack music releases. It's incredible how much incredible music has been made available, mostly thanks to the efforts of a relatively small number of dedicated people with their own labels, such as Film Score Monthly (sorely missed now), Intrada, Cinema-kan, Quartet etc.

The Twilight Time limited edition blu-ray series has also been releasing high quality transfers of films with isolated audio tracks for just the music. This is also an amazing development.

And now we have to consider another part of film score appreciation that's gaining ground. The release of the actual written scores. With the right combination of book and blu-ray, you can now watch, listen and read along.

Exhibit A is Neumation Music's new release of Bernard Herrmann's groundbreaking and still thrilling and unmatched music for The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Famous for its use of electric instruments, most notably two theremins but also electric guitar, electric cello, electric violin and electric contrabass—who else was even thinking of these instruments in 1951?—this is one of Herrmann's masterpieces, anticipating trends in concert music, minimalism, for instance, that critics and serious audiences would swoon over decades later.

The book has an introduction by the son of the original electric violinist on the session, as well as a survey of the score, breakdowns of the individual cues and notes on certain instruments (of which one is the theremin, as you might expect).

There aren't very many books that are essential to the Bernard Herrmann devotee's library, but this is absolutely one of them.