Music in Our Ears

Early this morning I caught up with an old movie called "Boys Night Out", a classic comedy from 1962 where four suburban businessmen get an apartment in Manhattan for evening entertainment not involving wives. The apartment ends up including a blonde woman who the guys believe is an escort, but is actually a graduate sociology student using the opportunity for her thesis on the sexual fantasies of suburban married men. Of course it is a comedy, so no one actually gets their clothes off in these dalliances. The lack of hanky panky is the face of assumptions otherwise is one of the comedic threads.

The film has a classic ending, with the blonde, the husbands, their wives, a private detective and the student's professor all in the apartment and yelling at each other, shortly followed by a scene months later where all four couples are out for the evening together.

The movie is a successful silly comedy of the era, well executed in terms of sets, clothing and cast. And it has music - real music. When the first of the men sharing the apartment arrives for "his" night, he brings a bottle of champagne and puts a recording of a Mendelssohn violin concerto on the stereo.

There was a time where this was common. The theme for the  Lone Ranger television show was from the "William Tell Overture" by Rossini, families listened to recordings by Heifitz and the last time I played Rachmoninoff's second symphony I could have sworn I heard the start of the theme song for "Million Dollar Move" in the middle movement. Many popular films used classical music.

But this is long lost. When we were walking out of the movie "The King's Speech" a few months ago, several people in their early 20's were commenting on how wonderful the music was. It was a lot of Mozart, with the ending music being the magnificent Adagio movement from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. We stopped to tell them what they had heard and they were floored to hear it was classical music. They were talking about getting the recordings - maybe they did.

There is a good reason to put classical music into the common marketplace, even if it does risk playing the more accessible works to death. It gets it into peoples' ears as something familiar, not music that can only live in stuffy music halls. It's a shame this doesn't happen so much any more. The are still some moments, like the use of Orff's "Carmina Burana" in the movie "Excalibur", but they are too few.