Malcolm Arnold, prolific film composer, R. I. P. (1921-2006)

[JamesM]

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Composer Sir Malcolm Arnold dies

He passed away at the Norfolk and Norwich Hopsital.

[Rob Compton]

Thanks James. This is extremely sad news, though not entirely unexpected; he had been very ill for some time.

A very distinguished composer indeed....:mellow:

RIP Sir Malcolm.

rgds
Rob

[Allen Dace]

I particularly liked his touching score for 'Whistle Down the Wind' and he made a great contribution to the fun at St Trinians.

[julian_craster]

I think Sir Malcolm's greatest score was for THE SOUND BARRIER....


Obituary: Sir Malcolm Arnold

Sir Malcolm Arnold: prolific composer

Sir Malcolm Arnold's output was prolific, including symphonies, concertos, ballet music and more than a hundred film scores.
But while some regarded him as one of the pre-eminent composers of his generation, others saw him as superficial and flippant.

The youngest of five children from a prosperous Northampton family of shoemakers, Malcolm Arnold was a rebellious teenager who was attracted to the creative freedom of jazz.

After seeing Louis Armstrong play in Bournemouth, he took up the trumpet, and at 17, won a scholarship at the Royal College of Music.

By 1943, he was a principal trumpeter with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and, throughout his life, he retained a love of music for brass.

Malcolm Arnold was given exemption from the armed forces during World War II, but his desire to serve became compelling after the death of his brother in the RAF.

However, he was turned down by the parachute regiment and then by the Navy.


Discussing a score with Carl Foreman and Carol Reed
When he was finally put into the infantry, he likened it to being relegated from principal trumpeter at the London Philharmonic to performing in a bus band. He ensured his return to civvy street by shooting himself in the foot.

By 1943, his gifts as a composer became apparent when he wrote the overture Beckus the Dandipratt. He followed it with a horn concerto in 1945, a symphony for strings and, in 1948, a clarinet concerto.

Film scores

He then turned mainly to composing, his first symphony being performed in 1950. Three years later, he wrote a Coronation ballet, Homage to the Queen, which was premiered at Covent Garden.

Malcolm Arnold developed a style of music that had a general appeal without being banal. His growing reputation brought him many commissions including film scores.

Among them were Whistle Down the Wind, The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and the Bridge over the River Kwai.


Arnold's private life grew turbulent
The latter won him an Oscar for his brilliant counterpoint melody to the Colonel Bogie march.

In the 1960s, following the breakdown of his marriage, Malcolm Arnold moved to Cornwall with his second wife. By the end of the 1970s though, his life degenerated into alcoholism. It ruined his second marriage.

By 1978, he had written eight symphonies, but his Ninth took several years to complete. Indeed, his life might have ended too but for the loving care of a friend, Anthony Day, to whom his Ninth Symphony is dedicated.

He was knighted in 1993.

Sir Malcolm Arnold's unpretentious music was almost invariably appreciated by performers and audiences alike. He said he wanted to be remembered as an honest composer.

From
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3395959.stm

[Marky B]

A great composer. He seemed to have had a signature "trumpet blowing" in many of his music.

Ta Ta
Marky B

[Steve Crook]

Originally Posted by Marky B A great composer. He seemed to have had a signature "trumpet blowing" in many of his music. Ta Ta Marky B

The obits I've heard on the radio say he was much influenced by Louis Armstrong, especially as a youngster.

Steve

[samkydd]

The Times September 25, 2006

Sir Malcolm Arnold
October 21, 1921 - September 23, 2006
Prolific and troubled composer who won an Oscar for the Colonel Bogey march in Bridge on the River Kwai

MOST of the professional life of Malcolm Arnold was spent far away from the British musical establishment. His personality, until he approached old age, was as massive as his frame. In his youth he looked like a trumpet player, which indeed he was with the London Philharmonic in the Forties before he devoted himself to composition and conducting.
But he was also schizophrenic. Extreme boisterousness could be punctuated by moods of deep depression, which brought on mental collapses and unsuccessful suicide attempts, his outward robustness concealling a certain fragility of both body and mind. At a time when musical opinion was against him, he rejected the notion that the symphony was dead. “No more dead than the novel,” he once said. By the time symphony writing became popular once more, Arnold had already composed nine.

A lot of his gloom was caused, especially during his middle life, by the scorn with which his music was treated in many quarters. He was convinced that Sir William Glock, when Controller of Music at the BBC, pursued a vendetta against him. Certainly Arnold’s compositions, melodious, often jokey and lightweight, were little to Glock’s taste and far too mainstream for a battalion of eager young Third Programme producers busily championing Stockhausen and Boulez. The reaction of a number of music critics only deepened the gloom; the term “Malcolm Arnoldish” was considered by them deeply pejorative.

With such resentment in his mind, much of which was justified, Arnold would take off to the pub and seek solace in alcohol. That simply added to his reputation of being difficult, antiintellectual and prone to shooting himself in the foot — as he quite literally did on one unfortunate occasion.

