John Morgan: Restoring the Scores
Mikael Carlson talks to John Morgan about his work for the pioneering Marco Polo label.
Originally published in Music from the Movies Issue 17, Autumn 1997
Text reproduced by kind permission of the editor, Paul Place and Mikael Carlsson
In the continually growing flow of new recordings of film scores, the reconstructor and arranger has a key role. For the ambitious Marco Polo label, composer and orchestrator John Morgan has reconstructed several classic film scores by such esteemed composers as Max Steiner, Hans J. Salter and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. I recently spoke to John about the trials and tribulations of reconstructing lost scores.
John Morgan has an ardent affection for film music. This love has resulted in many important recordings of ‘lost’ film scores from the golden age of Hollywood. Among the scores he has rescued from the threatening death of oblivion you will find Max Steiner's CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS, THE THREE MUSKETEERS and THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN, Hans J Salter and Frank Skinner's HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS and Erich Wolfgang Korngold's THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, ESCAPE ME NEVER and ANOTHER DAWN. Looking at that list of credits, John Morgan has firmly established himself in the same division of film music champions as Charles Gerhardt and Christopher Palmer.
About five years ago, the late Tony Thomas approached John Morgan about doing a suite for a five-minute performance of Max Steiner's THE THREE MUSKETEERS. “As it turned out, this was one of our first Marco Polo discs. From then on, Klaus Heymann of Marco Polo liked my ideas on how to continue and maintain a film music series, so, as they say, I was in like Flynn!”, John explains. “It was not difficult getting that first job. I knew music and I could orchestrate. On the first album I worked ‘cheap’ to prove myself. It was a success, so here I am.”
John was born in Los Angeles in 1946. He was raised in a musical home, and his parents loved music. “They had tons of recordings of operas, operettas and classical ‘light’ music,” John remembers. “Luckily my family also had an old piano that I started banging on as soon as I was big enough to get to it. I started taking lessons at an early age. As I went through High School, knew I would do something in music, but thought teaching would be the thing.”
At the age of twelve, his family moved near San Diego, where he subsequently earned a Masters Degree from San Diego University.
Drafted with Bruce
“I was drafted in 1968 and met Bruce Broughton at Fort Ord. We became friends, as we both hated the army,” John recalls. “I went back to San Diego University in 1970 and taught music theory, film music, orchestration.”
In the late seventies John moved back to his native Los Angeles and started working as an orchestrator for film composers such as Alex North, Bruce Broughton and Fred Steiner. John is also a composer in his own right, and has composed more than twenty film scores. For the past five years, however, most of his time has been filled with reconstructing projects, and this is something he clearly enjoys. “One of the great things about Marco Polo is I have a completely free hand in choosing the music and making up the programs on the albums,” John says. “One of my main concerns is not to do bits and pieces of any given score, but to do all the music that I feel works well away from the film. So I let the music determine whether a title will be ten or twenty or sixty minutes in length. Every album we do I have a passion for. It is just too much work to do things that I really don't care for.”
One of the great tragedies of film music is that some of the glorious scores composed by even the most appreciated composers are lost or destroyed. The music, on paper, is no longer. This situation has prompted several projects where ‘lost’ masterpieces have been reconstructed. Intrada's Excalibur Collection, with Bruce Broughton conducting Miklos Rosa's Ivanhoe and JULIUS CAESAR reconstructed by David Robbins, is one example. The most prolific label in this area today, however, must be Marco Polo.
To take an old, crepitating film, listen to the music and actually write down the score from this rather poor source is, naturally, quite difficult. But this is exactly what John Morgan basically does when he reconstructs the music of Steiner, Korngold and the other masters. “First off, I decide on what composer or what film we want to do. I get the video of the film and record all the music directly off the film's soundtrack. I listen and relisten and whittle it down to what I feel is the best music. Then if it is not an entire album for this one film, find other works - preferably by the same composer, as it is easier to catalogue in the record stores - that makes up an interesting program,” John explains.
