JONES & SCHMIDT

TOM JONES:

Back in those early days, there were four of us sharing an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  In addition to Harvey and me, there was Bob Gold, who was co-owner of the Sullivan Street Playhouse and later chief factotum and general manager for our Portfolio Workshop, and Robert Benton, who was art editor of Esquire.  Benton, who went on to write “Bonnie and Clyde” and a number of other films, several of which earned him Oscars as both writer and director, wanted to do a short art film of paintings about the courtship of his great aunt and uncle.  The result was “A Texas Romance, 1909" for which Harvey wrote the music and did one section of the paintings.

HARVEY SCHMIDT:

A TEXAS ROMANCE, 1909 was an attempt by four contemporary artists to evoke, through their paintings, the world of a small Texas town in an era that had preceded their own. The paintings were freely based on photographs., letters, and postcards, discovered hidden in a cigar box in the family barn by Robert Benton, and dealing entirely with a courtship between his grandfather's brother, who was the local mailman, and a young woman who came to visit her relatives in Waxahachie, Texas, in the summer of 1909. They met, fell in love, got married, and shortly after the marriage, she died. All simple events, in a sense, but when set in the rich fabric of a specific time and place, moving and dramatic in the quiet way that all of the minute detail of life can be. When the specific facts had been crystallized in a lean but pungent script form by Tom Jones, and the paintings all completed, we blocked out the general areas where music was to happen, and then I composed what is, in essence, a little piano suite, to which we keyed the shots, cuts, pans, and dissolves of all the artwork. I hoped the effect would be almost like hearing someone taking a piano lesson somewhere up the dusty street on a hot, still, summer afternoon. I had to constantly remind myself to keep it simple. Whenever the temptation arose to do something more sophisticated, I fought it, and tried always to settle for only the most obvious chords and the squarest of harmonies. The challenge was to keep it musically aloft and engaging within these narrow restrictive confines. I tried to float free with memories of my own Texas German Methodist childhood of echoing Sunday School pianos, choir rehearsals, male quartets, distant bands practicing, funerals, Firemen's Frolics, Womanless Weddings, and dance recitals.

This film gave me enormous pleasure to compose and perform, and it is my hope that this recording might bring some of the same to you.