David Wiegand of the Times Union’s sister newspaper, San Francisco Chronicle, has a wonderful appreciation of Marvin Hamlisch. He is part of it:
Mr. Hamlisch often wrote with great heart and emotion, but the music for “Chorus Line” memorably shows how much more there was to Mr. Hamlisch’s music than what we heard on the surface on a first listen: He didn’t write songs of hope, love and longing — he wrote human songs, songs about life, not just Broadway or Hollywood’s version of life.
Mr. Hamlisch wrote scores for more than 40 films, including “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Way We Were,” “The Informant” and “Ordinary People.” He was an equally gifted arranger, most memorably, perhaps, for his work on the Paul Newman classic, “The Sting,” in which he adapted the ragtime music of Scott Joplin. If you listen carefully to that score, as everyone did when the film came out in 1973, you may get yet another sense of Mr. Hamlisch’s genius. The score, and the main theme, “The Entertainer,” display an absolute respect and loyalty to Joplin’s original music, even while reworking it for a big Hollywood film.
In a more popular music vein, Mr. Hamlisch and then-girlfriend Carole Bayer Sager composed “Nobody Does It Better” for the 1977 James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me.” It was sung by Carly Simon on the soundtrack and became one of her most enduring hits.
And through it all, the awards kept coming: He was one of only 11 people to have won Tonys, Grammys, Oscars and Emmys, and one of only two people to have also won the Pulitzer (the other is Richard Rodgers).
Unlike other composers, it isn’t always that easy to identify a Marvin Hamisch song or score. We might be able to identify a piece of music as, say, a “Henry Mancini song” or a Bernard Hermann score, but that’s less true of Mr. Hamlisch’s music. The same man who wrote “Sunshine, Lollipops and Roses,” sung by Lesley Gore, wrote the score for the musical “The Sweet Smell of Success,” the score for the film “Bananas,” the classical symphonic suite “Anatomy of Peace” and was principal pops conductor for the Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, San Diego, Pasadena and Dallas symphonies. He was due to be announced as principal pops conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra at the time of his death, had completed the score for the forthcoming Steven Soderbergh film about Liberace, starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, and was working on a new Broadway show called “Gotta Dance.”
That isn’t to say that Mr. Hamlisch somehow lacked a style — far from it. If anything, he owned many styles, and each one was authentic and unique.
