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About Albert Glasser
Artist Biography
Albert Glasser was once described on Mystery Science Theater 3000 as "the man who holds you down and pummels you with music." The statement may be a bit unfair to the man, but it can describe the tone of many of the best-known movies that he scored. Glasser specialized in writing the music for B-movies and some of his most visible appearances were associated with director/producer Bert I. Gordon, who specialized in 1950s movies about giants, mutants, and monsters.
Glasser was born in Chicago and, after studying music, headed for California, where he joined the Warner Bros. Studios music department in 1935 at age 19. His job was as a copyist and his work put him into contact with figures such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and, later, Max Steiner. Among the earliest projects he worked on was copying Korngold's overture for the movie Captain Blood. This was 1935, when bold, complex music for films was a rarity and Glasser was so amazed at the material that he'd copied that he later sneaked into the recording session and watched the composer conduct the orchestra in laying down the main title theme. That was Glasser's introduction to the vision of what a composer could do for a film and it gave him a career goal.
Glasser spent nine years working as a copyist and arranger before he got to score his first movie, a horror film called The Monster Maker, produced by Sigmund Neufeld at Producers Releasing Corporation, for which he was paid 250 dollars. This low-budget movie, made by one of Hollywood's "Poverty Row" studios, marked the beginning of a career that would get Glasser's name attached as composer to the scores of more than 125 films, as well as several television series. The most notable of those at the time was Big Town, a popular program from the early '50s for which Glasser composed dozens of cues, although the most visible of his television music grew out of the scores he wrote for a pair of low-budget late-'40s Cisco Kid features starring Duncan Renaldo and Leo Carrillo -- his music was considered so effective that it was licensed by the producers of the television program that evolved at the end of the 1940s.
Other composers, such as Elmer Bernstein, also got their starts writing the music for low-budget B-pictures -- Bernstein, however, made the jump to major features within a few years and had the opportunity to carve out a name for himself as an important composer in films and was sufficiently well recognized to get a recording career off the ground by the mid-'50s. Glasser was never fortunate enough to get the jump to major movies -- even films that he scored that were made at major outlets like United Artists, such as Top of the World (1955) or Huk (1955), were genre films and relatively modestly budgeted independent productions -- the sort that attracted the notice of other industry professionals, but not the public or the record industry.
In between his scoring assignments, which involved as many as a dozen movies a year, he worked as an arranger for figures such as Ferde Grofe (on movies such as Rocketship X-M, which was how they met, Glasser arranging Grofe's score for the film, and I Shot Jesse James, and concert works such as Grofe's 1963 Worlds Fair Suite), film composers Dimitri Tiomkin and Johnny Greene, bandleader Paul Whiteman, and composer Rudolf Friml. His ability to work quickly, both as a composer and conductor, and to get good performances out of hastily assembled studio ensembles made Glasser ideal for the world of B-movie production, where there might easily be only three hours of total time available to record 30 or 40 minutes of finished music cues for a film. Music was essential for these movies as a means of bridging the dramatic and technical gaps in their low-budget productions, which might show through if the audience didn't have anything to concentrate on.
Glasser's work in science fiction dated to his arrangements on Rocketship X-M, but in late 1954, he plunged in a little more directly with his pounding, furious score for the thriller The Indestructible Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr. That film's release was delayed for an extended period, however, and a new opportunity in the genre came along in the interim. Late in 1955, he met Bert I. Gordon, a producer, director, writer, and special effects designer, who had heard Glasser's music for the movie Huk. He was in the process of preparing an independent sci-fi/horror film called The Cyclops, co-starring Chaney, and needed a composer. Glasser was engaged to write the score and recorded his music for the film in January of 1956, thus beginning a relationship, which, over the next two years, had him writing the music for such films as The Beginning of the End, The Amazing Colossal Man, Attack of the Puppet People, War of the Colossal Beast, and Earth Vs. the Spider, all depicting battles between mankind and outsized animals, or gigantic (or miniaturized) people in conflict. In between those titles, he even managed to work in a giant insect movie outside of Gordon's orbit, The Monster From Green Hell, which told about giant wasps. All of those movies became, for a generation of postwar teenagers and pre-teens (and the next wave, who grew up with them on television), Glasser's signature films. They featured bold passages for the horn sections and pounding thematic material (hence the MST3K quote) and the occasional use of exotic instruments such as the theremin. Probably the best of this material included the opening sections of The Beginning of the End, all of The Amazing Colossal Man, and Attack of the Puppet People.
Glasser also managed to work for Roger Corman on occasion, on movies such as Teen-Age Caveman, starring Robert Vaughn, and wrote music for westerns -- a favorite genre of his -- adventure movies, and children's films like The Boy and the Pirates, but it was the music for Gordon's science fiction and horror movies for which he was best known and most widely recognized. With the decline of B-movie production in the early '60s, film work became much less frequent for Albert Glasser and he busied himself as an arranger instead. In an 18 year period from 1944 through 1962, however, he still had his name attached to an astounding 135 films, with perhaps three dozen more that he scored for which he never received credit. Apart from his credit as an arranger, he was never widely acknowledged by the music industry outside of the film world; although in 1978, Starlog Records, an offshoot of Starlog magazine, made its debut as a label with The Fantastic Film World of Albert Glasser, which featured excerpts of his work for everything from the Cisco Kid to The Amazing Colossal Man, derived from various original audio sources. Glasser did occasional film work, almost all of it horror or science fiction related, through 1972 and died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in the spring of 1998. His nephew Leo Eylar (b. 1958) is a classical composer and conductor. ~ Bruce Eder
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