The original music from
the Laurel & Hardy comedy Our Relations (1936) represents
a world premiere for the Dutch orchestra, The Beau Hunks. This
music was only partially used in the released version of the
film. The rest, buried and forgotten for 65 years, was recently
discovered in a collection of handwritten sheet music. Now, for
the first time, we can hear the score just as Leroy Shield originally
wrote it; also for the first time, we can understand how familiar
tunes like "We're Out for Fun" and "On a Sunny
Afternoon" in a larger context...
The Beau Hunks
In
1992, musician/producer Gert-Jan Blom and graphic designer/researcher Piet Schreuders founded the orchestra The Beau Hunks in order to reconstruct the lovely music from Laurel & Hardy
films. The results: 3 albums with Laurel & Hardy-music, hailed
the world over by press and public alike. Newsweek even
called The Beau Hunks "the best things from Holland since
tulips." Het orchestra soon broadened its repertoire with
work by similarly "neglected" American composers, Raymond
Scott, Edward MacDowell, and Ferde Grofe.
Archival research, painstaking
reconstructions, "live" recording techniques and period
instruments are essential ingredients of Beau Hunks products,
coupled with carefully designed packages and informative booklets.
The Beau Hunks developed into a self-styled "documentary
orchestra." Although the orchestra changes in size from
project to project, there is a core group of devoted musical
specialists: reed players Robert Veen, Ronald Jansen Heijtmajer,
Frank Timpe and David Kweksilber, trumpet player Menno Daams,
and a rhythm section consisting of Ton van Bergeijk (guitar),
Gert-Jan Blom (double bass) and Louis Debij (drums). These musicians
were all involved with this new album, which can be regarded
as a crowning achievement of The Beau Hunks' output so far.
With Our Relations The
Beau Hunks return once again to their "roots": the
music of Laurel & Hardy. For their first albums, the music
was transcribed note-by-note from the hissy film soundtracks
because the sheet music was presumed lost. This presumption was
proven false when in 1994 and 1995 a collection of original sheet
music from Hal Roach films was found in a Los Angeles archive.
Part of this collection yielded the notes written by Leroy Shield
for the 1936 comedy Our Relations. Producer Piet Schreuders
studied the sheet music, identified the dozens of individual
themes and combined them with titles and "lead sheets"
found in the Music Division of the Library of Congress. Menno
Daams and other Beau Hunks arrangers filled in the missing parts
where necessary and orchestrated themes of which no parts were
found. In this manner about 95% of the original film score could
be reconstructed.
While the discovery of original
music was sensational in itself, it became even more interesting
when it turned out that much of this music never made it into
the released film. The tune "Carefree" (using elements
from Laurel & Hardy's "cuckoo" theme), for instance,
or "Captain Winkle", introducing the captain of the
S.S. Periwinkle. About half of the original music, which was
recorded in May, 1936, ended up on the cutting room floor during
postproduction in August, to disappear without trace. Gone was
just about every element which made the score into a whole, like
the Overture, musical transitions, musical effects and variations.
All this can now be heard on this album, for the first time in
65 years. Recording this project required an extra large orchestra.
To this end the Beau Hunks teamed up with the esteemed Dutch
radio group, The Metropole Orchestra.
The composer: Leroy Shield (1893-1962)
When
Leroy Shield wrote his first film tunes for the Hal Roach Studios
in 1930, he was in effect starting his third career. He had started
out as a traveling concert pianist in the classical circuit,
and later became musical director for the Victor recording company.
For seven years he oversaw the recordings of orchestras such
as Paul Whiteman's, Jean Goldkette's, and Horace Heidt's, in
the process becoming an expert pianist, conductor, arranger,
as well as a magician "behind the scenes", in the control
booth. To these skills he added the young art of film composer
in 1930. He more or less invented the craft, producing over a
hundred of stock themes and musical effects for the comedy series
produced by the Hal Roach Studios: Charlie Chase, the Little
Rascals, and Laurel & Hardy. The original recordings of Shield's
music have never been found. The performances by The Beau Hunks
and the Metropole Orchestra are the next best thing, approximating
the original recordings as well as possible.
In the detailed liner notes
to Our Relations, which can be read as a detective story,
we learn how Shield was interested in becoming the studio's musical
director by the late 1930s. The studio wanted this too, then
appeared to have second thoughts. Eventually Shield left Hollywood
to become a respected and busy orchestra leader in Chicago, as
musical director for NBC, and later for the ABC network in New
York. He liked to work with large symphony orchestras and wrote
a number of light classical tone poems in the 1940s. Still, Leroy
Shield's greatest achievement as a composer is arguably the light
music he wrote, largely anonymously, for the Hal Roach comedy
factory. It had such high quality that it was recycled over and
over again throughout the '30s, to the delight of film fans the
world over. The sheer volume of the work, its titles unknown
to the public and scattered over hundreds of film soundtracks,
has caused its musical significance to remain unrecognized. It
is hoped that the album Our Relations, which now presents
his work as a musical entity, will change this state of affairs.
Film historian Richard W. Bann
states in his liner essay: "With the arrival of this new
album, hopefully Shield will be back, will be rediscovered, and
will be celebrated for all the joy his ever fresh-sounding, joyous
and infectious melodies have brought to fans -- both music fans
and film comedy fans -- for seventy years."
