The Great Composer Quiz – July 28, 2020
This time, it’s a Quiz about finding something new in the same old scene. This Great Composer spent time on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley writing music for a film set in the California central valley during The Great Depression, based on a book by a Nobel Prize Laureate. Nine years later he was invited back to the same ranch to write music for a film set on a California ranch during The Great Depression, based on another book by the same Nobel Prize Laureate. With so many elements being the same, our Great Composer had difficulty coming up with new ideas. “Now I ask you,” he said, “if you had to look at the same landscape every day, could you think up different music?” So he returned to familiar landscape of a different kind, his own notebooks of the past and there came across “kids” music written for an unproduced musical. It was ideal for the new film and he used it. So who was this occasional ranch hand, this Great Composer?