o_19nbemi6p1vje1l7kvmm117n5bla.pdf

Johnoscar’s
A Night at the Movies
Lux Aeterna by Clint Mansell
Requiem for a Dream 2000
Somewhere in Time John Barry
Somewhere in Time 1980
Dead Things Philip Glass
The Hours 2002
Warsaw Concerto
Dangerous Moonlight 1941
Metropolis Theme by Gottfried Huppertz
Metropolis 1927
A Night at the Movies with Johnoscar

“Enigma Variation1” by Edward Elgar
“Clubbed to Death” by Rob Dougan
The Matrix 1996
Bombarded with propaganda, many Germans supported the rise of fascism in Europe. They believed they were paving Europe with a
utopian vision of the world. If Nazi Germany was the ultimate dystopian reality, The Matrix may be the ultimate dystopian fi lm. Dystopian
fi lmmaking portrays a vision of a world gone bad. In the Matrix, the world’s inhabitants have become so deluded that their neural
hologram—their cerebral conception of the world—that it bears no resemblance to objective reality.
The Matrix was a ballet of bullets choreographed to a script packed with deep symbolic and philosophical themes. Pitched by the
wannabe fi lmmakers as a cyberpunk comic book, the end product blockbuster inspired a small avalanche of analysis including an
Oxford Press publication: Philosophers Explore the Matrix. If the magic lantern was the forerunner to the cinema, then a shadow play
was the forerunner to the magic lantern show. Beneath the S & M black costumes and the streams of green screen computer codes
of The Matrix lies Plato’s famous allegory of shadow plays in cave.
In Plato’s allegory prisoners are bound allowing them only to see their cave wall. A fi re from behind them throws shadows on that wall,
some manipulated and some random, and that moving shadow puppet story defi ne theses prisoner’s conception of reality. As Plato’s
story progresses, we learn something else: The prisoners prefers the comfortable illusion from shadow plays over the, often painful,
challenge required to understand the “outside the cave” world of reality.
There are approximately 300 billion stars in the Milky Way and there are 100 trillion synapses in a human brain. The synapse is the
point of communication in which most important things that happen in our brain occur—and it at this point where neurological potential
for trouble arise. This connection constitutes the entire focus of modern psychiatry.
Mirror cells appear to play a key role in our ability to relate to the movie screen. This suggests that emotion plays a key role on our
mental construction of reality. In Plato’s way of thinking, what we can see is simply an illusion—but wisdom is devised from the painful
realization that everything we think we know is false. Our brain constructs a synaptic conception of a surrogate reality. To question
what we think we know will strengthen our understanding but to passively accept the shadow plays splattered on the cave wall like
neurons—in an alpha induced hypnotic trance—is a life not examined at all. We are our own agents of deceit and our capacity for
delusion is as endless as stars in the sky. And that realization is the beginning step in any effort to understand reality.
The Matrix - Featured an electronic soundtrack and one of the most famous pieces was derived from a classical composition.
Clubbed to Death, like As Time Goes By, was written prior to the movie but became wildly popular after inclusion in the Matrix. The
‘original song” or more specifi cally the famous Kurayamino Mix began with a symphonic recording of Elgar’s fi rst Enigma Variation.
The theme is transformed into pulsating electronic rhythm inter-splices it the Rob
Dougan’s performance of his own composition on solo piano. Elgar wrote 14 Enigma
variations but Rob Dougan’s Matrix rave scene hit is effectively the 15th variation that
Elgar never wrote.
Each Enigma variation by Elgar is an affectionate musical portrait of an individual
from Elgar’s close personal circle of friends. Who they are about, how they are indicated
by the score and the discovery of the main theme constitute the enigmas
referenced in the title. If such a task were to have any meaning beyond Elgar’s sentimental
feelings it might be this: Individuals matter, the people who populated our
lives are important and worthy of the individuated meaningful musical monuments
Elgar constructed of them. They are not unlike the emotional--sometime musical-
-monuments we manufacture of one another ourselves in the molecules of the movies
in our mind.
