The following is a guest post contributed by Archivist Janet McKinney in the Music Division’s Acquisitions and Processing Section.
As a musical theater enthusiast, I was excited to be the archivist assigned to process the papers of composer, pianist, and conductor Marvin Hamlisch (1944-2012). As I expected, I found some interesting musical theater material in his papers, such as a script and scores for seven selections from a musical based on Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” written when Hamlisch was 16 years old. As work progressed on the collection, however, I discovered that the richest research potential lies within the film music material.
The film and television scores in the Marvin Hamlisch Papers span the entire duration of Hamlisch’s compositional career, from his first film score in 1968, “The Swimmer,” through the last film Hamlisch worked on, “Behind the Candelabra” (released posthumously in 2013). The documents vary from title to title and offer insight into various stages of the compositional process.
Some films are represented by scores from early in the compositional process—sketch scores or short scores written in Hamlisch’s own hand. They may display cue numbers, click track information, or directions to the orchestrator. Short caption titles indicate the action or scene. The score below for “The Sting” (1973) is for “Cue 101A” and is written for a scene involving the characters Luther and Hooker (played by Robert Earl Jones and Robert Redford). Researchers can see cross-outs and erasures, indicating changes Hamlisch made for the music to better serve the action during the scene.
Orchestrators and arrangers play a vital role in creating the soundscape of a film, and Hamlisch worked with a number of the leading experts of the industry. Thirty-seven arrangers or orchestrators are represented in the collection, the most frequent being Billy Byers (1927-1996), Jack Hayes (1919-2011), Richard Hazard (1921-2000), and Torrie Zito (1933-2009). Film titles in the collection include many full scores hand-written by these musicians. Shown below is the “Main Title” from “The Way We Were” (1973), orchestrated by Herb Spencer (1905-1992) with a vocal line for Barbra Streisand. The Music Division has a long history of collecting the scores of significant orchestrators and arrangers, and Hamlisch’s papers provide a consequential complement to these holdings.
Other types of film music materials found in the Hamlisch Papers include piano-vocal scores, lead sheets, piano-conductor scores, and instrumental parts used for recording sessions. In the piano-vocal score below for “Nobody Does It Better” from “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977), Hamlisch specifies additional piano accompaniment on the second verse, elaborating upon the accompaniment from the first verse.
I have highlighted the film music materials for their research value, but the remainder of the collection is also full of potential. Show music and individual works further document Hamlisch as a composer, while photographs, programs, set lists, and scrapbooks document Hamlisch as a performer and conductor. Hamlisch was honored with all four major American entertainment awards: the Emmy, the Grammy, the Oscar, and the Tony. He also received the Pulitzer Prize, and the Hamlisch Papers is the only location in which all of these awards are maintained as part of a single collection. Visit the Performing Arts Reading Room in the Music Division to discover more about the Marvin Hamlisch Papers and his career!