AI Artists - Charles Fox Reviews

The Columbus Dispatch, Wednesday, March 19, 1997

Composer Fox continues to score with TV, film themes
He is a graduate of New York's High School for Music and the Arts and a student of Nadia Boulanger. Not the background one might expect for the composer of the themes from Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and The Love Boat.

...Whatever he composes, the spirit of his late teacher remains with him. Boulanger, the grande dame of the Parisian musical world for several decades beginning in the 1920's, might be described as the spiritual mother of American music, given her widespread influence. Fox studied with her for two years.

"She put everything you did under a microscope and made you think about the tiniest detail." he said. "We did excercises in the ancient clefs, four-part harmony. But she also guided you to find the deeper meaning."

He relies on that early training to do what few film composers have done: build symphonic suites out of his music for other, perhaps more popular, mediums.

"I hear my music orchestrally, so this is an extension of what I do," he said. "Classical music winds its way through all my music. I think I'm going to enjoy this very much."

Hilliard Northwest News, March 19, 1997

Hollywood's Fox brings his music to CSO

...When recording the score for a film, Fox generally conducts in the studio with the film running on a screen overhead. Fox said he composes much the same way with a keyboard and synthesizer on on side of his desk and a video player on the other.

The program for the two evenings at the Ohio Theater touches on the wide range of music and styles Fox has worked in since graduating from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and later studying in Paris.

...Adding the video, and likely a few anecdotes about how the pieces came to be, Fox said he hopes to bring the music forward much the way improved theater technology has done with the movies.

Instead of being "just under the level of the car crashes," the orchestra will be dominant, while the film will play with the dialogue and sound affects from the original track. "What I have done here is take the music, not so much what I like, but what I thought would entertain," Fox said. "It's a chance to play with the music in the forefront rather than the background."

The Columbus Dispatch, Saturday, March 22, 1997

TV tunes popular with the symphony audience

By design or serendipity, Columbus turned out to be the place where film and television composer Charles Fox decided to unveil his first full-length, symphonic pops program. The show - called Cut to the Chase - premiered at the Ohio Theatre last night, care of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra Pops with Fox conducting.

...Fox, proving the adage that such creatures are sly, has, therefore, wisely arranges his themes into suites, like one featuring tunes from Laverne and Shirley, Love Boat and Happy Days.

The three-movement suite based on music for Oh God, Book II may have contained some of his least familiar music, but it still worked well. It also showed early on that he knows how to orchestrate and how to build moods, both thematically and through logical use of the orchestra.

Some of his music, such as A Thousand Heroes and Victory at Entebbe, in fact, suggested that Fox might be, if not a frustrated symphonist, at least someone who might try to write a contemporary American symphony or concerto in his own quasi-popular idiom. (After all he did study with Nadia Boulanger.)