Johnoscar’s
A Night at the Movies
Odessa Beach by Michael Nyman
Man With A Movie Camera 1929
Gabriel’s Oboe by Ennio Morricone
The Mission 1986
Main Theme, Final Scene by Ennio Morricone
Cinema Paradiso 1988
As Time Goes By by Herman Hupfeld
Casablanca 1942
Smile by Charlie Chaplin
Modern Times 1936
I Always Love You
Ikaw Lang and Mamahalin
Cues from Robin Hood by Erik Wolfgang Korngold
The Adventures of Robin Hood 1938
Schindler’s List John Williams
Schindler’s List 1993
Enigma Variation1 by Edward Elgar
Clubbed to Death by Rob Dougan
The Matrix 1996
Lux Aeterna by Clint Mansell
Requiem for a Dream 2000
Dead Things Philip Glass
The Hours 2002
Somewhere in Time John Barry
Somewhere in Time 1980
Warsaw Concerto
Dangerous Moonlight 1941
A Night at the Movies with Johnoscar
Metropolis Theme by Gottfried Huppertz
Metropolis 1927

“Smile” by Charlie Chaplin
Smile—music by Chaplin, lyrics and title added later by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons—comes from the 1936 fi lm Modern Times.
Riddled with symbolism and often delivered with comedy the fi lm gave us enduring visual metaphors for the Modern Industrial Age
such as the little tramp getting lost in the gears of machinery or herded sheep edited in to the fi lm with commuters exiting a train. Over
70 years later Charlie Chaplin’s Smile remains one of the most popular and enduring pieces of fi lm music ever written.
Modern Times 1936 - While well into fi lm’s “Sound Era” Chaplin structured Modern Times like a Silent Era Film using the
synchronization for sound effects with an almost continuous concert-like score. Chaplin who wrote or demonstrated the music for all
of his feature length fi lms was not a fan of the richly woven fi lm scores by composers such as Max Steiner, Franz Waxman or Erick
Wolfgang Korngold.
Charlie Chaplin--along with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks--became one of the three artists who formed United Artists but unlike
his partners he had musical ability and strong musical instincts.
The Great Dictator, now seen as a great classic fi lm, triggered Chaplin’s fi rst wave of negative publicity. A frivolous lawsuit, a kangaroo
court and an FBI media smear campaign caused his reputation to erode further. By 1952 the threat of trumped up criminal charges
forced him into 20 years of American exile forcing Charlie Chaplin out of the Hollywood fi lm industry he helped to forge.
“I Always Love You”
Ikaw Lang and Mamahalin
Television and cinema bear similarities in design and function. With the recent rise of home theater
systems, the boundaries blur further. Large screens, crisp pictures and high fidelity—quite often surround
sound—challenge the superiority of the traditional movie theater. Many who prefer viewing
movies in public movie houses argue in favor of a preference for the larger screen but the size of the
moving image experienced is not determined by the absolute size of the screen but by the position of
the viewer in relationship to the picture. Much of the music in this collection comes from much older
films including some dating back close to 100 years. Therefore most of us who have seen these old
great films have probably seen them on a television. What we know about brain waves and television
is this: It involves the alpha level of brain activity.
The more frequently a viewer watches television—or movies—the more easily the brain slips into an
alpha level: a slow steady brain wave pattern in which the mind is in its most receptive mode. In this
state ideas and suggestions can be implanted directly into the brain with a minimal amount of viewer
participation. The phenomenon produced is a form of hypnosis. The viewer then surrenders to a
steady stream of somebody else’s ideas or assembly of images, music and sounds without the critical
thought patterns necessary to question their validity or the motivations of the producer. With the ever
increasing concentration of all medias, those forging the illusions we generally accept have become
increasingly few.
Our senses feed our brains with a surging flood of sensory data. It could easily be drowned by the tidal
wave of sensory stimuli were it not for our brain’s processing filters. The impulses are sorted and assembled,
noticed and ignored. With films, this filtering process is aided and controlled by the filmmaking
team including the producer, the director, the screenwriter, the editor and even those responsible
for the music performance and the score.
In addition to the outside stimulus coming in, our brain projects a structure on to the world. It isolates
quantities, relationships, constructs memories and facts. The fake realities of films (and or television)
compete with our actual experiences—and hard earned knowledge—to form the neurological recreation
that makes up our inner conception of the outside world.
While movies may seem to simply reflect the world around us, their greater effect on our mind is to
shape or mold our conception of reality and to define our subjective relationship to the outside world.
The music collected from these films has been arranged in an order to encourage the listener to think
about our media saturated culture along with the role of music in film.
A Night at the Movies presents Johnoscar's arrangements and interpretations of some of the greatest
film music known, from some of the greatest films ever made. These movies are products of the culture
which produced them but also outstanding exceptions to the rule. For a selection to be considered
for this collection they needed to possess the ability to stand alone in performance on piano. But
as the noted musicologist Philip Tagg indicates, "If music analysis is to be of any use to the majority
of people living in the same culture as I do [in reference to our immersion in a world of media saturation]
it must clearly deal with music as if it meant something beyond itself." This relatively brief set of
notes attempts to return Johnoscar’s musical selections back into the context of their extraction from
the magic lantern show.
