Henry Mancini

• Born: April 16, 1924
• Birthplace: Cleveland, Ohio
• Died: June 14, 1994
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

American film-score composer

An Academy Award-winning film composer, Mancini incorporated jazz and popular music into his compositions, abandoning the classical Hollywood practice of primarily using symphonic music for scores.

The Life

At the age of eight, Enrico Nicola Mancini (mahn-SEE-nee) began his music training with his father, who taught him piccolo and flute. After the family moved from Cleveland, Ohio, to the steel town of West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh), in 1936, Mancini took up the piano. A year later he joined the Pennsylvania All-State Band. During that time, Mancini became interested in jazz, particularly the swing style of Glenn Miller’s and Benny Goodman’s big bands, and he taught himself arranging. His formal training in orchestration, arranging, and theory started at the age of fourteen, when he studied with theater conductor and arranger Max Adkins in Pittsburgh. After high school he continued his education at the music school of Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. In 1942 he was accepted at the Juilliard Graduate School of Music in New York, but he had studied there less than a year when he was drafted in the Army for a tour of duty in Europe.

During his service, first with Air Force and then with infantry military bands, Mancini met musicians from Miller’s Army Air Corps Band. They were instrumental in providing Mancini with a position as pianist and arranger for the newly formed Glenn Miller Orchestra under the direction of Tex Beneke in 1946. During his residence with the orchestra, Mancini met Ginny O’Connor, a member of the Mello-Larks, who sang with the orchestra and whom he married in 1947. When O’Connor became a session singer in Los Angeles in the same year, Mancini moved with her to Los Angeles, where he worked freelance as an arranger and composer for radio shows, bands and nightclub performers until 1952. At the same time, he took courses at the Westlake School of Music, and he privately studied composition with Ernst Krenek, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Alfred Sendry. An engagement of the Mello-Larks for a short film featuring Jimmy Dorsey was the springboard for Mancini, who was hired as the arranger for the film, to work at the Universal-International Studios music department. He joined the staff in 1952, working under music director Joseph Gershenson and alongside such experienced composers as Frank Skinner, Herman Stein, David Tamkin, and Hans Salter. In 1958 Mancini had the opportunity to score Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. Shortly after, after being laid off from a financially ailing Universal Studio, he signed up with Blake Edwards—a director, formerly employed at Universal—to score the music for a television series.

The Music from “Peter Gunn.” The sound track for this television series became so popular that Mancini also wrote the music to Edwards’s next television series, Mr. Lucky, yet another success.

From that time to the late 1980’s, Mancini regularly scored an average of three to four films a year. Among this copious output are more than twenty-five film scores for Edwards, culminating in Victor Victoria. Mancini was not able to complete its musical-theater adaptation, which premiered on Broadway in 1995, because he died of pancreatic cancer in 1994.

For his work, Mancini was nominated for eighteen Academy Awards (receiving four: two for Best Score and two for Best Song) and for seventy-two Grammy Awards (receiving twenty, including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995). In addition, he received several career achievement awards.

The Music

The Universal Years. Mancini’s career as a film composer began in 1952, when he was hired for a two-week assignment to cowrite music for the Abbott and Costello comedy Lost in Alaska (1952). After that, he was promoted to staff member of the Universal music department. During the next six years he composed or co-composed (often uncredited) the scores for around ninety films, from which music was reused for fourteen films as stock music. These films were primarily B-pictures, belonging to the Western, musical, comedy, mystery, or monster film genres. During these assignments, Mancini familiarized himself with a clichéd use of film music. Besides such assembly-line assignments, his affinity for swing jazz and his previous involvement with the Miller orchestra made him the right choice to adapt the music and compose the tune “Too Little Time” for Anthony Mann’s biopic The Glenn Miller Story (1953). Two years later, Mancini was asked to write additional music for a similar film, The Benny Goodman Story (1955). Another important film Mancini was able to work on as an uncredited second composer—next to the experienced Frank Skinner—was Douglas Sirk’s melodrama Imitation of Life (1959).

