Composers, arrangers, conductors, session musicians, and executives
worked in easy listening and scoring, complicating an academic
focus that lionizes film music while ignoring or deriding easy
listening. This book documents easy listening's connections with
film music, an aspect overlooked in academic and popular
literature. Fueled by the rise of the LP and home entertainment,
easy listening became the largest midcentury commercial music
market, generating more actual income for the record business than
7- inch singles. Easy listening roped in subgenres including
classical, baroque, jazz, Latin, Polynesian, "exotica," rock,
Broadway, and R&B, appropriated and reinterpreted just as they
were for cinema. Easy listening provided opportunities in
orchestral music for conservatory- trained composers. Major film
composers such as Henry Mancini and Michel Legrand had a prodigious
output of easy listening albums. Critics fault easy listening for
structural racisms, overlooking its evolution and practitioners.
Easy listening helped destabilize a tripartite record business that
categorized product as race records, old time records, or general
popular music. Charlie Parker's with Strings records altered the
direction of jazz, profoundly influencing other performers,
encouraging bold crosspollinations, and making money. The influence
of technology and historical contexts of music for work and leisure
are explored. Original interviews and primary sources will
fascinate scholars, historians, and students of cinema, television,
film scoring, and midcentury popular music.
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