An Interview with Jerome Moross

Jerome Moross in Conversation with Noah Andre Trudeau
Originally published in Music from the Movies Issue 1, 1992
Text reproduced by kind permission of the editor, Paul Place

I'll begin with a question that was suggested to me by Bernard Herrmann. Would you label yourself as a film music composer or a composer who writes film music?

I'd say a composer who writes film music.

Where would you place film music in relation to concert music.
Well, my main music has always been concert music and theatre music, and film music was after that.

But you consider it a form of theatre music, definitely.
Well you haven't got the control in film music that you have in theatre music. You don't have the final decision on the piece that you wrote for the job. You don't decide on the length of the composition; you’re writing to the scene that is finished. It is theatrical, of course, but it's a different kind of theatre.

You got started in the film music business as an orchestrator as I remember. What exactly did that entail? Obviously an orchestrator orchestrates, but actually there's more to it than that, isn't there?

Well, it goes according to the composers you work with. Some give you a completely laid out sketch and some give you a piano piece.

Did you work with any specific composers for any length of time?

Yes, during the war when I was at Warner Bros I was assigned to two composers especially - Adolph Deutsch and Freddie Hollander. Deutsch used to write everything down to the last sixteenth rest and Hollander used to write Chopin-like pieces which had to be turned into orchestral pieces. So it was a difference of style. Then of course we were all farmed out. If the studio was in a rush you'd be assigned to Steiner or anybody.

Did you work with some of the big ones like Steiner or Korngold?
Well Warner Bros. had loaned Steiner over to Selznick and I forget what picture he was doing but he got into some sort of problems and I remember I had to go over and help out on some of it. I never worked with Korngold although he was around the studio.

What was it like working with these prominent figures? You're in the golden years now...
Oh sure. You see my name on television at night as an orchestrator on a lot of the old Humphrey Bogart films. But I had already been performed. “Frankie and Johnny” had already been done at the Chicago Opera Ballet and I'd had a show done by the Theatre Guild. I had any number of concert and theatrical performances. Then I couldn't get a job in Hollywood. I was considered too wild. But I had to get something to do - I was very broke. An orchestration job came up and I took it and stayed with Warners for three years, then I couldn't take it anymore and I left. Then followed a peculiar period of about five years in which I would be in New York doing something - “Ballet Ballads” was produced during that time and other things - and when things would go bad I would go out and get an orchestration job. I rather liked that - it seemed easy. Then finally, in 1950, I got a composition job in Hollywood and from then on I began to be offered composition of pictures.

When you say you got out of orchestration because you couldn't take it any more, what was it you couldn't take? Was it the pressure of the work, or having to subjugate your own creative instincts?
Oh no, I didn't feel non-creative. As a matter of fact I really learned the orchestra then and I thought I was a good orchestrator when I began. There was nothing like this business of sitting and orchestrating away at ten or eleven in the morning and then getting on the stage in the afternoon and hearing it. You really learn what goes with the orchestra and you learn not to make orchestral mistakes. What I didn't like was the demands on my time and I began to feel that it was more and more cutting into what I wanted to do. And then you were always in a rush, always working all night long.

When you first started in film composition, I tend to think the films you got were small budget films.
They were low budget films and they were mostly dull but it was a better living than being an orchestrator. At the time I was fascinated with the theatre and I was writing things like “Ballet Ballads” and “The Golden Apple” and while both of these brought great personal satisfaction, they did not bring in any money. So I would have to run back to Hollywood and do something to let me write the next one.

But you didn't feel that you were lowering your standards by writing for films?
No. It was just another medium but one that wasn't most attractive to me.

Perhaps even in the best of your film scores, were you ever trying to make a certain musical statement either through the drama or through the music? Meaning were you trying to pass your own message along, your own commentary on the story?
Well you have to. You are underlining the story musically at that point for the audience and you've got to add to the film. You've got to heighten it or lower it or whatever the problem is but you're helping the film, you're helping the director, you're helping everybody. You're trying to make the best film you can. As far as musical statements go, I never felt I was writing any differently for a film than I would write for the concert hall or theatre. Perhaps you didn't have as much time to work on counter-points or something. You did certain things because there was lack of time, but there was no question of writing differently for films.

You obviously had to work with the director and the producer in film scoring. Did you ever have any great difficulties getting your ideas across to them? Did you ever want to try certain things that they turned down because of their lack of musical feeling or did you have a pretty good collaboration with the people you worked with?
I rarely worked with the directors. Occasionally I came in on a film early and worked with the director. Mostly, I was assigned the film after it was written. I would write the music afterwards and parts that they didn’t want they could drop out and they did quite often.