A Night at the Movies with Johnoscar

“Odessa Beach” by Michael Nyman
Man With A Movie Camera 1929
The landmark Avant Guard documentary opens in an empty movie theater. As the patrons shuffl e in and the fi lm is edited, the orchestra
readies itself for their performance of the music for Man With a Movie Camera. This mesmerizing musical montage can fl icker as fast
as neurons fi re. Director Diziga Vertov’s approach ripped fi lmmaking from the clutches of the stage dramatist by devising a more abstract
narration that relied instead on photography, editing and music. Filmed over three years in Moscow, Kiev and Odessa—the fi lm
sought to portray a 24 hour day of life in the Soviet Union. This symphonic montage captured, prescribed and celebrated a dynamic,
industrialized world through a fast paced, breath taking, pyrotechnic, cinematic display driven by a sublime, and at times, pulsating
musical score.
.
The fi lm is well photographed and marks some of the earliest examples of many dazzling cinema-graphic techniques, and all achieved
with a hand cranked camera. Almost any single frame could be isolated and presented as an individual work of art in a modern or
contemporary museum. A forerunner to Cinéma vérité, a documentary approach to fi lmmaking used frequently today, Man with a
Movie Camera seeks to tell a story without a narrator to unveil “the hidden truths behind a crude reality.” One of the earliest examples
of fi lmmaking—from the Silent Era—is simultaneously one of the most modern. Like Walter Ruttmann’s 1925 fi lm Berlin: Symphony
of a Metropolis, Man with a Movie Camera is a rich photographic document preserving his vision of an era in music video form, but
unlike most music videos, an enduring neurokinetic work of art.
“Gabriel’s Oboe” by Ennio Morricone
The Mission 1986
The symbiotic relationship between “The Cross” and “The Crown” and the power plays for domination between the powerful Spanish
and Portuguese serves as an historical backdrop to the movies lush cinema photography in a Latin American jungle.
Gabriel’s Oboe is one of the most popular pieces of music in the world. This reoccurring theme appears in its entirety in one of this
fi lm’s most poignant scenes. Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) surrounded by the natives Guarani Indians, saves his own life by playing
this musical solo on his oboe in the jungle.
“Main Theme, Final Scene” by Ennio Morricone
Cinema Paradiso 1988
“As Time Goes By” by Herman Hupfeld
Casablanca 1942
One of the most famous and most quoted fi lms of all-time presents a complex, intricate, political and social commentary on the early
days of World War II. This movie could probably not have been made a few years earlier due to Hollywood’s secret Collaboration (a
term both parties used to describe the agreement) with the Nazis granting editorial power over Hollywood’s movies in exchange for
market access to Germany. Produced in a decade when Warner Brothers made a movie a week, Casablanca surpasses its humble
origins as “just another Warner Brothers’ picture” by exploiting American patriotism (in the continuing wake of Pearl Harbor) to make
a fi lm about war refugees in Europe.
The song, As Time Goes By, was not intended to be left in the movie as a primary theme, nor in the completed composer’s score. Max
Steiner, the fi lm score composer, used the song as a placeholder and intended to replace the music with a yet-to-be written song of
his own. But as the fi nal scenes were being shot and the fi lm edited, As Time Goes By became too intricately intertwined with both the
fi lm and the story to replace in the score.
The magic lantern show may have been a precursor to cinema but Ricard Wagner’s musical dramas established the foundation and
structure for classical fi lm scores. The meaning and feeling in Wagner’s music dramas were deepened through the extensive use of
Leitmotifs or reoccurring musical themes. As a student at the Vienna Conservatory the composer Gustav Mahler became infatuated
with Ricard Wagner, and his music showed it. Max Steiner, the only famous student of Mahler’s, became a direct link to that “Leitmotif”
approach. Like Mahler, Max Steiner capitalized on his unique ability to adapt a popular work to a complex musical score and As Time
Goes By, a song written by Herman Hupfeld years earlier, became the principle motive in the score.
Music utilizes a variety of areas in the brain. It can differentiate rhythm, speed, volume, pitch and melody. But the stimulation of
neuro-networks in the inferior frontal gyrus, deep in the frontal lobe of the brain, becomes necessary to recognize the reoccurrence of
a musical theme, such as a leitmotif As Time Goes By.

