'The Creeping Unknown'

Synopsis

The life of British composer James Bernard reads like a PBS mini-series: as a schoolboy, he meets Benjamin Britten, who encourages his interest in music; during WWII he joins the R.A.F., works with the team breaking the German Enigma code, and takes occasional breaks from this top-secret work to turn pages for Britten at London recitals during the Blitz; after postwar study at the Royal College of Music, he starts writing music for radio and stage plays.

Then by chance another composer booked to score a British science-fiction movie falls ill, and Bernard is asked to step in. The film The Quatermass Xperiment, was released on today’s date in 1955, proved a hit, and was even shown in the U.S., retitled The Creeping Unknown.

The Creeping Unknown would become James Bernard’s bread and butter, since the Hammer Film studio, who made The Quatermass Xperiment, kept Bernard on to score their horror films starring Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein. Unlike most film composers, Bernard orchestrated his own work, and helped establish the “Hammer sound,” lushly romantic or frantically hair-raising as needed. After his death in 2001, a biography was titled James Bernard – Composer to Count Dracula.

Music Played in Today's Program

James Bernard (1925-2001): Opening Credits and Dracula’s Blood, from Taste the Blood of Dracula; Studio orchestra; Philip Martell, conductor; GDI GRICD-010

On This Day

Births

• 1887 - Nicaraguan composer Luis Delgadillio, in Managua

• 1915 - British composer Humphrey Searle, in Oxford

Deaths

• 1958 - British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, 85, in London

Premieres

• 1815 - Weber: Clarinet Quintet, in Munich, featuring clarinetist Heinrich Bärmann

• 1846 - Mendelssohn: oratorio Elijah, at Birmingham Festival in England, with composer conducting

• 1954 - Alan Rawsthorne: Practical Cats (after T.S. Eliot), for speaker and orchestra, at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland

• 1956 - Martinu: Frescoes of Piero della Francesca, for orchestra, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria

• 1957 - Panufnik: Rhapsody for orchestra, in London

• 2001 - André Previn: Tango, Song and Dance, at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist Lambert Orkis

Others

• 1717 - French flutist and composer Jacques-Martin Hotteterre is appointed royal flutist (“flutte de la chamber de Roy”) at a salary of 6000 livres