David Raksin is Dead, Wrapped in Memory

David Raksin died this week at the age of 92. He was taught by Gershwin and Schoenberg, two great composers from the opposite end of the spectrum, worked for Chaplin and with Bernard Hermann, the great Hitchcock collaborator.

He's best known, as you will no doubt hear, for his theme from Laura but his scores for many movies is also worth considering. His legacy was great and his haunting music from Laura (forget the schmalzy renditions of the title song and rent the film) and other films influenced other more contemporary films such as Twin Peaks (TV) and later the wierd and wonderful movie Fire Walk With Me. Angelo Badalamenti kept with Raksin's '40s sensibility throughout the series, although his music is a bit more lush and ethereal. It's no coincidence that the name of the girl found in the first scene of Twin Peaks is Laura. Here's the theme from Fire Walk With Me. This music makes a great companion piece to pondering this man's long and fruitful life (I always like my tributes to musicians and composers to be either covers or music influenced by).

Alex Ross, who knew Raksin, writes a brief but interesting remembrance of the composer including this fascinating tidbit:

Incidentally, Raksin not only wrote a glorious, swaying theme for Laura but also introduced a striking electronic innovation. Everyone who's seen the movie remembers the scene in which Dana Andrews stares at Laura's portrait and falls under her spell. The mood is set by eerie shimmering chords on the soundtrack. What Raksin did — as he explained in an interview with Roy Prendergast, author of Film Music: A Neglected Art — was to record a series of piano chords with the initial attacks omitted. The engineer turned on the microphones only after each chord had been struck, and continued bringing up the levels until ambient noise saturated the ringing tones. Raksin then made tape loops from this spectral, disembodied sound. "It was the interplay of the partials without the ictus," he explained. Some years later, the Beatles used the same trick to create the massive piano chord at the end of "A Day in the Life."

David Raksin, 1912-2004

Notes: This isn't an MP3 blog but at times I'll use audio. I do not own the server that this song came from - it is a "found object" and it may be removed at any given time. I have no idea if the server owns "copyright." The referring page for the MP3 is here. If you like the song, I suggest you buy it. Here's a link to various prices for this soundtrack where you will get a much better quality and full recording if you would like to purchase it. I recommend it heartily.

Here's an Amazon search on their classical music site for David Raksin.