The Godfather Composer Nino

Retuning the Philadelphia Orchestra: A pitch for Ormandy's ideas

If the authors of the Philadelphia Orchestra's newly unveiled strategic plan intended to craft a document with generous wiggle room, they succeeded. No matter which artists and what kind of repertoire and concert formats materialize in the coming years, president Allison B. Vulgamore will be able to point to the plan and say the orchestra had been open in its intentions.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so, it turns out, do orchestra fans. The artistic-space-holder feel of this blueprint raises the real possibility of trading Copland and Carter for circus acts, and listeners are appropriately alarmed.

"Somehow I doubt that the Philadelphia Museum of Art would ever replace Matisse and Rembrandt with velvet Elvises in response to slowing admission levels," a reader wrote in response to an Inquirer article about the plan.

"That rustling sound you just heard was Eugene Ormandy turning in his grave," wrote another catastrophist.

A little perspective, please. I walked over to said grave at Fourth and Pine Streets last week, and the orchestra's fourth music director is nestled as peacefully as ever in his fern-covered plot. It should be remembered that, more than any other music director before or since, Ormandy clearly understood his job description to encompass the entertainment end of the spectrum.

It's no accident that his grave marker bears a corporate insignia: that of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association. Even in death, Ormandy knows which side his bread is buttered on. A pragmatist of the first order, he is credited with saying: "It's all very well to have principles, but when it comes to money you have to be flexible."

What does this mean for the orchestra's future and its eighth music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin? Everything. If the strategic plan is going to reconnect the orchestra with its previously larger listenership, it will bring back into existence an orchestra that is all things to all people.

Ormandy was a master at that. Peeling back some of the mythology that has obscured the Ormandy years is instructive. Yes, he premiered plenty of new works. But looking, for instance, at the 1969-70 season, the core of his tenure, what we find is a curator who cared whether you listened.

10 Most Masterful Movie Scores of All Time | Online Degree

Lists like this are almost impossible to assemble (and not just because they could easily transform into a list that's nothing but John Williams scores). There have been so many wonderful film scores since the medium began that picking just 10 -- heck, picking just 100 -- is a horrible challenge. Let's acknowledge up front these scores are masterful but that they're hardly the only ones worth writing about; rather, they're 10 great examples of just how important is music is to film, and of how an unforgettable score can turn a movie into a pop-cultural landmark. You're probably familiar with the lot of them, which is the whole point. These are the scores that have made indelible marks on all of us.

The Last of the Mohicans : Composer Trevor Jones initially worked up an electronic score for Michael Mann's historical epic of adventure and romance, but the music was given an orchestral rewrite toward the end of production. As a result, Randy Edelman came in and scored a few scenes while Jones was overhauling the project, and the two received co-credit for the final result. The acclaimed, gorgeous score is fueled by sweeping strings that complement the fantastic scenery. One of the most recognizable scores of the 1990s.

Psycho : Bernard Herrmann scored some of Alfred Hitchcock's biggest films, including Vertigo and North by Northwest , but even against those classics, his work on Psycho stands out. Who out there doesn't know about the stinging strings used in the shower scene? That reference is so popular that more people have probably made jokes about it than have seen the actual movie.

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