In 1958 Mancini scored his first important film, Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. Mancini abandoned the usual studio orchestra configuration, and he concentrated his forces on a big band lineup with an emphasis on percussion instruments. The music in Touch of Evil describes the locale (a U.S. town near the Mexican border) and mood (criminal), and it also depicts the psychology of the leading characters. These purposes manifest themselves in the opening of the film, during the notorious three-and-a-half-minute-long take. The unmistakably Afro-Cuban-influenced music, with cutting brass chords and the superimposition of other diegetic music (rock and roll and swing), prepares the audience for the sudden explosion of a car bomb.

Scoring Style.Mancini used Afro-Cuban and cha-cha music again in his first feature film collaboration with Blake Edwards. The fifteen-minute party scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) is underscored with four different Latin tunes showcasing extended jazz solos. Breakfast at Tiffany’s can be regarded as Mancini’s first composition exhibiting the scoring practices that would become his trademark. Mancini generally prefers a multithematic to a leitmotivic or monothematic approach for the overall musical design of a score. He also exhibits an affinity for popular music, eliminating nearly completely symphonic film scoring. Furthermore, Mancini explored novel concepts on how music interacted with the image, through simple melodic construction, unambiguous harmonic progression, and economical, lucid orchestration. All these features are responsible for the cool, light touch Mancini’s music conveys, representing and shaping an urban, sophisticated, upper-class zeitgeist of the 1960’s. Instead of creating complex through-composed cues (a praxis that many film composers of the 1950’s, such as Elmer Bernstein and Bernard Herrmann, carried out), Mancini modeled his scores on popular song structures and jazz tunes. Jazz ballads with a bossa nova rhythm accompany romantic scenes (The Pink Panther), cool jazz-influenced upbeat numbers accompany urban scenes (Breakfast at Tiffany’s) or suspense scenes (The Pink Panther) and—as already stated—Afro-Cuban big band tunes accompany party scenes and tension scenes. The most notable feature that Mancini explored, however, was the interpolation of a memorable song with a cantabile melody in many of his films, beginning with “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the title tune in Days of Wine and Roses, Charade, Dear Heart, and Two for the Road, and “Meglio Stasera” in The Pink Panther as well as “The Sweetheart Tree” in The Great Race. Other films have instrumental, songlike themes such as A Shot in the Dark, Arabesque, and I Girasoli (Sunflower). These songs were not only placed into a film for the purpose of a new musico-dramaturgical approach to film scoring, but also for commercial purposes, as vehicles to produce and promote albums of the film sound tracks.

The Mancini Sound. Much of the Mancini sound was achieved by utilizing a uniquely personal orchestration. Unlike most other Hollywood film composers, Mancini orchestrated the major part of his music himself. He preferred warm string pads, sustained French horn chords, sharp staccato brass interjections, and colorful woodwind sections. He often scored passages for two alto flutes, for solo bass flute, for solo trombone, for small jazz vocal ensemble (as in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Charade, and Two for the Road), and for ethnic-sounding instrument combinations (as in Experiment in Terror and Arabesque). He also featured vibraphone chords (often at the ends of cues), harp arpeggios, unembellished piano melodies, and sparse harmonic accompaniment. The jazz solos that Mancini incorporated into his scores were usually performed by a few selected musicians (such as trumpeters Pete and Conte Candoli and saxophonist Plas Johnson), whom the composer would rehire repeatedly. Based on this formula, Mancini composed music for more than seventy films. Most memorable are his scores for That’s Entertainment!, The Return of the Pink Panther, Edwards’ musical Victor Victoria, the television miniseries The Thorn Birds (with flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal as soloist), and The Glass Menagerie (directed by Paul Newman).

Musical Legacy

Mancini was instrumental in changing the direction of film scoring at the beginning of the 1960’s. He used jazz and popular music as the base of his compositions, and to a large extent he avoided the cliché tropes with which jazz was associated in the 1940’s and 1950’s, such as crime, nightlife, drugs, and prostitution. He also embedded a song in the narrative fabric of a nonmusical film, accenting key plot moments, and he used song structure as the paradigm for many of his scores. In the early 1960’s, Mancini was not the only composer moving toward a different aesthetic in film scoring. Composers such as Michel Legrand, Lalo Schifrin, Neal Hefti, Quincy Jones, and Johnny Mandal increasingly began using jazz- and pop-oriented orchestration, integrating pop songs at prominent places in the film, and utilizing idioms from popular music as the foundation for their scores.

