No News (Two Black Crows) + Herrmann's music

[DirkMcCallahan]

Just as an experiment, I tried syncing up the No News record with two cues from the CD of Bernard Herrmann's music for Ambersons. I used Departure - Isabel's Death and Elegy, which, taken together, were almost the exact length of the No News record. Not sure how interesting this would be to anyone here, but I thought it might be worth sharing:

https://soundcloud.com/user-192010456-2 ... eath-elegy

[Roger Ryan]

Herrmann's music makes the "No News" routine sound like a horror story, which is the power of music cues to color the content of a scene. Of course, in the original edit, the "Elegy" cue led into the closing boarding house scene (where the "No News" recording was heard playing on a Victrola) and the "End Titles" cue began as Eugene was driven away from the boarding house; no scoring was used during the bulk of the sequence itself.

By the way, I believe Welles' reference to "No News" as a "Two Black Crows" routine is inaccurate. The "Crows", also know as Mack and Moran, gained popularity in the 1920s during Welles' pre-teen and teen years, but "No News", written and performed by Nat M. Wills, predated the duo by about a decade-and-a-half. Released in 1908, Wills' recording is a perfect fit for the time-frame of the boarding house scene which is meant to take place a couple of years later, whereas any recording by Mack and Moran would have been an anachronism if used in the scene.