Film music is a field that, while fascinating in itself, probably won't be making an appearance on this blog very frequently. Economics has a driver's seat role and creativity is optional. That isn't to say that film music can't be spectacular, and there are many wonderful figures I could pontificate upon if given the chance, but there are other blogs dedicated to the craft and the music I write about has a much smaller audience from the get-go. Another step farther away from the concert hall is "library" music, whereby a record company puts out an album of copyright-free music for a steep initial price. The music is designed for background use in movies and commercials, and records are often programmed for "drama" and "horror" and the like. There's been a big movement in the last couple of decades to unearth this kind of music (focusing on albums from the '60's and '70's), and whole blogs are dedicated simply to filesharing them.* the composers remained anonymous in a de facto sense; who would bother to remember their names? So when I found out the composer of an obscure but delectable piano piece I'd found was a regular contributor to library albums, it opened a curious research door I never before knew existed.
Eugene Cines (1918-2004) is a man without a biography, at least as far as the internet is concerned. A New Yorker from the cradle to the grave, his work was mostly limited to TV music, such as the Music Director position for the movie-of-the-week show Studio One. He was also a regular library music composer, specifically for Boosey & Hawkes. Until I started research for this article I had no idea Boosey & Hawkes had a library music program; this forum question reveals a staggering list of their library product, a reminder that not only is there more out there, you can drown in it if you're not careful. I can't think of any other sheet music publisher that had a program like that. Either way, Cines had a niche, and some of the music he wrote under their support was pretty spiffy:
He even popped up on an NBC Background Music Library album (NBC 116, VA), whose two sides are "Sea Atmospheric" and "Sea Atmospheric, Scenic." His lone contribution, "Solo for Alto Flute", seems a bit outside the confines of library music, appropriate for a windswept vista but pointing towards concert legitimacy (and an easy linking piece for your next alto flute recital).
The good, consistent work Cines provided for Boosey & Hawkes must have been the way in for him to publish his "real" music, and in 1974 they published Abbreviations, a set of three serialistic piano miniatures. It didn't sell, and is not listed on their website, but there are some copies at Sheet Music Plus, though they couldn't be bothered to list his full name or include a cover photo. Perhaps that's for the better; the covers for Boosey & Hawkes music at the time were composed of ugly, blocky script and an unfortunate color scheme (pale yellow background and dusty purple words), and combined with Cines's lack of a name meant doom for the Abbreviations. It's a shame, because they're quite nice, fine additions to the longstanding tradition of brief, concentrated dodecaphonic piano literature. And as I recently got around to performing the whole set for YouTube, it's high time I celebrated these pieces the way they deserve.
The ability to imbue serial music with an emotional core is a treasurable one with composers, and Cines manages this with a very modest effort in these Abbreviations. While perhaps not the most emotional of the set, the first one is the shortest, only one page long, and develops its material with assured care. Considering how deliberate and transparent Cines's revealing of the source row is in this first piece is, one wonders if these have been used for teaching theory - and someone like me could fantasize about having a college theory teaching post and saying "Now, take a look at this piece - oh, is this something nobody's heard before? How delightful! Mind if I play it?" An indulgence, sure, but then at least someone might play them besides myself.
The second piece is where Cines starts to swoon. Much like Ben Weber, he knew how to milk a row for a good melody, and from the first few bars the listener is transported to a dark, romantic world. That swoon does a slow dance with pregnant pauses and spidery arpeggiations, both hallmarks of post-Second Viennese School composition that aims for the dramatic. But the drama is still muted, all movements arrested in enigmatic, mauve chords. The attention to finicky detail here is reminiscent of other serial micro-classics, like John Heiss's Four Short Pieces from the same period.
The final piece lets the drama into the foreground, and it's a black, alien one. Now we have fortissimo, now we have extended technique, now we have the violent rustling of bat wings and the struggle for good against the abyss. Like all good screen composers, Cines is a natural storyteller, and without functional harmony gesture and line strut on the ear's stage. And to cap off this twilight ballet, the music shoots away into mystery, a squid vanishing in its own ink.
One day I'll mount my "sui generis" recital, one featuring the sole published works of their composers, and pieces like this will not only feature there, but are rich and endearing enough to make mounting the recital worth it in the first place. Maybe one day Cines's descendants will contact me and send me a box of his unpublished concert works, but until that day comes I'll keep his Abbreviations close to my heart as tiny gems of serial piano music. Considering the relative ease of putting them together, it's too bad that more pianists haven't found them yet - but if they all knew about them, where's the fun in me writing about them?
~PNK
*This is a funny case where copyright hounds have to be kept chained - the music was designed to be copyright-free.
