Laurence Rosenthal
Laurence Rosenthal 1926-
On May 21, 1988, Intrada Records was host to Laurence Rosenthal. He met with collectors and signed autographs while enthusiastically discussing his film music career. I met with him a couple of hours before to ask him a few questions of my own. I’d very much like to thank George Champagne for preparing the recording of the interview. I’d also like to thank Doug Fake and Fred Shepard for giving us a place to hold this meeting.
Originally I was asked by George Lucas to compose the music for the entire series, but then very quickly it became apparent that there was so much music and so little time that it was humanly impossible for one man to do it all. So a young composer was brought in, Joel McNeely, to help out, to do some of the episodes. Now in fact he was so tied up on certain shows - for example an episode about early Jazz, in which he is an expert - that we had to bring in a third composer to make it - Frederic Talgorn.
Reviews
Meetings with Remarkable Men is a remarkable film with a remarkable score. The film appeared in 1979, and quickly disappeared, rarely to be seen or heard of since. Perhaps this is not surprising, for even in the eclectic 70's this was an unusual project. Theatre director Peter Brook - who later made the marathon C4 TV drama based on The Mahabarata, the score for which is an intriguing collaborative work available on the REALWORLD label - chose to bring to the screen the autobiographical story of Gurdjieff's 20 year quest for the meaning of life
Strange are the ways of the film music industry. It's currently not possible, for example, to buy on CD John Williams' outstanding, Oscar nominated score for the major Jack Nicholson hit movie THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1987). Yet here we have a compilation of scores from a truly terrible and long forgotten 1970's TV series. The music though, is perhaps surprisingly, rather better than the show it was written to accompany.
The fourth in Varèse's notable series of music from the Lucasfilm TV series may be the best thus far. Vol. 3 was comprised primarily of 1920's jazz music, appropriate enough for the episodes they accompanied but somewhat restrictive, dramatically. Vol. 4, however, is purely and thoroughly dramatic adventure music. Rosenthal’s “Ireland, 1916” is steeped in Irish folk music, utilizing numerous quotes from Irish melodies while held together
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