Are you concerned about the stigma that seems to go with the tag of “film music composer”? Do you think it's hurt the integrity of your serious music?
It hasn't hurt the integrity of my serious music but it certainly has hurt my acceptance. The serious composers immediately form a block, you're a film composer now and they have that. To try and break that is almost impossible. On the other hand, I have never seen any of them turn down a film except that now there are no films for them.

Do you find that film music itself is evaluated as music or that it hardly ever gets a good evaluation?
Well it's very difficult to say. I've made two orchestral suites out of film music. One is a suite from THE BIG COUNTRY and one is a suite called “Music From The Flick” which is from five early films which were of varying quality but there were five pieces in them that I liked. More than five pieces, I sometimes combine them. Anyway I made a film suite out of it. By the way, THE BIG COUNTRY had an enormous sale in records and gets played practically every day on some radio station or other. There are concert performances of it too, both here and in Europe.

In a sense then, it would be kind of ironic if you were to get back into the concert hall with film music which in a way got you out of the concert hall.
Well, yes, except THE BIG COUNTRY is meant for pops concerts and things like that. Our concerts have changed; we no longer have a varied programme. We tend towards those dreary Bruckner symphonies, you know. And gone are the days before the war when the programme had music of all sorts of interests. We now assign that to what we call our promenades or the pops concerts.

Could you perhaps in a general sort of way describe the process of how you wrote your film music? Did you usually come in after the completion of the film?
Yes, most of the time I came in after the film. Generally it was a very rough cut and I would sit down with the producer, or sometimes with the producer, the director and the music editor who would make notes, and we’d decide where the music would go. I had been schooled by Leo Forbstein at Warner Bros. and his theory was he never knew where the “top brass” would want music so he'd score almost everything. My tendency is pretty much the same way. If the scene is slightly dull, I say well lets put music in there, they can always throw it out. After we decide where the music is going to be, the music editor goes back and starts working with his Moviola and ends up giving me timing sheets which give a complete breakdown of each scene to be scored. I see the film work a few times then I take the sheets and start writing.

From there, you do a piano score?

Well I write in a kind of four or five line short orchestral sketch. If I have time to orchestrate it myself, I can work from that. If not, it's easy to mark down exactly what I want the orchestrator to do and then you move to the stage and start recording. Any final changes you want to make, orchestration or cutting or anything, you make then and there.

The studio orchestras must be quick readers.
They're brilliant. The studio orchestras, at least in the heyday of the film period, let us say between 1935 and 1965, were the most brilliant musicians in the country. I first arrived in Hollywood in 1936 and I was astounded by the quality of the orchestras. I wasn't working with films then, I was working for the Chicago Opera and instead of spending a dull winter in Chicago I had gone to Hollywood and it was very exciting then.

I guess the big money attracted the good talent.
The money attracted them but also they played all the time. They played all year round and in between there was a tremendous amount of chamber music going on. The musicians were marvellous. Every studio had an orchestra. Every studio had to have a minimum of men and there were about eight or ten big studios.

Did you ever write with a particular soloist from any of the orchestras in mind?
No, you scored for what the film wanted. They called in extra men or you didn't have to use the full orchestra if you didn't want to although everybody did. Because the orchestra wasn't that big we always wanted more strings. The only thing that would happen was that players would buy peculiar instruments and they would come rushing up to you and say they had a double bass oboe or something and suggest that you use that in your next film. So instead of using a bassoon you would use a double bass oboe and it would mean an extra few dollars for the player. Sometimes you did it just to be nice to him.

I'd like to talk specifically about those of your film scores that have been recorded. We'll talk about the biggest one first, which is of course THE BIG COUNTRY. It seems to me that there is something there besides just another western score. I have a feeling that you reacted to the drama in a very personal way.
Well I was very excited about doing that picture. It was my first really big picture. And it was a western and my own style is - unconsciously - American. I just write that way. It fitted the way I wrote and without knowing it I seem to have turned out the prototype western score. This is the way to do a western now - the way I did it in BIG COUNTRY. The style, the ambience.

You were one of the first American composers to score in this natural way. I mean, Steiner did his westerns but not in an indigenous American style.
There were other American composers but they all wrote that same way. Tiomkin would come along and do westerns with sad Russian songs in them. Their western was the western of the Russian steppes or the Hungarian plains but THE BIG COUNTRY was a western with American rhythms, American tunes and a boldness and brashness about it and this was the way to do a western.

After you did the film were you acclaimed for this score in any way or was it considered just another a job?
Most peculiarly, I think the composers in Hollywood realised it was something because I got the nomination from the Academy but I couldn’t possibly compete with the political goings-on.

