Here is my little tribute to Frank Zappa from my album No Secrets. It's called "Flying Without a Parachute" and I recorded it on the night I heard Frank had passed away. Enjoy.

The Warped Ones (1960)

The End of Homework Assignments!!Finally!!

I just wanted to let everyone who was actually interested in the original concept for Criterion Improvisations that the "Homework Assignment: Not a Real Blog"s have finally come to an end...I promise! Soon, those non-Criterion Improvisation blog posts will be deleted forever, so read them now if you are interested.

In my next blog, I plan to return to my original idea of talking about soundtracks to Criterion and Eclipse Blu Rays and DVDs by resuming my discussion about Eclipse Set #28: The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara. We have been looking at composer Toshiro Mayazumi's composing career but we will now specifically look at his score for The Warped Ones and discuss his career in the context of his scores for Kurahara.

One other feature I'd like to add to this blog is a record of my movie viewing, both at home and at the theater. This list begins on January 1, 2012.

Here is the list so far:

Me and the family have watched the entire Terminator: The Sara Connor Chronicles series and were very disappointed to find it only lasted for two seasons.

Hugo - The whole family saw this in a non-3D so-so theatre here in Portland, ME. Great film even without the 3D and perfect for my family of young and old cinephiles.

Spiderman 1 and 2 - At home on Blu Ray. Good popcorn fun for the whole family. (Santa brought us a professional popcorn popper for Christmas.)

Twilight Zone - We're on Season 1 on Blu Ray so far. Some great scores by Bernard Herrmann.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents - I'm in the process of revisiting Alfred Hitchcock-directed episodes of Season 1 on DVD. Might watch the whole season again.

Carlos - 1/7/12 Watched part 3 with Shelli (my wife). Not for the kids, obviously.

Salo - 1/8/12 Definitely not for the kids. Watched it by myself and was disgusted again but on Blu Ray you can see it is also a very beautiful film. Nonetheless, the most disturbing film I've ever watched.

Harakiri - 1/9/12 First time I've seen it on Blu Ray. Like Disney after Salo! A great Japanese film about the Samurai code.

The Phantom Carriage - 1/9/12 I've watched parts 1 and 2 so far but I keep falling asleep.

Exciting new blog

Hi, Criterion Improvisations fans.

You might want to check out a new blog I'm doing called "Music Appreciation at Saint Josephs." I'll be teaching Music Appreciation at St. Joseph's College in Windham, Maine this Spring. This is some free open course ware that is an interactive blog looking at the history of music from Gregorian Chant to modern day Rock. I think you'll like it. Just click below:

Music Appreciation at Saint Josephs

Toshiru Mayuzumi Continued...Finally!

Finally a blog about film scores! I'm sorry I've had to use this blog space as a place to do homework assignments but I'm finally back, continuing my exploration of the concert career of Japanese film composer Toshiru Mayuzumi.

I did actually buy a CD with some of Mayuzumi's orchestral concert music on NAXOS (8.557693) conducted by Takuo Yuasa. The earliest piece of music I was able to hear so far was from 1948. It is a short orchestral piece called Rumba Rhapsody. A rumba is the slowest of five Afro-Cuban ballroom dances. The other dances are the paso double, cha cha cha, samba and the jive. The dance comes from Cuba before the revolution.

Here is a rather sexy video of the rumba:

Why, you ask, would a Japanese composer be interested in a Cuban dance? As we will see, Mayuzumi was very interested in exotic things. His dad was a sea-captain and inspired his interest in foreign parts of the world. We will see this interest in exotic things throughout his career, even in the movies he would score for in the future. Because his dad was away from home a lot, a a child, Mayuzumi would dream of the places his father might be traveling to. Later in life, he would explore exotic subjects as a way to feel a connection with hid dad.

Rumba Rhapsody starts off sounding a lot like Rite of Spring Stravinsky. This is no surprise because Mayazumi was introduced to the music of Stravinsky, Debussy and Ravel when he attended the Tokyo Music School in 1945 and studied under Qunihico Hashimoto. Hashimoto became a role model for Mayuzumi in many ways, influencing his politics as well as the way he dressed. Perhaps Hashimoto became a bit of a father figure for Mayazumi.

Hashimoto had Mayuzumi compose in every style, from pop music to more progressive pieces. This helps explain the scores Mayazumi wrote for Koreyoshi Kurahara in the sixties (from the Eclipse set The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara that we will be looking at soon) with their wide variety of musical styles. Mayuzumi's love for exoticism would give his music a richness and variety that made it unique.

I don't know if he was quite there yet with Rumba Rhapsody but the piece is certainly delightful and accesable to any open minded listener. If you have a taste for the Exotica movement in the late 50's and early 60's you will really enjoy the piece. (Think Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman Dick Schory and RCA Living Stereo) After the Stravinsky-esque opening, you can imagine you're sitting in your art deco living room with some colorful cocktail in hand enjoying the "hi-fi".

The only difference is that there is nothing corny or substandard about this music. The music is expertly orchestrated, and the Stravinsky influence shows Mayuzumi was not just a lounge lizard. I like that he wasn't afraid to let all his influences show here.

You can buy the whole CD or download it from amazon for less than seven bucks and I would suggest you do.

Join me next time when we continue to explore the life and music of Toshiru Mayuzumi by taking a look at his next orchestral piece Symphonic Mood.

Criterion Improvisations - Understanding 12-tone Music

After hearing from several people regarding Criterion Improvisations, one thing seemed to be a recurring comment. Many of you reading this blog felt I went over your heads with unfamiliar music lingo.

One of things I mentioned was 12-tone composition. I had mentioned that Toshiru Mayuzumi had composed in this style in the mid-fifties. In this edition of Criterion Improvisations I will attempt to give you a fairly simple explanation of what I meant by this with the aid of some video links you can check out to illustrate my point.