Once after having conducted the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, some of the players found him at a pub piano knocking out tunes and wearing only his underpants. The story, of a musician going from hushed concert hall to bar-room chord-bashing, is analagous with Arnold’s output: a continuity between the serious and the light-hearted.

But no one could accuse Malcom Arnold of being anything other than extremely fluent as a composer. When he was at his peak during his thirties his output was as huge as it was varied. Between 1951 and 1957 he wrote the scores for more than 80 films, culminating in the famous whistling adaptation of the Colonel Bogey march in The Bridge on the River Kwai which won him an Academy Award. He once claimed that he only wrote film music so that he could conduct it himself and so gain experience in this area. He may just have been teasing, because many of these scores were highly effective. During this period he also composed three operas and three ballets as well as a quantity of works for the concert hall.

But the great white hope of British music eventually found himself turned into an ogre who, many believed, was best left ignored. Gimmicky pieces, such as the Grand Grand Overture (1956), commissioned for a Hoffnung concert and scored for three vacuum cleaners, floor polisher, four rifles and orchestra, amused the public and provided fodder for youth orchestras, but failed to impress the critics. A new Arnold composition billed for the second half of a concert often found them leaving at the interval. Among orchestral players he was more admired. As an ex-performer he was adept at writing for solo instruments and well knew what could and could not be demanded from their players.

He lived long enough to enjoy something of an Indian summer. In the void left by the absence of successors to Stockhausen et al, Arnold’s music found a new respectability during the 1990s. So too did the man, who had finally beaten the bottle in 1987. The determination to self-destruct had evolved into a determination to be cast, at last, as one of the grand old men of British music. As the 21st century dawned, music had come full circle: tunes and melodies were once again in demand, and Arnold was at last appreciated.

Malcolm Henry Arnold was the youngest of five children from a well-to-do Northampton Methodist family involved in the footwear business. As a child he was asthmatic and needed to be carefully looked after by his mother, who was a fine pianist and a dominant figure in his childhood. His father also played the piano and organ and the young Arnold, who was educated privately, was widely exposed to music from a young age.

At the Royal College of Music he studied composition with Gordon Jacob and trumpet with Ernest Hall, but by the time he had completed his studies he was aware of his tendency towards schizophrenia. He joined the trumpet section of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1941, becoming principal almost immediately.

Despite originally registering as a conscientious objector, Arnold left the LPO to join the Army in 1944 which did little for his emotional wellbeing. He was furious when, after rigorous infantry training, he was drafted into playing cornet in a military band: hardly a major contribution to the war effort and a lowly post in comparison with the one he had given up. In frustration he shot himself in the foot — potentially a serious offence — and was discharged on medical grounds.

When he recovered Arnold went to the BBC Symphony Orchestra as a trumpet player and then rejoined the London Philharmonic in 1946. The same year the LPO recorded an overture he had written, Beckus the Dandipratt.

He had been composing since childhood, inspired, he once said, by a chance meeting with Duke Ellington in a Bournemouth tea room. Louis Armstrong was another influence. John Hollingsworth told him that the British film industry was lacking in men who could write agreeable background music. Arnold found he could answer such a need with ease and there followed a mass of movie scores, ranging from The Captain’s Paradise to The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. But this was not a time when the music establishment took kindly to — or could even comprehend — the concept of crossover music.

Arnold pressed on regardless. In 1948 he won the Mendelssohn Prize for composition, and, though married with a small daughter, took off for Italy. Upon his return he dedicated himself full time to composing and conducting. The demand for film music kept him in continuous and exhausting work for many years, sometimes writing as much as 50 minutes of music in just ten days. It also made him extremely rich. Although the Colonel Bogey march remains his best-remembered, his own favourite was the music for Whistle Down the Wind: “It’s simple, sentimental and helps the picture,” he said.

In many respects he worked too hard and too fast, churning out music like a conveyor belt. And as an artist he was unclassifiable: one moment there would be traces of serialism, the next a frivilous meoldy. Even more disconcerting for those who like to pigeon-hole their artists were the works in which he explored his own despair through the music: “I had to write it as a study in blackness”, he once said of his Ninth Symphony.

By the Sixties Arnold had become, with Britten and Walton, the most successful of the contemporary British composers in terms of income. But in one respect he was different: they had prestige and acceptability. Malcolm Arnold had no inclination to try to ingratiate himself with those who thought his music too “popular”. He never surrounded himself with a coterie. When he was in rollicking mood he would eat enormous meals, usually with a similar quantity of wine, and as a result could behave badly. When he was in the glums he would curse those who deliberately turned deaf ears to the music he wrote with deep purpose.

In the latter category comes the Double Violin Concerto, commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin (1962), a number of his ballet scores, including Homage to the Queen and Solitaire, and some of his symphonies. The Seventh Symphony, whose premiere he conducted with the New Philharmonia in 1974, was a musical depiction of his three children and showed Arnold in reflective, even sombre mood. Even more sombre was the close of the Ninth, which was first performed by an amateur orchestra under Sir Charles Groves before an invited audience.