Do you remember who won the Oscar that year?
Yes, Tiomkin won it with THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. He really campaigned for that award.

THE BIG COUNTRY is still as fresh today.

It still goes on. It's still in print and it's lovely that it has that kind of insurance.

I can understand why the Europeans do the concert suite from it. It's because of that special sort of American quality that really few composers can achieve.
I think I achieved that quality even in the First Symphony. You can hear that same kind of quality.

Just as Korngold used a pot-pourri of his film themes in his violin concerto have you ever found yourself quoting some of your film scores in your concert works? I was thinking especially of your Sonatina for Clarinet and Choir, I mean that's got THE BIG COUNTRY written all over it.
No it hasn't. It has my style but it doesn't have a single theme or rhythm from THE BIG COUNTRY. I would love to use some of the melodies from my films. They'd make marvellous material, and I created a lot of material. There are all kinds of problems - copyright laws etc. The thing to do is to write new tunes.

An interesting paradox that strikes me is that in the concert hall it’s a rare composer who conducts but in film music it's a rare composer who doesn't conduct. I noticed you conducted a good many of your film scores. Was this always your own choice?
Well, when I went to the Juilliard, which was completely a fellowship school at the time, my fellowship was in conducting. I then discovered that I don't like conducting before an audience. I'm not an actor; I have no extraversions. But I discovered that in a theatre or on a sound stage I can conduct and I feel I can do my own scores better than anyone else. I knew exactly what I wanted. As soon as the opportunity came to conduct I took it.

I noticed you didn't conduct THE WAR LORD.
No I didn't conduct THE WAR LORD because the musical director of the studio insisted on doing that because otherwise he had no job.

Now the recordings from both THE BIG COUNTRY and THE CARDINAL - were they separate recordings made specifically for records?
No, they were the soundtrack. The records weren't made separately and THE BIG COUNTRY was recorded in Hollywood and THE CARDINAL was recorded in London.

Usually when you listen to something taken from the film score it tends to be shorter and more choppy. I'm surprised the recordings weren’t edited.
But sometimes the things were edited in the film. They went in and out of them. I believe in writing enough so that you do write a piece. Actually I wish that they would leave those things alone. I think the sense of form in a well-formed piece of music aids the scene it was written for but it's hard to sell that idea to a director. I'm talking about what happens in opera or a musical comedy even, or ballet where the roundness of the performance is aided by the music. Good ballets, most peculiarly, are always done to music which helps them formally.

In every case after you did a film score, did you see the finished product?
Yes.

Was there ever a case where a film was edited against your intentions?
Yes, one. And I was horrified. The producer wasn't in town. He was producing a play on Broadway and the director and I worked on the film and we finished what we thought was a very good film. The producer came back and he cut the film to hell and consequently had to cut the music and shift and change things. All kinds of incredible things happened and he destroyed a perfectly marvellous film and a perfectly wonderful score, if I may be immodest. But he destroyed the film too which was awful.

But it's still your name on the credits and possibly you might have to share the blame for this...
Right. The film was FIVE FINGER EXERCISE.

It's kind of a shame because if people start blaming you for it, they’ll curse you for that film not knowing that it wasn't your fault.
Well you've got to take your lumps.

Do you agree with someone like George Antheil who felt that a film score should also stand on its own as music?
I think mostly it should stand on its own as music, yes I do. It should have a validity, it really should. I haven't done that many films, but on the other hand if you do a lot of films I suppose you do get into the habit of saying, “well, this film is nothing very special, I'm doing it for X-amount of dollars and I'll just toss out something.” But I never felt that way about the films. No matter what they were I always tried to exert myself. Maybe it’s vanity, but it's also a feeling that perhaps I can help this film somehow.

Even those grade-B films that you started out with?
Naturally, and which I continued to do. Up until the last films I did I had grade-B films mixed with some big ones.

I take it THE BIG COUNTRY didn't open any doors. Did you start getting a lot of offers to do westerns after that?
Yes, I got offers for westerns. That became very tight, but then I got others. After THE BIG COUNTRY there was JAYHAWKERS and THE MOUNTAIN ROAD.

Sounds like a couple of westerns...
No, MOUNTAIN ROAD took place building the Burma Road in China or something like that. I forget exactly what it was.

Have you ever turned down the opportunity to do certain films?
Yes I have. I've turned down films for two reasons. Because I felt that they would do better with a jazz or rock score that I couldn't do or the last few films I've turned down because they've gotten too violent. Just the idea of writing violence for that length of time, I found very unattractive or unappealing.

