Working today on the final version of a choral piece I need to finish in the next day or two, and then it’s on to two piano pieces I’ve promised to a performer that have been sitting on the shelf for a few weeks during all the chaos at work.
But while I take a break from all that, I’m going to point out, as I did during the last Olympic games, one of the minor heroes of its TV coverage.
And that would be the Frenchman Leo Arnaud (1904-1991), who was
one of the many behind-the-scenes orchestrators and music men during the golden age of Hollywood. He was nominated for an Oscar for the orchestration work he did on The Unsinkable Molly Brown in 1964 (here’s a bit from it):
But Arnaud’s lasting contribution to the world of music is a 30-second -or-so bit of a piece he wrote around 1958 for Felix Slatkin (father of Leonard), who was making a bunch of orchestral albums at the time that showed off flashy sounds that would come off well on the new stereo equipment then making its way into American homes. One of those pieces was called Bugler’s Dream, and we have known it since 1968 as the theme of the Olympics.
We used to play an arrangement of it in high school band, and there was a bit right after the fanfare that always reminded me of Dvorak’s Carnival Overture, and I found it finally on YouTube in a video taken from TV during the 1996 Atlanta Games:
For me, you can’t get much better than this theme for an Olympics brand (the beauty part for me is the second time through, when the chord sequence goes from I-V to I-iii-vi). The second you hear it, you think of the Games, and that’s an interesting kind of immortality. It reminds me, too, of the unexpected direction lives can take.
Arnaud, after all, studied with Maurice Ravel and Vincent d’Indy, and you simply couldn’t have studied with more eminent musicians as French music student of the time. Then he had a career as a jazz trombonist in the 1920s, after France went mad for jazz when James Reese Europe played this hot new music for them in the days after the end of World War I. That’s an interesting mix, to say the least.
Arnaud was one of those many thousands of workers in the film industry who helped make movie magic for billions of people, which maybe makes the first thing you think is: OK, a commercial hack who got lucky. But commercial music isn’t easy to do. It takes a great deal of skill, and it’s not for nothing that the sound studios of Los Angeles needed to get first-rate people as movies became more and more intricate.
So I like to think of Leo Arnaud as one of the unsung professionals who brought the work in on time, under budget, tirelessly and probably with no more than the usual complaint. In other words, your basic working guy, though in a much more glamorous field.
I’d love to hear from anyone who worked with him or knew him; he must have gotten a good bit of satisfaction out of hearing his music become associated indelibly with these great world events of sport. You have to think it made him proud.
10 Comments
August 17, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Just yesterday, August 16, 2008, I visited the final resting place of Sir Leo Arnaud in Yadkin Co., N.C. His wife (now deceased) was a friend of my mother’s and I had been a guest in their home. He was a brilliant man even into his late 80’s. I had always loved Olympic Fanfare even before meeting him and find it very exciting to have this personal connection to the Olympics. I was delighted to find your blog and know that Sir Leo would be humbly proud. His wife was a dear, precious lady. He told me that the first time he saw her, he thought, “She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” Thank you for acknowledging his genius and keeping his memory alive. I would love to hear from you. Patricia
August 17, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Patricia:
Thanks so much for writing.
I’m delighted to hear from you because you did know Sir Leo, and in times like ours, when technology makes so many things available but we know less and less about where they came from, it’s good to remember that someone had to take time to create them.
I’d be interested to know if he had time to write some standalone classical pieces outside his film work; I imagine he was too busy most of the time but maybe he had a moment or two to squeeze out a string quartet.
August 18, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Thanks for writing this. I was born after Leo died, but I actually wrote most of the Wikipedia article on Arnaud you linked to. What is the music following Bugler’s Dream in the Atlanta video? I’ve heard it before but I’m not familiar with it.
August 18, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Sawyer:
I can only say that it was part of the Arnaud Olympics music we played when I was in high school band, so I assume it’s part of Buglers Dream. That’s the part that reminds me of the Dvorak Carnival Overture, a little.
It reminds my wife of the Mendelssohn Italian Symphony, but in any case, I remember it as part of the Olympics music. Now I really should find the original and listen to it. I’m sure it wouldn’t take too long to find on the Web.
August 18, 2008 at 8:11 pm
The lively brass work during the final 30 seconds of the piece was edited out by John Williams when he wrote his “Olympic Fanfare” for the 1984 Los Angeles games. I miss it a lot now because ABC had always played it to the end when they broadcast the Olympics in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
August 27, 2008 at 6:09 pm
I often think of Leo, especially every four years during the Olympics. During the late 70’s some friends and I had the pleasure of meeting Leo when he still lived in Beverly Hills. He told us many stories – how as a child he would watch Debussy go into a music store; his stories of Ravel and the early Jazz era in France; how as a young man he was was to play a cello solo and he looked up and Saint Saens was playing the organ. I wish I could remember all the stories. He was brilliant.
September 22, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Hi. I am doing a PowerPoint presentation on Noel Leo Arnaud Vachant. (He had many names!) I am lacking one very critical piece of information — a photo. I have a very VERY small one from the internet but I can not confirm it is him. I’m wonderng if you have any that you know of or if you could contact Patricia Spencer and see if there is any contacts she might still know of. I’ve even looked up geneology (sp?) but can only find his death date. Some records need updating but it seems so unfair that a man who wrote the one piece of music that EVERY American knows, is going off as an unknown without a face. Can you help?
Thank you,
Regina DeDominicis
October 16, 2008 at 9:44 am
I am originally from Hamptonville and had the pleasure of meeting Sir Leo at my father’s lumber company there in 1982. We became good friends, and I visited his home many times. We had wonderful discussions about music. He was such a character and told great stories. I had just graduated from college with a degree in piano. He was happy for me to play his piano, and many times he would play along on his cello. He even played his cello at my wedding in 1985. I feel so lucky that our lives crossed paths.
November 11, 2008 at 12:56 am
Hello again Greg. I have hit a landmine of information about Lord Leo. I feel almost as if I had sat down with this fine man. My PowerPoint presentation has driven me to acquire Adobe Flash. Needless to say, a Flash animation is underway. May I send it to you when complete to include on this page?
In my search to find a photo of him, I called the library in Hamptonville, NC. I HAPPENED to reach a librarian that was dear friends with Lord Leo’s wife before she passed away. This nice librarian put me in touch with his granddaughter and I have since received about 35 photos of various subjects. One such photo is that of a piece that Lord Leo wrote for Fae (his wife) when she was on the way to the hospital in an ambulance. He followed in a separate car. He believed that a composer shouldn’t need a piano to write music any more than an author would need a dictionary in hand. He composed this piece for Fae using notes ONLY of her initials — F – A – B.
I will stay in touch and send this Flash animation when it is complete.
Regards,
Regina
November 11, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Regina:
That’s wonderful news, and congratulations to you for your persistence in finding some more Arnaud material.
When you’ve got the flash animation done, please send it along, and I’ll devote a new entry on this blog to it.
Thanks for keeping at this; judging by the responses I keep getting on this topic, there will be plenty of interest.
– Greg