Page - 250 - in Der Filmkomponist Max Steiner - 1888 - 1971

250 5- Summary nutes, seconds and Frames. Steiner conducted most of his music with a click whereas other famous composers of the day, such as Newman and Korngold, conducted without a click. Because of his organized work, Steiner managed to deliver his music on time even with the tightest Studios' schedules. Looking through his sketches (typically 200 to 400 pages) one gets a deeper insight into Steiners way of working. The first note on the Casablanca music sketch says acopy from reelxx bar xx to bar xx". This was an instruction to Steiners orchestrator, Hugo Friedhofer, to copy these bars and to fit them into the orchestral texture, sometimes transposed. Using the same procedure, in other sections, Steiner wrote instructions to copy music from other films, such as Now, Voyager, Confes- sions ofa Nazi Spy, The Charge ofthe Light Brigade, The Life of Emile Zola and Tovarich. Since the orchestral structure and the musical flow of Steiners work are continuous and convincing, the audience never considers it as what it is, a musical patchwork. They hear a completely composed work of art as can be heard on the Warner Brothers CD ofthe music of Casablanca, published more than fifty years after the movie's debut. Casablanca has been chosen as the exemplar of Steiners art for this book because in this assignment one can see the working method and the musical patterns of Steiner in a purified form. This is because Steiner, as an employee under contract with Warner, had to write the music for the film without being as ambitious as he had been in scoring King Kong or Gone With The Wind. His most important stylistic device was the leitmotif. Leitmotifs had been used in Eu- ropean music, both on stage and in concert music. The idea was to provide structural clarity and to convey dramatic ideas. Richard Wagner, for example, used the leitmotif as one of his main composing tools. With this in mind, Steiner once said in an interview, "IfRichard Wagner would haue lived in this Century he would be the number one film com- poser' In Der Ring des Nibelungen there are roughly one hundred leitmotifs, which Wag- ner had named melodic moments. Since the leitmotif helps the composer to call out all of the dramatic and emotional developments by using Variation, sequences, modulations, permutations, etc., it is also the perfect tool for the film composer who has to do the same in a few minutes or seconds. The leitmotif also allows the film composer to show the viewer the inner movements, to explain internal or external changes, to help the au- dience to connect and to associate. The harmonic basis is as important as the leitmotifs. Wagner provided his dramas with a permanent musical flow which he called eternal harmony. The harmonic changes were now used according to the dramatic development; the brightness of the chords (from dark to bright tonalities) was used to react promptly to the change of emotions. Also the film composers use the suggestive change of tonalities to help the dramatic needs of the story.