During Hollywood’s golden age, movie music wasn’t culled from a stock sonic library (cue that tinkling piano for pensive mood) or stitched together from old pop hits (publishing rights owned by the studio?). Even many modestly budgeted films had original scores written by staff composers and performed by in-house orchestras.
Play It Again: The Classic Sound of Hollywood is a two-CD set that revisits (and repackages) some of the most familiar music of that golden age and beyond. The selections extend beyond the era of Gone With the Wind and into the ‘60s (Doctor Zhivago, Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and the ‘70s (Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Released by Sony Masterworks to mark TCM’s 20th anniversary celebration, Play It Again is not a collection of original recordings from the films but is pulled mostly from orchestral albums recorded decades later. Nevertheless, the versions follow the arc of the originals and, when heard together, offer a full menu of the aural variety that once came out of Hollywood.
While the men who wrote music for the movies weren’t usually deemed composers of the first order in their day, they had big ears and active imaginations. Deploying influences ranging from Copland to Stravinsky, they fleshed out cinematic stories with a lush aural grandeur lacking in most recent films.
