MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer, conductor and flautist Carmine Coppola died ten years ago today in Los Angeles on April 26, 1991, at the age of 80, after suffering a stroke.

Although much of his film career was closely connected with his son, director Francis Ford Coppola, he created memorable music for some of the defining American films of the 1970s and 1980s, including The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, The Black Stallion and The Godfather Part III. His work brought him an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.

Carmine Valentino Coppola was born in New York City on June 11, 1910, into an Italian-American family. He studied flute and composition at the Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music and became an accomplished professional flautist. He performed under Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra before increasingly turning to composition, arranging and conducting.

Coppola’s connection with cinema became significant when Francis asked him to contribute music to The Godfather (1972). Nino Rota wrote the principal score, but Carmine supplied additional music, including material heard during the Corleone wedding festivities. The collaboration continued more substantially on The Godfather Part II (1974), where Coppola contributed original material alongside Rota’s themes, including music associated with the film’s early twentieth-century American sequences. Rota and Coppola shared the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score, giving Carmine his greatest professional honor.

His most ambitious film assignment followed with Apocalypse Now (1979). Coppola and his son developed an unusually atmospheric musical landscape combining orchestral writing, synthesizers, percussion and electronic effects with the film’s extensive use of existing music. Carmine’s score ranges from eerie, dreamlike textures to violent rhythmic passages, complementing the increasingly hallucinatory journey into Vietnam and Cambodia. The music won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score.

The same year Coppola composed one of his most attractive scores for Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion (1979), produced by Francis. Its music moves from mysterious, almost impressionistic writing for the boy and horse stranded on a desert island to warmer Americana and energetic racing material. The score received a Golden Globe nomination and demonstrated that Coppola’s abilities extended well beyond the operatic Italian-American sound with which he was most closely associated.

Coppola continued contributing music to many of his son’s films during the 1980s, including The Outsiders (1983), Gardens of Stone (1987), Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and the “Life Without Zoë” segment of New York Stories (1989). His music often reflected Francis’s preference for keeping filmmaking within the family, and Carmine occasionally appeared onscreen in small roles as well.

His final major score was The Godfather Part III (1990), which brought him back to the musical world that had established his reputation. Drawing upon the familiar themes of the earlier films while adding new material of his own, Coppola produced a suitably elegiac conclusion to the Corleone saga. The score received a Golden Globe nomination, while “Promise Me You’ll Remember,” written with lyricist John Bettis, was nominated for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.