So you were never concerned with whether the film had the potential to be a big film or not. It was just a specific task and you were out to do your best job whether you were scoring a film as big as THE BIG COUNTRY or as small as FIVE FINGER EXERCISE…
It's always a question of doing your best. Of course on a big film, quite often they will give you more time and more means and a bigger orchestra.

How much time would you say you got per film?
Well it varies. THE BIG COUNTRY took ten weeks. Some films I got four weeks. Most films are about one hour and forty minutes long and run to about thirty to thirty-five minutes of music. But THE BIG COUNTRY was three hours long and had seventy-five minutes of music which is as much as you write for two other films. And they could have used more music in it than they had.

Did they cut any music from the final product?
No, nothing substantial was cut out but they kept saying that they didn't want me to do music here and they didn't want me to do music there. When I realised the enormity of the work that was being asked of me, I agreed with them. I think that in the back of their minds was the fact that they were afraid that I wouldn't have time to do that much, but they could have used more music. I thought it was a good film. It wasn't very popular here. It just managed to make back its money, but in Europe it was enormously popular.

There's a real kind of motif in THE BIG COUNTRY. Did you quote an old western tune in that or did you create that motif?
No, I wrote it. I wrote every tune in it.

What do you recall of another western you did, THE PROUD REBEL?
PROUD REBEL was really a marvellous film. I really knocked myself out on it and so did the producer, Sam Goldwyn Jr. I thought it was a beautiful film and it just died. No film could have been prepared more lovingly or with more intent, acted better or anything. It's a marvellous film, but it died.

From what I heard of that score I tended to think that your writing wasn't as exuberant or as wide open as THE BIG COUNTRY.
It's a different subject. THE PROUD REBEL was kind of a human drama and THE BIG COUNTRY was more of an impersonal drama.

In your main title to THE CARDINAL there's an echo motif that strikes me as a baroque idea, a very medieval sound.
It's a baroque sound. THE CARDINAL main title was a walk through some sixteenth century castles and they put those shots together and you were entirely in a baroque world. I decided that musically at that point you had to throw your audience into that. You weren't going to be in a baroque world all the time although you were in it quite a bit. So it would have been silly to do anything but a baroque score.

If I can believe the liner notes on that album, I understand it was an exceptional situation where you were invited to attend the actual filming. Was that the first time you had come in early and how did you think it affected your music?
Well I'd come in early when I did things like the ballet sequence in HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN. Actually what happened on THE CARDINAL was that Otto Preminger was dragging me all over Europe acting as a music department. We had a lot of pre-recordings for the ballroom scenes, for scenes with monks, we had to have music for this or that. It turned out he needed a lot of music to help in the making of the picture. Ordinarily in Hollywood the music department would deal with that but here on location I had to do it because Otto figured out that was the cheapest way of having a music department.

Do you really think it made a difference to your dramatic score, the fact that you were involved at every stage of the production?
I really don't know, I can't say. It was a different kind of experience, it was fun.

When you were required to write Dixieland jazz for this film, did you do a sort of pastiche of it, because obviously you were not a Dixieland composer?

No, but I used to play in a Dixieland band. I wrote out a piece and I called five guys together and we were on it until it was good for the scene and off we went. You can't write out the notes for a Dixieland piece. But you can rehearse with the men and work it out and that's what we did. The film itself required this kind of thing because it moved around so much. It required tango, it required Dixieland jazz, it required religious chants. So you had to write them.

Alright, let's move on to THE WAR LORD. This has a twelfth century setting but it's not really a period score. I was wondering why?
Well it was my idea. I mean I think it has an archaic sound, but it goes according to whose archaisms you're thinking of. We haven't the faintest idea what the music sounded like in the eleventh century. I just gave it an archaic sound; my idea of archaism. It's like the Debussy or Satie things of Greece. We now accept that as Grecian. You're not talking about accepting things as conventional. You're just reacting to the period and to the drama.

If you compare THE WAR LORD music to the music for IVANHOE or PRINCE VALIANT, films with a similar period setting, your music has a much more human and wistful quality than those others.
That's the way I felt about the film. Maybe what I was thinking about was tinged by the fact that I knew the play. The film doesn't follow the play too much except in broad outline, but I suppose the memory of the play was always with me.