Let’s begin with a musical example. The person who really developed the idea of 12-tone composition was Arnold Schoenberg, who eventually codified it into a new method of composing. He didn’t just have students, he had disciples who included Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Pierre Boulez, to name just a few. Here is Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra Op. 34, written in 1934:






After hearing that, you are probably either convinced to never listen to Schoenberg’s music again or you are at least intrigued about a type of music you may not understand but may want to learn more about. This is music without a tonal center. Did you sense an over-all important note here? Most typical Classical or Romantic music has a tonal center. There is one note the music seems to resolve to. Click here to listen to an excerpt from Mozart:




Did you sense that there was one particular note that seemed to be most important? You don’t even have to know the name of the note to sense this. Usually the last note in a tonal composition is this note or the compositions’ tonal center. In tonal compositions, notes are not part of a democracy but notes are ranked in order of importance. That’s why most symphonies will tell you the key in their title. This was important to understanding the music.

Schoenberg wanted to break away from the idea of a tonal center. He sought to free music from what he saw as a system of the past that was stifling his creativity. Here is a little video bio about Schoenberg’s life that includes some excellent samples of his music.



If you are at all familiar with the piano, you know there are 12 notes: Ab, A, Bb, B, C, C#, D, Eb, E, F, F# and G. Schoenberg sought to make all 12 of these notes equal. No “big cheese” of notes, everybody equal. This may be why when you listened to the above piece by Schoenberg that it may have seemed a bit directionless to you. To try to create a discernable pattern to the ear, Schoenberg arranged the 12 notes in a certain order. Say, A, Eb, D, C#, Bb, F, Ab, F#, B, E, C, C for example. As these notes are repeated in the same sequence over and over you can hopefully begin to recognize the pattern they make. Here is a video tutorial on 12-tone composition for you to look at:



I hope you will begin to give this music a chance and try to listen with open ears. It could be the beginning of a whole new musical adventure for you. As we explore the different film score composers in the Criterion Collection, I may present a tutorial like this from time to time to help everyone feel included in what I'm writing about. The purpose of this blog is not to talk over your heads and display my musical knowledge (not all that impressive, really) but to join you in an exploration of new musical directions. I hope this blog entry helped me to start achieve that ultimate goal. Let me know what you think. Maybe next time we'll look at electronic music in the 50's.

Thanks for reading.

The Warped Ones Part One: Enter Mayuzumi

The Warped Ones (1960)
Part One: Enter Toshiru Mayuzumi

Get ready for this one, folks. The Warped Ones, the second film in the Eclipse Series The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara, is where things start to get a little more interesting. This Japanese New Wave film features a score by Toshiru Mayuzumi that will take your breath away with its free jazz score. The film itself is a wild ride from start to finish and the music reflects that fact.

One of the things I would like to accomplish through this blog would be to introduce you to some new music you might not be aware of in a variety of styles of music. I would like to show how looking closely at movie scores and soundtracks can be a gateway into new worlds of music. This has certainly been the case for me. Hearing the music of Frank Zappa and seeing films like 200 Motels, which satirized a lot of 20th Century classical music, was certainly a gateway for me which lead to my interest in all kinds of music and ultimately lead me to compose my own symphonic, “classical” and art music. I hope this blog might do its own part in expanding your musical horizons. Looking into Mayuzumi certainly expanded mine.

In this installment of Criterion Improvisations, I would like to take a look at Mayuzumi who would also score the next three films in this Eclipse set. Even though Masaru Sato did a great job scoring Intimidation (1960) for Kurahara (see my last column), I believe Mayuzumi and Kurahara are a match made in heaven, as the director starts to get more and more bizarre throughout the 60’s.

Mayuzumi was an adventurous composer and unlike Sato (who only wrote film scores)wrote a lot of music for the concert stage. With the piece X,Y ,Z (1955), he was the first Japanese composer to work with musique concrète. That same year also he became the first Japanese composer to write an electronic music piece, Shūsaku I. Around this same period he also wrote 12-tone pieces, aleatory pieces and compositions for prepared piano as well as an orchestral piece called Elektoplasm that featured electric guitar. (I’d like to see, hear and possibly play that score someday – I am a concert guitarist myself. Check out www.donpride.com to find out more.)

Near the end of the 50’s, his music started to reflect his interest Buddhist chants. He wrote the “Nirvana Symphony” in 1958. The symphony is very colorfully orchestrated and is should be very accessible to most listeners. The symphony is in six movements:
1. Campanology I – orchestra
2. Suramaganah – Buddhist chant
3. Campanology II – orchestra
4. Mahaprajnaparamita – Buddhist chant
5. Campanology III – orchestra
6. Finale – chant and orchestra combined

It is quite a musical journey for the adventurous listener and I recommend it highly. The whole piece is around 35 minutes long and combines Eastern and Western music in a way that is highly original and not “cheesy” or “new agey” in any way. If you like Bright Sheng then I bet you would like this music. Of course, if you haven’t heard Bright Sheng yet, then you should definitely check out his music as well to see what exciting things are going on in contemporary classical composition today. You can download the “Nirvana Symphony” on itunes or amazon in a performance by the Tokyo Metropolitan symphony that is quite nice.

I think I’m going to end this “improvisation” right there. I have ordered Mayuzumi’s Mandala Symphony from anmazon and it should be here on Wednesday. This piece was written in 1960, the same year The Warped Ones was released, and will make an excellent companion as we continue to follow Mayazumi’s career in both film and on the concert stage together next time. In the meantime, please check out the “Nirvana Symphony” and let me know what you think.

Next time: Mayazumi’s Mandala Symphony and The Warped Ones