Original at
Glasgow University
Allan Gray
Allan Gray was, as was the case with so many Archers, a German emigre. Born
Josef Zmigrod in Poland in 1902 Gray was a fully fledged participant in
the culture of Weimar Berlin. Studying under the modernist Arnold Schoenberg,
he paid for his tuition by composing jazz-inflected music for the cabaret.
Schoenberg disapproved and Zmigrod took up the name of Oscar Wilde's famous
hedonist (Dorian) Gray for his cabaret work. Gray realised his ability was
for pastiche and incidental music and abandoned original composotion of
'serious' music. He began to compose for films, at Ufa where he met Emeric
Pressburger. Their paths were to cross again, working on the same film
The Challenge in the mid-thirties. After the start of the war however,
like Alfred Junge and Erwin Hillier as well, he was used for the Powell
and Pressburger-produced The Silver Fleet.
The first real use of Gray's talents however, came with The Life and
Death of Colonel Blimp, with its playful use of different periods and
moods and Gray's capacity for making music referential and reminiscent of
three eras, the eighteen-nineties, the nineteen-teens and the nineteen-forties.
On their next film A Canterbury Tale, the film was to begin with
the ringing bells of Canterbury Cathedral and Allan Gray selected the notes
of the peal which they would ring (although in fact the bells which appear
on camera are fibreglass miniatures), and he mixed this peal into the music
at the beginning and end of the film.
Gray's ability to create a 'playful referential score' was again needed
to evoke the lingering spirit of the medieval pilgrims. Gray's chief task
on the film after that was to write the orchestration for an Irish song,
'I know Know Where I'm Going', which gave its name to the film.
Gray's most memorable piece of music, which was also the most apparent to
the audience, was written for A Matter of Life and Death. The compostion
was 'the hauntingly simple, slightly atonal piano theme which accompanies
the staircase to heaven.'
After A Matter of Life and Death the Archers began using Brian Easdale
on their films. Initially this was only for Black Narcissus and Gray
was recalled for The Red Shoes. However this called for original
ballet music and Gray found he was no longer playing to his strengths. Michael
Powell wrote: "His main gift was a dramatic one. He had the capacity to
enter into the idea of a scene or a situation, but it was still film music
in the traditional way, applied on, as it were, mixed into the sound-track
and the dialogue of the actors, like glazing on a rich ham..". Robert Helpmann,
the choreographer of the ballet declared at the time that the music he was
writing was "utterly commonplace" and said he would withdraw from the film
if it became any more "to the public taste".
So it was that Gray parted with the Archers with Easdale again replacing
him. Gray's music had become synonymous with the Archers at their most playful,
but as their concerns with 'Art' became more pronounced, with Powell frequenlty
referring to 'Art' as their aspiration post war, Gray's abilities no longer
suited the company.