Living music
“If I can get a recording of the original tracks all the better. I listen to the music and try to forget the film. When music is divorced from the film, it ceases to be film music and becomes just music. It must live as music and not merely as a reminder of scenes from a film. At least, that is my credo! Now comes the footwork of getting permission to record the music, finding what written music survives. The hunt is always interesting, yet frustrating! Sometimes universities have scores, sometimes the composers' families, sometimes the studios, sometimes we only find partial scores, parts or conductor books. You never know.”
Considering the sound quality in older films can be frighteningly poor it can be difficult to sort everything out, so John has to use his instincts. “Many times, the original recordings are very difficult to hear in any kind of detail. Many times, you are trying to listen through dialogue and sound effects. This is where one's knowledge of a composer's style comes in handy. When you must guess, it will be educated,” John says.
Passion for Steiner
One of the composers who seem to fascinate John Morgan the most is Max Steiner. He actually knew the legendary composer in his later years, and he has always been a big Steiner fan. When asked what in his opinion made Max Steiner such a prominent and unique film composer, John answers enthusiastically. “He literally ‘did it all’ and in those early RKO years he experimented with orchestration, sound recording and the relationships of music to image and drama. For instance in THE LOST PATROL, he started and ended the film quietly, which was unheard of. He also had a choir doing wonderful humming for a night scene. In other films, he would experiment with pitching the music around the timbre of an actor's voice to avoid a sound clash. He would ‘catch’ things musically to heighten the drama. On the reverse of that he would sometimes play ‘against the scene’ to bring out what a character was thinking, rather than what the character was physically doing. He wrote good music. Even when catching every action in sight, the music had line and interest on a strictly musical basis. This is why his music is so fun to listen to divorced from the film.”
Max Steiner is probably most well-known for his full-blown orchestral scores, written in the broad Mahler tradition. But there is so much more to his music than just epic grandeur, and that is something John Morgan obviously appreciates. “He did like the lush and big sound favoured by such composers as Mahler, Strauss, Puccini - but he could also write in a subtle fashion with just a few strings in almost quartet fashion. He wrote terrific melodies, many in 3/4 time, and he kept them simple enough that he could vary, stretch, develop, and twist these melodies in so many dramatic guises. He was a master orchestrator. It is incorrect to think of Steiner as merely a ‘tutti’ type orchestrator. There are delights and new sounds all over his music.”
Of the Steiner scores John has been working on, the most difficult to reconstruct have been KING KONG and CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, two of the composer's most important and groundbreaking scores. For KING KONG, John used Steiner's original sketches to orchestrate the music as Steiner envisioned. “The score came to nearly two hundred pages,” he says. “There were too many compromises he and his original KONG orchestrator, Bernhard Kaun, had to make because of budget and primitive sound recording. I put back in the saxophones and the barbaric dissonance that many re-recordings have overlooked.”
What made CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE a difficult task for John was the huge size of the score. “The final ‘Charge’ is about eight minutes long and is over two hundred pages, just black with notes. There were also so many themes intertwined with one another, it was a real chore keeping everything straight”, he explains. One of the great advantages of working on the reconstruction of masterfully written scores is the vast opportunity to learn and gain experience. For John Morgan, Max Steiner's career and music has given him a good understanding of his work ethic. “Even on inferior films Steiner gave it his all. He never took short cuts or became lazy. The more you get into his music, the more you learn the subtle things he did musically for scene. Things that really are nearly ‘invisible’ to the ear, but ‘feel’ right. I also admire the way he ‘orchestrated’ his music ‘down’ as to not interfere or conflict with dialogue. This often saved his music being ‘turned’ down when the dialogue appeared”, John says.
Horror fun
A couple of the albums Marco Polo has released under the supervision of John Morgan include the fascinating and straightforward horror music of the late Hans J. Salter, another hugely prolific Hollywood composer. “Unlike Steiner, Korngold, Herrmann and others, Salter was with a studio that turned out mostly ‘B’ pictures. He and Frank Skinner were ‘A’ composers working on ‘B’ films”, John believes. “I have always admired the Universal horror music. I grew up with these films on television. Most record producers and companies would never do a serious recording of these scores. The films are just not known for their music. Well, when I had the opportunity, I jumped at it. It is fine, fine music. It is moody, well-written and just plain fun. This is real music, not some drone going on forever, like in many of today’s horror films.”