I noticed that a certain segment of the score was composed by someone else. Was that a question of time pressure?
Well a strange thing happened on that score. When the film was finished a fight started with the studio on one side and the director and the producer on the other side. Both sides started cutting it. Actually they shouldn't have cut it at all. The director Frank Schaffner and the producer should have possibly stuck to their guns but it was a losing battle for them I suppose. When the film was longer, the breadth and perfection of the movement and the slowness of the piece created a feeling of speed. When the film was cut it lost that quality and became just an ordinary film. I had a ten week contract and I sat waiting while they were fighting this out. Finally after five weeks the film was cut down to the two hours they wanted. So I only had five weeks left with an enormous amount of music to write. I just had to farm out the two big battle scenes. Of course, everybody knows about it because when it came to putting it on the record I said you must give the author credit.

They were going to give you credit for the battle scenes?
Oh, sure, they do on all of them. I had to fight with Decca.

Now the fellow who did the battle scenes, did he draw on your material for the film? I mean you can notice the difference, but it fits very well…
I gave him some phonetic material but most of the time its brass chords hanging around, and drums. The usual thing in battles is to try to make as much sound as possible. With all the screaming and roaring and smashing of pikes and maces against metal and all the rest going on in a medieval battle I don't know why they want more noise but they always do.

Did you ever have to fight for a sequence where you thought the music was being overwhelmed by the dialogue or perhaps a sequence where you did something you thought clever but which was rendered practically inaudible in the dubbing room?
Yes, I might have done something very clever but if some important dialogue is being spoken, they're going to put you down. People will remember whether a line of dialogue comes out. They won't remember that you suddenly had an oboe d'amore doing a lovely turn. Actually you have no control over that. If I was staying in Hollywood after I was through with the film, I would go into the dubbing room and I would sometimes discuss things but most of the time I found that they would do it very well. They were being very fair to every element in the film. They really try to make as good a film as they can, they don't want to destroy any of the things they've paid for. They're not out to undervalue the music or undervalue the dialogue or the acting. They want at that point to make a very good film.

Did you ever have a score completely thrown out?
No. That happens.

I heard about the Alex North score to 2001.
Did that get thrown out? I knew somebody had done it, I didn't know it was Alex North. And then they re-scored…

They just used some classical themes.
Lots of people have had scores thrown out. Tiomkin had a score thrown out. But then that's the producers prerogative. They hire you to do something and if they can't get what they want, they can go and get someone else to do it.

On the subject now of liner notes written for soundtrack albums, I feel that those written for THE CARDINAL and THE WAR LORD are pretty insipid...
They're better than some of the things you buy. I bought a piano concerto by Lalo because it was quite rare and I wanted to have it. The liner note implied that it was a terrible piece. Well, no book jacket would ever say anything like that, they entice you to read it. But to pick up a recording and have them say it's an awful work is impossible to understand. Actually I didn't think the Lalo piece was that bad and I was furious at the man who wrote the notes. These people should not be critics. People who write liner notes are supposed to be like the people who write the blurb on the dust jacket of a book - they should draw you in to buy it.

Some notes, like those on THE WAR LORD are just superlatives about the score, calling it magnificent over and over again.
Well that's doing it the wrong way. But there is a way of doing it by being moderately or even immoderately enthusiastic about the piece and giving you all the musicological reference you need, if you're the kind of person, like myself, who wants to know everything musicological about the work.

What has been your most recent film score to date?
Well I did three films all together. I suddenly discovered that I had to buy this apartment that was going co-operative so I made a lot of calls and did these films boom-boom-boom, one after another. RACHEL, RACHEL was the first and I did one in England called THE VALLEY OF GWANGI, then one in Hollywood called HAIL, HERO. And that I think is the last one I'll do.

You say that with a finality. I take it you're not going back to Hollywood?
I don't have to. I don't think I'll do any more and besides the film music of today has moved into an area in which every film maker is hoping to get a big rock album or something out of it. The film music to aid the film is gone. The film music is going to be a separate commercial entity on its own after the film. There are some good films being made but they are few and there are a lot of people fighting for them. I'd just as soon sit back and write when I want to write.

What would you consider the major differences to be between the Hollywood at the time of your arrival there and the Hollywood as it is now?
By the time I began composing for films they had an entire set-up that was wonderful in Hollywood. There was so much at your service, whole departments knew how to aid you. It was all set up, you had no problems. But that aspect of Hollywood is over.

When you look back upon the film scoring you've done, would you describe the act of creating film music as a craft or as an art?
Let me say this. When you work on a film, you are an artist and you have a craft and you use both things. You write art and you use your craft to enable you to do it in that particular form of having a two minute episode and to say what you have to say in that limited amount of time. You may have five or six weeks to do a film, so your craft has to be handy. But if you want to write a good score you have to be an artist.

[Jerome Moross was talking to Noah Andre Trudeau in an American radio broadcast.]