The Mancini Sound

Apr. 17, 2012

2:18 p.m.

Henry Mancini is the one name instantly recognized by the general public among all those who wrote the music that sets the mood for most films. As John Caps writes in his biography, Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music (University of Illinois Press), Mancini was probably the first Hollywood composer to become a star. None of his successors, including onetime protégé John Williams, have been able to eclipse him. Although bits of Williams live on in pop culture, especially the turbulent rhythm of Jaws and the fanfare for Star Wars, they have no life apart from the movies for which they were penned. By contrast, several of Mancini\'s melodies have become standards. Who doesn\'t know “Moon River” or the “Pink Panther Theme”? Mancini came from an emotionally austere, hardworking Italian immigrant family for whom music lessons were a mark of culture, and perhaps his distant father left a trace in the circumspect sentiments of some of his songs. His career began as an arranger at the tail end of the big bands, where he learned to work in popular idioms with orchestras and choruses (and happily marrying one of his singers, Ginny O\'Connor), but the exuberance of swing would not be Mancini\'s touchstone. Not surprisingly, the emotionally muted tones of the cool jazz movement, which emerged by the early \'50s and took special hold on the West Coast, were where the composer found his sonic palette. Nudged toward professional success by his wife, Mancini was one of several Hollywood composers who broke with the industry\'s symphonic tradition to explore contemporary, vernacular music in movies. Mancini\'s eagerness to please and willingness to work hard can\'t entirely explain why he caught the attention of an audience beyond the movie buffs who sat through the credits of every film. In the light of Kennedy-era optimism circa 1960, “the Mancini sound seemed to represent the bright, confident, welcoming voice of a new middle-class life: interested in pop songs and jazz, in movies and television, in outreach politics but also conventionally stay-at-home comforts,” Caps writes. A decent, unostentatious and unneurotic man of good intentions, Mancini struck just the right chord as the \'60s began. By decade\'s end, however, his golden years were behind and he entered a silver era of interesting experimentation. Who knew that Mancini made music by dropping rubber balls on piano strings or turning the folksy autoharp into a machine of dread? His avant-garde tendencies surfaced in a host of art films little remembered nowadays. As with any work of Caps\' scope, some mistakes creep in. Alfred Hitchcock\'s Frenzy wasn\'t a 1975 release (though it\'s fascinating to learn of the rejected Mancini score). And occasionally, the author overreaches. Putting Mancini in the same bag as the Beatles misses the mark; while many Beatles\' fans certainly enjoyed some of Mancini\'s songs, they were less likely to buy his recordings. The \'60s “baby boomers” Caps describes as Mancini\'s core audience were already a little old for the boommore the Rob and Laura Petri generation than the kids who flocked to rock\'n\'roll. But these are small points. Caps has written a positive yet critically astute study of Mancini, distilling his life to essentials and unafraid to declare some of his work as banal and cut to order. The author excels at describing Mancini\'s music, whether “Moon River\'s” comforting yet sad blend of hope and loss, the way the conversational “Days of Wine and Roses” begins in major before resigning itself to minor keys, and the comic stealth of the “Pink Panther Theme.” Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music is a marvelous book for anyone who cares about American movies and music in the 20th century.