No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood - Hardcover

Joe; Previn Curt; Marion Robert McGinniss

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385269595 ISBN 13: 9780385269599

Publisher: The Reader's Digest Association, 1992

Synopsis

Not many people remember that Andre Previn started his career as a film score composer in Hollywood - arriving at the age of 18. He was a quick learner, and he went on to win several Academy Awards and to fashion the scores of such films as "Gigi", "Porgy and Bess" and "My Fair Lady". In this memoir Previn recalls his years in Hollywood in the Golden Age from 1948 to 1964. Andre Previn is the author of "Music Face to Face" and "Andre Previn's Guide to Music".

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

The fabled days of MGM at the crest of its manufacturing of musicals, very amusingly re-created by a top arranger-conductor. Sixteen-year-old musical whiz Previn started work in MGM's music department in 1948--and stuck around until 1964. A German refugee who had attended the Paris Conservatory and was a phenomenal sight reader, Previn had endured a stint as an improvising pianist for a silent-movie revival house and been arranging for radio shows when MGM's music department hired him to write some jazz variations on ``Three Blind Mice.'' More minor jobs at MGM had landed him, by 18, a contract as a staff arranger and his first solo credit on the screen, for The Sun Comes Up, based on a novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Most of his early work, he says here, was on nonsensical, forgotten films that still embarrass him when he catches them on late-night TV. But his education bounded forward, and before he left he'd won Oscars for Gigi, Porgy and Bess, My Fair Lady, and Irma la Douce. His story here is told anecdotally around such figures as Jascha Heifetz, the great film composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann, and William Walton, directors Vincente Minelli, George Cukor, young Mike Nichols, and Billy Wilder, studio heads L.B. Mayer, Jack Warner, and Sam Goldwyn, and actors Rex Harrison, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire--and Lassie. Previn had the rankling privilege of being snubbed by Lassie, which he attributed to his low caste as a musician. At times, his stories bring outright laughter, such as his being discovered with pianist Mel Powell playing four-hand Haydn symphonies on an old upright piano outdoors in a snowstorm. Sheer charm. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

Previn, now a symphony orchestra conductor of some renown, was 18 when he began his music career working for MGM as an arranger. During the course of his 16 years with various studios, he progressed to composing and conducting, and ultimately won four Academy Awards. In many ways his rise typified the American immigrant dream, his German-Jewish family having fled the Nazis. Anyone who worked within the Hollywood studio system for as many years as Previn did is bound to have a large fund of stories, and his are wittily, at times hilariously, related. Although his attempts to amuse are occasionally too clever and his habit of directly addressing the reader can be disconcerting, this slim volume makes one anticipate a full autobiography. For general collections.
- Roy Liebman, California State Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Reader's Digest Association
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0385269595
• ISBN 13: 9780385269599
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160