The Notebook
Original Music by Aaron Zigman
plus source music*
Available in the UK on Silva Screen SILCD 1173 / in the US on New Line Records NLR 39031
Running Time: 66:59
Amazon UK Amazon US
* Source Music:
- 'I'll be seeing You' (Sammy Fain/Irving Kahl) sung by Billie Holiday
- 'Alabamy Home' (Dave Ringle/Duke Ellington) performed by Duke Ellington
- 'Always & Always' (Chet Forrest/Edward Ward/Bob Wright) performed by Benny Goodman and his Orchestra
- 'A String of Pearls' (Jerry Gray) performed by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra
- 'Diga Diga Doo' (Dorothy Fields/Jimmy McHugh) performed by Rex Stewart and the Ellingtonians
- 'One O'Clock Jump' (Count Basie) performed by Benny Goodman and his Orcherstra
A significant proportion of this album is given over to source music appropriate to the mid-20th century period and the Carolinas location of this romantic film. The popular, jazz and country classics are listed above and need no comment from me.
As a contemporary (well as a child) to the period of the story and a fan of the unashamedly over-sweet romantic film scores of those days, I wallowed in the excesses of Aaron Zigman's 'Overture' perorations. Zigman uses a large orchestra of almost 100 players, so you can imagine the big sweeping sound in those big perorations, music that grabs the heart and spirit. (It's repeated elsewhere – at the climax of 'On the Lake' for instance). For me, it was like hearing Newman's music for Love is a Many Splendoured Thing or Steiner's for Since You Went Away for the first time all over again. A bitter-sweet nostalgic mood is sustained through Zigman's music and at several points he uses a baritone saxophone to heighten the period feel. Alas elsewhere there is too much reliance on the sort of melancholic piano and string meanderings that have become too much of a modern cliché.
Classic source music with an original score that is, at best, cast in the big romantic- sounding mould of such Golden Age composers as Steiner and Newman.
Ian Lace
31/2
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