Although Hans J. Salter died at the age of ninety-eight in 1994, John Morgan actually met with him when preparing the Marco Polo album ‘Music for Frankenstein’. “He was a sweet man. He would always kid me and say ‘Make it better than it was originally’,” John recalls. “I told him I couldn't do that, but would make it as faithful as possible. We talked about his unhappiness with the often too small Universal orchestra. Often the orchestra was only twenty-eight or thirty-two players and Hans showed me his sketches and how he had to compromise when they only had two or three horns or only two trumpets. So I orchestrated his music, as he wanted it. I think we succeeded in being faithful to his music while enlarging the canvas to accompany the larger ensemble.”
Today Salter's scores for such classics as CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and the Frankenstein movies are fascinating in that they are very uncompromising and up-front. The last thing you can say about them is that they were low-key. “No, they were never low-key,” John admits. “Films are fantasy and fantasy needs music. These scores really helped cement the film together. The music smoothes awkward transitions, while keeping a constant mood of dread. When the music is divorced from the film and heard on its own, I believe that it ceases to be film music and becomes just music. It must live or die on its own. One of the real pleasures I get is when we get a review from a classical magazine that never saw these films, yet they rave about the music. That tells me the music is worth hearing. Although I want to please the film music fans who have fond memories of these films, I am even more eager for this music to be enjoyed without any filmic reference. That, to me, is a successful album.”
Today, the horror genre is almost the only place where a film composer can actually experiment, especially in terms of orchestration - Jerry Goldsmith, Elliot Goldenthal and John Corigliano providing some striking examples, for instance. However Hans J. Salter and many of his contemporary colleagues rarely used these kind of effects.
Out on a limb
“He just wrote dramatic music to fit the mood and action of the film. But it is certainly true that the ‘fantastic’ cinema has inspired composers to go out on a limb, so to speak. Just look at some of the titles; Steiner's KING KONG and THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS, Bernard Herrmann's THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, Rozsa's THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD, Waxman's THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, Tiomkin's THE THING..." John says.
A much more lyrical style, in comparison with the monstrous music of Hans J. Salter and Frank Skinner, was predominant in the scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. One of Marco Polo's latest releases is an album consisting of ANOTHER DAWN and ESCAPE ME NEVER. The latter one was particularly interesting from John Morgan’s point of view. He had to do some vast arranging on this piece. “Well, the ballet from this film was a ballet in the film’s story and it is cut short in the film. Korngold never felt compelled to finish it, so I wanted to put this piece on our ANOTHER DAWN album and I decided to it 'finish' it or round it out with other parts of the score,” John says. “A great deal of the full score was missing, so I orchestrated this in the Korngold style, which is very complex and time consuming. His music must be orchestrated like Richard Strauss'. It is so colourful; I had to wear sunglasses while reconstructing it. Most of the Universal horror music is much less complex, but HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN was very complex. It is a very modern sounding score. Full of dissonance and weird harmonies and bizarre orchestration.”
Of all the scores John Morgan has reconstructed in the last five years, he finds it difficult to pick any favourite, but mentions HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, KING KONG, and HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, which is on the new Hugo Friedhofer album. “I am glad we were able to do a Hugo Friedhofer album. He is a composer's composer.”
Russian travels
Most of the albums John Morgan has prepared for Marco Polo have been recorded with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra under the baton of John's good friend and colleague William T Stromberg. “We do two albums per trip to Moscow and we make two trips per year. We usually are there for about two weeks, although we only record four hours a day. So an album takes twenty real hours to record, if you take out time for breaks. They are first-rate players. They can play in different styles, which one needs with film music. We can get all the extra non-traditional instruments there, choir, saxophones, guitars, anything. They love playing this terribly difficult, yet new music. Many members came up to say that KING KONG was some of the most difficult music they have ever played. They were proud of themselves for getting through it! The recording in Moscow is full and bright, which is good for the up-front quality of film music.”
