lundi 26 mars 2012

David Amram - The Arrangement (1969)

EM/f.PC/LP 0020
THE ARRANGEMENT (1969)
L'ARRANGEMENT
Real. Elia Kazan
Mus. David Amram



LP Warner 1824 – Stereo (US)





Side 1. 
1. Anatolia (1:58) 
2. Love Is Never Out of Style (2:16) 
3. Mountain Snow (2:10) 
4. Sunny Days (2:35) 
5. Blue Tomorrow (1:36) 
6. The Zephyr March of The Nicotine Fiends (1:37) 
7. Old Country Soul (4:10)


Side 2. 
1. Other Dreams (2:18) 
2. Childhood Dreams (3:13) 
3. Definitely Blue (4:15) 
4. Ancestral Dreams (2:45) 
5. Kazoo Story (2:32) 
6. Anatolia (3:27)


Album produced by Sonny Burke and Jimmy Hilliard
Recorded in July, 1969, at Fine Studios, New York
Cover photo: Bruce McBroom
Art direction: Ed Thrasher


Notes Back Cover
David Amram's schizoid musical background combines "serious" work-at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Manhattan School of Music, Howard University, and as the first resident composer for the New York Philharmonic - with a free form jazz history that started with Dixieland bands and progressed through sundry jazz clubs where he shared his time and talent with such as Charlie Byrd, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Mingus. All of which is recounted in his book, Vibrations, published in 1968 by The Macmillan Company. When he isn't composing such imposing works as "King Lear Variations", he divides his time between the symphony podium, jazz jams, and a rare motion picture score. "Music is really one world", he says, scoffing at categorical limitations.
This is the fourth Kazan-Amram effort: their first was in 1958 with the play J.B. followed by the film Splendor in the Grass, then After the Fall at Lincoln Center's Repertory Theatre. The Arrangement is Amram's first feature film score in seven years-part of his deliberate plot to escape the doldrums of the "background music writer" syndrome. He is, very simply, a Renaissance musician - unbagged, unbowed, and happily unpoor.


Everyone knows what an "arrangement" is. But that's not what my film is about. Eddie, my hero, does have an "arrangement" with his wife, and one with his mistress; he has one with his father, and he has one with his boss. But the one that's killing him is the one he has with himself.
A lady friend of mine saw a preview of the film the other day, and when it was over she said, "I didn't realize that men lived under such pressure!" She got the point. The issue is not whether Eddie should stay with Deborah Kerr or go with Faye Dunaway. Who could decide that one? They are equally beautiful and equally attractive. The issue is : Who am I? And the issue is: Do I like myself? And: Can I do anything about it now? In other words, the conflict is between a man and himself. It's fought out on the bloodiest battlefield of all-and the most silent. After it's over, the enemy Eddie has killed is himself; hed had to in order to continue living.
Drama is conflict, they say, the clash of people, and when it's good, the clash of issues. What's at stake here is what the emerging generation-the "kids"-have been fighting for : Not to live thier lives by the standards they have seen to be invalid, but by their own experience seen in their own light. They are lucky; they caught on early. And they have made the first step. They have rejected the world their elders made, the world of wars and money-accumulation, of other-orientation and self-denial. My favorite line in The Arrangement comes when Eddie says to his bewildered, distraught wife, "I've got to learn to be selfish, that's it! I've got to learn to be selfish!".
This process of regeneration by self-murder is happening not only among the "kids", it's spreading. People in their middle years are beginning to drop out and to confront the basic questions: Who should I be? How should I live? What do I want? Who am I? It's not easy to do this after forty; it takes the hardest kind of courage. But every once in a while, you will see the story of my hero, Eddie Anderson, being acted out somewhere in the crowd around you. Look kindly on this man; he's in a tough fight.
That is my one great hope for the film-that when people of any age see it they will understand better the silent struggle in their own souls and so will find, in my film, an ally.


- Elia Kazan
October 6, 1969

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