He was a prodigious concerto writer — but only with a soloist in mind, and then not always mainstream classical soloists. Benny Goodman was the recipient of a clarinet concerto and Larry Adler of an offering for harmonica.

In common with certain other composers Arnold suggested that nine was the number on which to end his symphonic writing. It was, he said, the story of his life: “I had been through hell.” There had been a grim procession of lawyers, doctors, pills and a court order denying him access to his autistic son — and that was on top of the critics who offered such savaging remarks as “lightweight Neo-Romantic confection”, “ivory tower conservatism”, and “a product of a creative mind in an advanced state of disintegration”. A drugs overdose failed to kill him and he was left to live in despair.

By the mid-1980s he had sunk completely. Given two years to live by his doctors in 1984, he suffered two broken marriages as well as a Court of Protection order claiming jurisdiction over his professional affairs. A supportive social worker died, and after a failed attempt by a subsequent guardian to gain control of the future rights of his music, he was physically assaulted and thrown out on the streets.

When the BBC Omnibus programme celebrated his 70th birthday with a sympathetic programme, discreetly suggesting that he had been shabbily treated, not least by Broadcasting House, Arnold looked frail. His body had shrunk, although some of his words carried a little of the old pugnacity when be declared roundly to the cameras that he “had lived quite long enough”. One commentator said that he appeared to be “a melancholy clown”.

However, he continued for another decade and more, his spirits renewed by the patience and companionship of his carer and personal assistant, Anthony Day. The pair moved into Day’s Norfolk home from where Day helped to restore the composer’s health and also his financial position. He was also active in promoting Arnold’s music and encouraging him to compose once more. By his 80th birthday, Arnold had finally become much respected: his lifetime’s work celebrated, albeit belatedly, with an extensive series of concerts on Radio 3 as well as in concert halls around the country.

Malcolm Arnold was appointed CBE in 1970 and knighted in 1993.

He married Sheila Nicholson in 1941. They had a son and a daughter. He married Isobel Gray in 1963. They had a son, but that marriage also ended in divorce. From 1984 Arnold was cared for by his companion, Anthony Day.


Sir Malcolm Arnold, composer, was born on October 21, 1921. He died on September 23, 2006, aged 84.

[djdave]

Arnold was one of those film composers who never achieved fame in the way Bernard Herrmann did or financial success like John Williams.

Sadly, even film score fans can be ignornat of his works. I'm a member of a film msuic forum, and a common theme from my fellow posters is how little they had of his music in their collections.

[Ascoyne D'Ascoyne]

Arnold had a unique style and it was forged out of the traditional building-blocks of music. The avant-garde were always very dismissive of Arnold's music but it is my guess that things like the "Tam O'Shanter Overture" and the "English Dances" will still be performed long after the "crash, bang, wallop, screech" crowd have been totally forgotten.
Arnold, like, for example, Martinu, Holbrooke and Liszt was a very prolific composer and, as is the case with those men, his facility was something of a curse as it lead him to produce a large, uneven output of work which needs sifting and evaluating to bring the "gems" to light. His facility served the film industry well, as a composer needs to be able to work fluently and efficiently in order to fulfil his commission on the kind of tally of films which Arnold was asked to work on.
I particularly like the score for "Whistle Down the Wind"; I wonder if any other BritMovie members have a favourite Arnold film-score.

[Wee Sonny MacGregor]

And don't forget that Arnold wrote the music for the early St Trinians films. He wasn't in the same financial league as John Williams but I read that in later years he was getting £200K a year from royalties. I would suspect that a lot of it was frittered before Day took his finances in hand. A great composer - the River Kwai music is terrific.

[samkydd]

Originally Posted by Wee Sonny MacGregor And don't forget that Arnold wrote the music for the early St Trinians films. He wasn't in the same financial league as John Williams but I read that in later years he was getting £200K a year from royalties. I would suspect that a lot of it was frittered before Day took his finances in hand. A great composer - the River Kwai music is terrific.

The only Arnold piece I know is Colonel Bogey, but now he's gone no doubt there will be a resurgence of interest in his work by a record company and a compilation CD will be in the shops in time for Christmas!

[Allen Dace]

He didn't write Colonel Bogey - he wrote the counter melody and the rest of the score. That tune and the overall quality of the film probably won him his Oscar though and he still deserved it for an amazing job at short notice.

[Santonix]

Some wonderful film music and of course the famous opening music to the long running TV programme "What The Papers Say", taken from his ballet Solitaire.

[Ascoyne D'Ascoyne]

Originally Posted by Santonix Some wonderful film music and of course the famous opening music to the long running TV programme "What The Papers Say", taken from his ballet Solitaire.

I remembered the theme-music as being one of the "English Dances" and the Wikipedia article which I consulted says the same. Of course Arnold, like many busy composers (Handel and Bach are two good examples), might well have borrowed music from one of his own scores to use in another; perhaps that the case with Solitaire, which I don't know.

[Santonix]

Absolutely right, the ballet Solitaire is danced to 9 sets of English Dances and a polka and a sarabande.