Music from the Magic Lantern Show
The magic lantern show, first devised in the 1600s and an ancestor of modern cinema, dazzled spectator’s
minds with the illusions of demons and apparitions popular culture had already lead them to
believe to be true. The monstrous and the marvelous could be conjured in the popular consciousness
with the aid of sound effects, narration and—even music—which competed with common sense, logic
and empirical data to inform a conception and ideas about the world. The magic lantern proved to
be so effective that it became an important for Jesuits, such as Athanasius Kircher, as an important
instrument for theological indoctrination by the illusions and allusions made possible by artistically
rendered projections from a lantern.
Magic lanterns and the world of cinema exploit a loop hole in our mind. Our perception may not be
as objective or unfiltered as we may wish to believe. The outside world is recreated as a neurological
hologram in our brain and unsubstantiated data, including fantasies, compete with hard facts and real
world experience for the creation of a “holographic” illusion (complete with music and sound) in the
audio and visual cortexes of our brain.
The brain is a complex collection of approximately 90 billion neurons or nerve cells which are nourished
and supported by an even larger number of glial (Greek for glue) cells. Electrical and chemical
signals are generated by each neuron. Each in turn squirts or "fires" neurotransmitters across synapses
or microscopic spark plug-like gaps between these brain cells, to generate a new nerve impulse
in the neighboring neuron. Up to two thousand neurons can feed signals to a single cell which, in turn,
sends signals to hundreds or thousands of other brain cells. Neurons working together in networks
can produce a tropical storm of electrochemical activity that excite the regions of the brain responsible
for sound and vision capable of producing the illusions that become the movies of our mind.
“Cues from Robin Hood” by Erik Wolfgang Korngold
The Adventures of Robin Hood 1938
Korngold fully exploits the use of motifs as a meaningful entity in movies. Proclaimed by Gustav Mahler, Puccini and Richard Strauss
to be the greatest child prodigy ever, Erick Wolfgang Korngold had composed great musical dramas—worthy of Wagner—years prior
to arriving in Hollywood. With Korngold the leitmotif became one of the principal elements of the musical structure. The leitmotifs can
take on the form of a melody or a rhythm often revealing subtle psychological changes in the motivations of the characters’ intertwining
arcs. Korngold’s collaborations with Michael Curtiz in works such as Captain Blood, Sea Hawk or Robin Hood transformed the
medium into swashbuckling celluloid symphony.
Korngold improvised much of his music on the piano while watching the fi lm. Like Richard Wagner, the drama drove the structure.
His motives could be associated with a character, an idea or an event. These motives underwent modifi cations and developments to
advance a story, enhance the atmosphere or to connect the characters with pivotal events and into a full textual musical score. Like
a networks of neurons in the brain working together to form moving musical pictures in our brain, Korngold’s motives became the
building blocks of his symphonic web and the movie’s almost continuous musical fl ow.
A resident of Vienna, Korngold initially declined the offer to compose the music for Robin Hood but the studio head was a zealous fan
and agreed to meet any and every condition Korngold proposed. In later years the composer often credited Robin Hood with saving him
and his family from the European Holocaust.
Schindler’s List John Williams
Schindler’s List 1993
John Williams’s reputation as a fi lm composer fl ew through the stratosphere with his music for Star Wars—a space age drama inspired
by Wagner’s Ring Cycle—featuring music reminiscent of the swashbucklers by Korngold. The music for Schilndler’s List took on quite
a different, more solemn, character. While still a student at Juilliard John Williams selected Johnoscar to debut a solo piano arrangement
of music from the fi lm at the Jewish Federation in New York City.
Some parts of the brain can be attributed to particular tasks—yet music appears to require the coordination
of many areas including those associated with hearing, emotions and memory. The role
of music in cinema is a phenomenon that has been subjected to little empirical study but some of its
roles can be inferred intuitively. Movie music can establish a mood, resolve ambiguity, remind us of
events that have already occurred and provide a sense of continuity across the broader spectrum of
the cinematic experience.
The more we stimulate neural networks the more reliable they become. And the ability of our brain
to coordinate music and a story with a two dimension plane of projection has been stimulated and
developed to become a reliable and complex neural function which most perform or, more correctly—
passively experience—daily. We can make general observations about brain activity for a neurological
function including the types of neurons firing, the types of neural networks active and the parts of the
brain involved through the study of brain waves. While there are no particular studies I know of concerning
brains waves and cinema, there have been studies on brain waves and television.
A Night at the Movies with Johnoscar