Remembering Leonard Rosenman, Film and Concert Composer

James Dean was already dead before I was born, but nev­er­the­less, I couldn’t help but mar­vel at his per­for­mances in the movies Rebel With­out a Cause and East of Eden. In fact, I admit it: I’m a big James Dean fan, even if there are only 3 movies. I vividly remem­ber see­ing those movies when I was a teenager at a reper­tory cin­ema (now there’s some­thing that has gone away, a vic­tim of DVD rentals and plasma screens), with Cyn­thia Nikitin, a friend who I still keep in touch with and is hope­fully going to be vis­it­ing us here in Van­cou­ver later this spring.

Dean’s movies, espe­cially East of Eden, made a great impact on me. The emo­tions and moods that made up Cal’s world didn’t seem all that far from my own ado­les­cent thoughts and feel­ings. I also remem­ber that I imme­di­ately loved the sound­track, which was as rich and com­pli­cated as the film’s plot, direc­tion and act­ing, filled with angst and con­flict. In that incred­i­ble scene where Cal’s father rejects his gift (money to pay him back what he’d lost in his refrig­er­ated veg­etable deba­cle — it’s no good because it was an ill-gotten gain from the war econ­omy), I remem­ber how Elia Kazan’s cam­era shifted to a strange tilt (mir­ror­ing the off-centre rela­tion­ship between Cal and his father). I also remem­bered the bru­tal, stab­bing music accom­pa­ny­ing the trip that Cal takes his brother Aron to see his mother (now a Madame at a brothel in Sali­nas instead of being dead, as he had been told), an act of des­per­a­tion and lash­ing out at his father and brother. It’s strong, angu­lar, and very dis­so­nant music, sound­ing far more like the works of Arnold Schoen­berg than Hollywood.

There’s a rea­son that East of Eden’s music is closer to The Sec­ond Vien­nese School than Sun­set Boule­vard: the com­poser of the score was Dean’s piano teacher, New York room­mate and friend Leonard Rosen­man. Rosen­man died yes­ter­day at the age of 83.

When Dean got his first act­ing break, he intro­duced Elia Kazan to Rosen­man, and that’s how Rosen­man got his first break as a film com­poser. He had actu­ally already stud­ied with Schoen­berg, and also with the Ital­ian com­poser, Luigi Dal­lapic­cola at Tan­gle­wood on a fel­low­ship (a place I attended as well). He had all the cre­den­tials of a New York Intel­lec­tual 1950s com­poser, and if things had gone the usual way, he would have prob­a­bly become a pro­fes­sor at some col­lege, teach­ing Music The­ory and Com­po­si­tion, and writ­ing an oeu­vre of cham­ber music with the occa­sional orches­tral com­mis­sion, if he was lucky. (This is a career that for me as well, is the road not taken). That all changed after the film work. Rosen­man despaired that his East Coast col­leagues felt he had ‘sold out’ and wouldn’t even look at his seri­ous pieces (much less per­form them) after he left New York and the New Music scene. He even­tu­ally got some per­for­mances, but the move to LA meant that he had to chan­nel his craft into film. By doing so, I think that Rosen­man stands as one of the few bridges between Expres­sion­ist con­cert music (Schoen­berg, et al), and cin­ema in the 1950s and 60s.

Both Schoen­berg and Dal­lapic­cola were ser­ial com­posers, and it’s still dif­fi­cult to say assess just what kind of an affect they had on music, even though it’s been a cen­tury (!) since Schoen­berg wrote the first of his works that aban­doned tonal­ity. If Schoenberg’s tech­niques, or at least the sound world he gave birth to, were to hit the main­stream, East of Eden is one of those films where one of his pupils actu­ally got through to the masses. The Expres­sion­ist aes­thetic of that movie’s sound­track is as close as Schoenberg’s sound as you ever hear in film from that era. It’s not just East of Eden, either. Rosen­man also wrote the score to Fan­tas­tic Voy­age in 1966, and that score is a dead ringer for Schoenberg’s ‘Five Pieces for Orches­tra’ of 1909. It still strikes me as amaz­ing that the sci­ence fic­tion movie music accom­pa­ny­ing minia­tur­ized scuba divers and a nuclear sub­ma­rine repair­ing the body of a sci­en­tist really had its roots in music writ­ten for the con­cert hall some 57 years earlier!

In some ways, Jerry Gold­smith (who also died recently in 2004) rep­re­sented the bridge between Stravin­sky and per­haps Bar­tok and cin­ema, but Rosen­man is, I think, truly the heir to Schoenberg.

Rosen­man had a long an fruit­ful career in Hol­ly­wood. Unfor­tu­nately, In recent years he’d suc­cumbed to fron­totem­po­ral demen­tia. I hope that some of his con­cert and film music gets played. I dis­cov­ered that the iTunes store indeed had a won­der­ful record­ing (far bet­ter than the orig­i­nal sound­track orches­tra) by San Fran­cisco com­poser John Adams con­duct­ing the Lon­don Sin­foni­etta in the music from East of Eden and Rebel With­out a Cause. It’s def­i­nitely worth getting.