Albert Glasser

Albert Glasser was once described on Secret Science Theatre 3000 while “the person who keeps you straight down and pummels you with music.” The declaration may be a little unfair to the person, nonetheless it can explain the tone of several from the best-known films that he obtained. Glasser specialized on paper the music for B-movies plus some of his most noticeable appearances were connected with movie director/manufacturer Bert I. Gordon, who specific in 1950s films about giants, mutants, and monsters. Glasser was created in Chicago and, after learning music, going for California, where he became a member of the Warner Bros. Studios music section in 1935 at age group 19. His work was being a copyist and his function place him into connection with figures such as for example Erich Wolfgang Korngold and, afterwards, Potential Steiner. Among the initial projects he done was copying Korngold’s overture for the film Captain Blood. This is 1935, when vivid, complicated music for movies was a rarity and Glasser was therefore surprised at the materials that he’d copied that he afterwards sneaked in to the documenting session and viewed the composer carry out the orchestra in setting up the main name theme. That was Glasser’s launch to the eyesight of just what a composer could perform for the film and it gave him a profession objective. Glasser spent nine years functioning being a copyist and arranger before he surely got to rating his first film, a horror film known as The Monster Manufacturer, made by Sigmund Neufeld at Makers Releasing Corporation, that he was paid 250 dollars. This low-budget film, made by among Hollywood’s “Poverty Row” studios, designated the start of a career that could obtain Glasser’s name attached as composer towards the ratings greater than 125 movies, aswell as several tv series. The most known of those at that time was Big City, a popular system from the first ’50s that Glasser composed a large number of cues, even though the most noticeable of his tv music grew from the ratings he had written for a set of low-budget past due-’40s Cisco Child features starring Duncan Renaldo and Leo Carrillo — his music was regarded as therefore effective that it had been licensed from the makers of the tv screen program that progressed by the end from the 1940s. Additional composers, such as for example Elmer Bernstein, also got their begins composing the music for low-budget B-pictures — Bernstein, nevertheless, produced the leap to main features within a couple of years and had the chance to carve out a name for himself as a significant composer in movies and was sufficiently well known to obtain a documenting career off the bottom with the mid-’50s. Glasser was hardly ever fortunate enough to have the leap to major films — even movies that he have scored that were produced at major outlet stores like United Performers, such as The surface of the Globe (1955) or Huk (1955), had been genre movies and fairly modestly budgeted 3rd party productions — the type that fascinated the see of other market professionals, however, not the general public or the record market. Among his scoring projects, which involved as much as a dozen films a yr, he worked well as an arranger for numbers such as for example Ferde Grofe (on films such as for example Rocketship X-M, that was the way they fulfilled, Glasser organizing Grofe’s rating for the film, and I Shot Jesse Wayne, and concert functions such as for example Grofe’s 1963 Worlds Good Collection), film composers Dimitri Tiomkin and Johnny Greene, bandleader Paul Whiteman, and composer Rudolf Friml. His capability to function quickly, both being a composer and conductor, also to obtain good shows out of hastily set up studio ensembles produced Glasser perfect for the globe of B-movie creation, where there could easily be just three hours of total period open to record 30 or 40 a few minutes of completed music cues for the film. Music was needed for these films as a way of bridging the dramatic and specialized gaps within their low-budget productions, which can display through if the viewers didn’t possess anything to focus on. Glasser’s function in research fiction dated to his preparations on Rocketship X-M, however in past due 1954, he plunged in a bit more directly along with his pounding, furious rating for the thriller The Indestructible Guy, starring Lon Chaney Jr. That film’s launch was delayed for a long period, nevertheless, and a fresh chance in the genre arrived in the interim. Past due in 1955, he fulfilled Bert I. Gordon, a maker, movie director, writer, and unique effects developer, who had noticed Glasser’s music for the film Huk. He was along the way of preparing an unbiased sci-fi/horror film known as The Cyclops, co-starring Chaney, and required a composer. Glasser was involved to create the rating and documented his music for the film in January of 1956, therefore beginning a romantic relationship, which, over another two years, experienced him composing the music for such movies as The start of the finish, The Amazing Colossal Guy, Attack from the Puppet People, Battle from the Colossal Beast, and Globe Vs. the Spider, all depicting fights between mankind and outsized pets, or gigantic (or miniaturized) people incompatible. Among those game titles, he even were able to function in a huge insect movie beyond Gordon’s orbit, The Monster From Green Hell, which informed about large wasps. All those films became, to get a era of postwar teens and pre-teens (and another wave, who was raised with them on tv), Glasser’s personal movies. They featured striking passages for the horn areas and pounding thematic materials (therefore the MST3K estimate) and the casual use of spectacular instruments like the theremin. Most likely the best of the materials included the starting sections of The start of the End, all the Amazing Colossal Guy, and Attack from the Puppet People. Glasser also were able to function for Roger Corman sometimes, on films such as for example Teen-Age Caveman, starring Robert Vaughn, and published music for westerns — a preferred genre of his — experience films, and children’s movies just like the Boy as well as the Pirates, nonetheless it was the music for Gordon’s technology fiction and horror films that he was most widely known and most more popular. With the decrease of B-movie creation in the first ’60s, film function became significantly less regular for Albert Glasser and he busied himself as an arranger rather. Within an 18 season period from 1944 through 1962, nevertheless, he still got his name mounted on a fantastic 135 movies, with probably three dozen even more that he have scored that he under no circumstances received credit. Aside from his credit as an arranger, he was under no circumstances widely recognized by the music sector beyond the film globe; although in 1978, Starlog Information, an offshoot of Starlog mag, produced its debut like a label with THE GREAT Film Globe of Albert Glasser, which presented excerpts of his function for from the Cisco Child towards the Amazing Colossal Guy, derived from numerous original audio resources. Glasser did periodic film function, the vast majority of it horror or technology fiction related, through 1972 and passed away of a coronary attack in LA in the springtime of 1998. His nephew Leo Eylar (b. 1958) is usually a traditional composer and conductor.