Quote:
God, you've got a lot of time on your hands...


All of us have the same amount of time on our hands, and we each use it in different ways. Editing music like this is second nature to me, and I can do it very quickly. I find music very rewarding, certainly more rewarding than watching "reality" TV (what an oxymoron) or following the stock market. The SODOM LP - with that brassy, mesmerizing Overture - was my introduction to home stereo, and I've been hooked on the score ever since. It's a unique score. BEN-HUR, KING OF KINGS and EL CID were all re-recorded for LP by Rozsa, but SODOM featured the actual film soundtrack cues, and the most wonderful of the these, the Overture, Intermezzo (Entr'acte) and the Epilogue (Exit Music), were preserved by RCA Victor - they're not to be found on any video release of the film. One of my favourite tracks is "Messengers of Jehovah," which dips into Abraham Idelsohn's collection of ancient Hebrew themes and, as William has pointed out, has a connection with a Passover motif used by Rozsa in KING OF KINGS.

As for time, Rozsa spent a lot of time composing and recording the score, and the results were, as Avie's biblical quote reminds us, "casting pearls before swine," or, as Rozsa put it, "love's labour lost." I'm grateful to Rozsa for "wasting" time in creating the "pearl." I appreciate his "labour of love" and I've responded to it by trying to do it full justice -- and I feel that the time spent in doing so is justified. When you hear some of the cues joined properly, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.