Martin Ellis Delivers the Goods in Movie Music at the Organ Pavilion August 7

Works by John Williams, Hans Zimmer and Robert and Kristen Anderson Lopez Draw Big Crowd

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, August 7) my husband Charles and I went to the seventh of the 11 Monday night organ concerts at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park. This is the 35th annual summer organ festival – it consists of 11 Monday night concerts, which started June 26 and will conclude with a rock tribute on Labor Day, September 4 – though of course there wasn’t one in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, and while there was one in 2021 it actually took place in September and October and was clearly thrown together at the last minute. This year’s run of concerts has been uncommonly good: last night’s featured organist Martin Ellis and its theme was “Music in Movies!” Instead of a traditional biography Ellis contributed a short essay in the program regarding the connection between music and motion pictures, which of course dates back to the silent era. “From the onset of moving pictures, the pipe organ played an important role in helping create the mood, atmosphere and emotion for early movies with no recorded sound,” Ellis wrote. “‘The Mighty Wurlitzer’ became a common household term, and thousands flocked to the neighborhood movie theatre in the 1920’s and 1930’s to leave reality behind and experience drama and theatre on a screen.” Actually in the silent era the very largest theatres had full orchestras on retainer, and director Allan Dwan recalled that for a blockbuster spectacle like Robin Hood (1922), which he directed for Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. as both co-writer (as “Elton Thomas”) and star, he’d travel to the big cities a day in advance to rehearse the film with the orchestra and make sure they got the sound effects in synch with the film. Theatres the next rung down from the big-city first-run houses had organs, then the next rung down had string trios (piano, violin and cello), and the cheapest theatres had just a piano.

When sound films first became practical in the mid-1920’s a lot of people thought the movies of the future wouldn’t contain dialogue; instead people thought the real virtue of sound in films would be to allow the music and effects to be presented in lock-step with the visual portions instead of catch-as-catch-can with whatever live musicians the theatres could afford. As sound films developed and the idea of background music took hold again in the early 1930’s, prominent composers came to the movies and certain composers – Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Franz Waxman, Miklós Rósza, Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Victor Young – in effect became stars in their own right. But instead of focusing on the composers of classic Hollywood, Ellis chose a program based on the leading modern-day film composers, notably John Williams (medleys of his scores for Star Wars – the first one – and Jurassic Park and a clever tribute including Superman, E.T., the Harry Potter movies and Raiders of the Lost Ark) but also Hans Zimmer (a score for a relatively obscure recent film, Christopher Nolan’s 2014 Interstellar) and the husband-and-wife team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, who wrote the songs for the Disney computer-animated film Frozen. Ellis said in his essay that James Horner (best known as the composer for James Cameron’s Titanic and Avatar) is another one of his modern-day faves, but he didn’t play anything by Horner in his program and he played only one score by Hans Zimmer (a functional rather than truly great composer – I call him “the room man” because “Zimmer” is the German word for “room” – though after what Ellis played last night I may have to re-evaluate him upward), for Christopher Nolan’s little-known film Interstellar (2014).

Ellis opened his program with a work of his own, “Fanfare” (which he’d also played, along with his Jurassic Park selections, on a sneak preview at the regular Sunday afternoon organ concert the day before), and then the fast outer movements from Carson Cooman’s (b. 1982) “Sonatina No. 4.” (Ellis stressed he made a particular point of playing only music by still-living composers.) Then Ellis played his Jurassic Park medley, which as it had the day before sounded like one continuous score cue instead of the three parts (“Welcome to Jurassic World” – the use of “World” instead of “Park” identifies this as from the franchise’s 2015 reboot and/or the two subsequent sequelae – “Theme from Jurassic Park” and “Journey to the Island”), and following that he played a four-movement suite of his own. The title Ellis gave this suite in the program was “A Technicolor Holiday,” though he said he had originally written it for his gig as a church music director in Vancouver, Washington (as opposed to the larger, more prominent and more famous Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada) and called it “Colors of the Church.” He explained it was a mixture of the secular and sacred holiday seasons – Hallowe’en, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and the Fourth of July – and each holiday had a color associated with it: Hallowe’en was orange, Christmas green, Valentine’s Day red and the Fourth of July blue. Ellis’s suite was charming collection of miniatures, but after he played them and the “Fanfare on Psalm 150” by his friend and colleague Jaebon Hwang, the real meat and potatoes of the program began.

Ellis had worked out an arrangement with the Spreckels Organ Society lighting crew so he could project close-up action footage of his hands on the keys onto the display pipes, while on the arch on top of the organ building he would show scenes from the films, or at least vaguely related to them. The next selection was his John Williams medley, and for the Superman theme he used footage from the late 1930’s/early 1940’s Superman cartoons by Max and Dave Fleischer (the first-ever Superman movies!) while for E.T. he used a roughly animated scene of Elliott riding off to the sky on his bike with E.T. in its front hamper. The projections for the Harry Potter theme and Raiders of the Lost Ark were stills vaguely related to the films and their settings. For his next piece, his medley from Zimmer’s Interstellar score, he blended footage of actual space missions and what might be clips from the movie (I can’t say for sure since I’ve never seen it, though when I got home I was impressed enough with Interstellar to order it from amazon.com). Ellis’s next selection was the Frozen medley, and he thoughtfully saved the most famous song, “Let It Go,” for last and opened with his own favorite song from the film, “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” (Ellis joked that he was a huge fan of Alan Menken, who did the scores for the Disney animated films Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, enough that when the Lopezes came along and did just as good a score for Frozen he oddly resented it.)

Ellis’s final programmed piece was the Star Wars medley – and he blessedly referred to the film by its original title instead of the preposterous moniker, Star Wars, Episode 4: A New Hope, it now bears to fit it into the overall cycle. He did “The Throne Room,” “Cantina Band,” “Princess Leia’s Theme” and the familiar “Main Title,” and he joked that whenever he plays at a restaurant containing an organ the audience always wants to hear the “Cantina Band” sequence. (Now that I’ve learned John Williams started out as a jazz musician, the infectiousness of the “Cantina Band” cue seems more comprehensible.) Ellis blessedly played an encore, though he didn’t announce what it was; both Charles and I were stumped by it. So were two of our old friends from the concerts, and so was the Google app on Charles’s phone which is supposed to be able to tell you the identity of any piece of music in its database. At first the Google app gave us Maurice Duruflé’s (1902-1986) “Prelude, Fugue and Chorale on ‘Veni, Creator Spiritus,’” but on later passes Google gave up completely and Charles logged on to a YouTube post of the Duruflé, whose third movement sounded vaguely like it but wasn’t (and playing the Duruflé would have broken Ellis’s rule about not playing any music by dead people). Charles ultimately ended up e-mailing Martin Ellis via a link on his YouTube page and asking him what the encore was; he hasn’t replied yet but I’ll update if and when he does or we figure it out ourselves. Still, I’m glad he did play an encore – most of the musicians this year haven’t, I suspect because the current intermission-less format for the concerts means they have to be up there for an hour and a half, straight – and it was a fun-filled concert all around and especially fine at its most bombastic and overwrought (Ellis joked early on about those words often being applied to him), both in the pieces of music he played and the ways he chose to play them!