William T. Stromberg, who has been conducting several of the Marco Polo recordings, is a composer and orchestrator in his own right. He has composed scores for TRINITY AND BEYOND, KILLING STREETS and ODDBALL HALL, among others. He first met John Morgan at the age of three - John knew his father. Today, thirty years later, the two are working together constantly.
“Bill is the best. He has reconstructed several of our suites, including THE ADVENTURES OF MARCO POLO, BEAU GESTE, SCARAMOUCHE, and when I ran out of time, cues from HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN,” John says. “I also get his opinion on suites I made up. We go to Moscow together and it is really a collaborative effort. He is with me from the very start of any given project. It is a team effort in all respects. Without Bill, wouldn't even do this stuff. We are each other's right hand.”
Besides his busy career as an arranger and reconstructor of classic film scores, John Morgan manages to find time to compose in his own right. “I recently composed the music for Randall Cook's DEMON IN THE BOTTLE that I think Disney picked up for video release. Although there was little money for music, we managed to invest it with a fun score. I say we, because Bill Stromberg and I worked together often on our own projects. He always conducts for me, he often orchestrates and ghost writes when I get in a bind. I do the same for him with the exception of conducting.”
In the near future, John will score David Allen's fantasy feature PRIMEVALS. According to John, it should be ready early next year and he plans on using the Moscow Symphony Orchestra for the recording. “I prefer to compose for orchestra, if possible. Sometimes, with budgets today, I must use some electronics to meet the budget, but I am happier with an orchestra in front of me. Of course, there are certain sounds that only a synth can give you. That is okay, but I hate the fact that symphonically conceived music must be played on synths at times.”
Considering the amount of classic film scores John has reconstructed, one can't get away from the fact that they must be a huge source of inspiration. “Yes! Whatever I have been reconstructing, I find on my own next composing assignment, little things I learn have crept in and become part of my style,” John admits.
College education
“Reconstructing is the greatest teacher in the world. To learn so many varied styles intimately, only a fool would ignore the influence. Every score I work on is a college education. And I get paid for it! It certainly beats working at Hamburger Hamlet or sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.”
Obviously John Morgan is quite satisfied with focusing his career on reconstructing and arranging. It's a tough time for composers he says, and if he's hired to compose a score it's important for him to work for a director who has trust in him as a composer and relies on his judgement.
“Music is not considered as high on the movie chain as it once was. Today, music is considered as a necessary evil. What with temp tracking and doing demos of your score, we have lost a lot of creativity in film music. By the time everyone has their input on what they like or don't like in your music, it is watered down to the lowest common denominator. Although I haven't yet got into the big leagues, I have at least been lucky to have worked with directors that have a trust in a composer and let them run with the ball.”
Another part of John Morgan's career was when he worked primarily as an orchestrator when he - in his own words - couldn't stand teaching anymore in the late seventies. Instead he moved to the Los Angeles area and started out orchestrating for Fred Steiner, Bruce Broughton and Alex North, among others. “For Fred, I orchestrated some HAWAII FIVE-O episodes, several hours of music for LAFF TUNES, which were Laurel and Hardy silent films, and much other stuff I can't remember. For Bruce, I orchestrated BUCK ROGERS, and some television stuff, which I don't remember.”
For Alex North, John Morgan did work on his DEATH OF A SALESMAN score, the television version with Dustin Hoffman. “Alex would sketch, and a lot of what he did on this project was readapted from his Broadway and film version of this play. He was a fine composer and wonderful human being. He didn't conduct, but he always knew what he wanted. He had faith in the orchestrator and, like Bruce Broughton, never went over your work; you just turned it into the copyists. If you had an orchestration idea, you put it in. Sometimes it remained, sometimes it was changed, but these people were secure enough in themselves to always let you have breathing room,” John recalls.
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