Mancini was not only a prolific film composer but also a conductor, performing primarily his music and that of other film composers up to fifty times a year, for more than six hundred performances throughout his career. Beginning in the late 1950’s, he reworked many of his film scores for recording, resulting in an output of ninety albums. His first album, The Music from “Peter Gunn” (1959), proved to be successful, topping the charts in February, 1959, and going gold. Other album hits were Music from Mr. Lucky,Our Man in Hollywood, A Merry Mancini Christmas, Mancini Plays the Theme from “Love Story,”Henry Mancini Conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in a Concert of Film Music, Cinema Italiano: Music of Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, and more.

Principal Works

film scores:The Raiders, 1952; All American, 1953; Ain’t Misbehavin’, 1955; A Day of Fury, 1956; Touch of Evil, 1958; Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961; Days of Wine and Roses, 1962; Experiment in Terror, 1962; Charade, 1963; The Pink Panther, 1963; Dear Heart, 1964; A Shot in the Dark, 1964; The Great Race, 1965; Arabesque, 1966; Two for the Road, 1967; I Girasoli, 1970; The Night Visitor, 1971; The Thief Who Came to Dinner, 1973; That’s Entertainment!, 1974; The White Dawn, 1974; Once Is Not Enough, 1975; The Return of the Pink Panther, 1975; The Pink Panther Strikes Again, 1976; Revenge of the Pink Panther, 1978; Ten, 1979; A Change in Seasons, 1980; Mommie Dearest, 1981; Trail of the Pink Panther, 1982; Victor Victoria, 1982; Curse of the Pink Panther, 1983; The Man Who Loved Women, 1983; The Thorn Birds, 1983 (television); The Great Mouse Detective, 1986; The Glass Menagerie, 1987 (television); Physical Evidence, 1989; Skin Deep, 1989; Ghost Dad, 1990; Switch, 1991; Son of the Pink Panther, 1993.

Principal Recordings

albums:The Music from “Peter Gunn,” 1959; Music from Mr. Lucky, 1960; Our Man in Hollywood, 1963; A Merry Mancini Christmas, 1966; Mancini Plays the Theme from “Love Story,” 1970; Henry Mancini Conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in a Concert of Film Music, 1976; Cinema Italiano: Music of Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, 1991.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Elmer. “A Conversation with Henry Mancini.” Film Music Notebook 4, no. 1 (1978): 9-21. An informative conversation between two renowned film composers.

Brown, Royal S. Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Brown’s seminal book on film music contains a long interview with Mancini.

The Cue Sheet. Henry Mancini. The Cue Sheet 9, no. 2 (1992). This special issue of the trade magazine The Cue Sheet, dedicated to Mancini, contains excellent articles on the composer’s music, including an annotated bibliography and an overview of the Mancini collection of scores and ancillary material at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Elhaïk, S., and D. Mangodt. “A Filmography/Discography of Henry Mancini.” Soundtrack! 34/35: 12-15. This is probably the best available filmography and discography on Mancini.

Mancini, Henry. Sounds and Scores: A Practical Guide to Professional Orchestration. Miami, Fla.: CPP/Belwin, 1986. A prime source for the student of Mancini’s orchestration techniques. It includes music examples from many of his scores up to 1963 (notably from Mr. Lucky and Peter Gunn).

Mancini, Henry, and Gene Lees. Did They Mention the Music? New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001. An autobiography, cowritten with Lees, is a good primary source for information about Mancini’s life, although it is heavily anecdotal.

Marmorstein, G. “A Passing Breeze Filled with Memories: Henry Mancini, from Universal to International.” In Hollywood Rhapsody: Movie Music and Its Makers, 1900 to 1975. New York: Schirmer Books, 1997. This short article offers a good overview of Mancini’s career.

Smith, Jeff. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 1998. Written by an eminent film music scholar, this book contains a long chapter on how Mancini reutilized his film scores for album releases and offers an in-depth analysis of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.