Counterpoint: The Journey of a Music Man [Hardcover]

Joe Harnell (Author), Ira Skutch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2001

Counterpoint is the life story of Joe Harnell, Grammy and Emmy award-winning pianist, composer, arranger and conductor. He was musical director for such stars as Frank Sinatra, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee and Pearl Bailey, as well as The Mike Douglas Show. His smash hit instrumental record of "Fly Me to the Moon" was a landmark, setting a new standard of performance in the record business. Among many others, he composed and conducted the scores for TV series like The Incredible Hulk, The Bionic Woman, and V, and also a number of movies of the week. His story is filled with revealing insights and anecdotes about the many stars and musicians he has lived and worked with, some funny, some sad, some appalling. Although his professional life ran smoothly and successfully, his perilous personal journey ran over rutted roads through three failed marriages and a tortured battle with booze, eventually emerging into the calm of sobriety and the exhilaration of a fulfilling relationship. Joe's book gives the reader a new, intimately known friend, whose candor and understanding will remain in memory for years to come.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joe, how I wish I had your chops in orchestration and on piano! It is great that we are able to stay in touch and I often think of our various meetings through the years, all the way back to Germany in World War II. Dave Brubeck

I have known and worked with Joe in many organizations over the years, and I can attest to his vast and successful experience as composer, performing artist, hard-working member and executive of composers and lyricists organizations, past president of American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers, and teacher in the USC film music program. Elmer Bernstein

Joe Harnell has long been recognized as one of the genuine masters on the American musical scene. His career as pianist, arranger, composer and conductor spans the richest and most creative period of our country's musical life, and Joe's contribution to it has been a major one. This memoir celebrates a joyous man whose love of music radiates in his work and in the man himself...and it is a privilege to salute him! John Williams

Product Details

• Hardcover: 340 pages
• Publisher: Xlibris Corp (May 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738849898
• ISBN-13: 978-0738849898
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,780,647 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars True Grit: One Musician's Life in the Industry, October 10, 2001

By 

Anne R. Richards (Ames, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Counterpoint (Paperback)

Joe Harnell and Ira Skutch's Counterpoint: The Journey of a Music Man is a fascinating memoir of a long life dedicated to art, fame, and, finally, self-acceptance and a higher good. The memoir should be rewarding reading for anyone interested in the music business; in the jazz, classical, popular, or film scenes; in luminaries such as Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, or Marlene Dietrich; or in the cultural history of music in the United States before and after the Second World War. Joe Harnell, eminent pianist, arranger, and composer for film and television, and winner of multiple Grammy Awards, tells the story from a vantage point of late-coming sobriety and self-awareness.

After an impoverished childhood in the Bronx, Harnell (born Hittelman) is offered a scholarship to Julliard. Reluctantly, he agrees to follow his parents to Florida and enrolls in the University of Miami, which also is offering him a music scholarship. His father is distant and self-loathing, and despite Joe's many efforts, their relationship never deepens meaningfully. Soon after the war begins, Harnell enlists in the Air Force and travels to Europe to play in the "Jive Bombers," an offshoot of the Glenn Miller Band. He becomes an accomplished jazz musician and later studies with Nadia Boulanger, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland. At Tanglewood, he is a classmate of Ned Rorem and Jacob Druckman, and a colleague of John Corrigliano, John Williams, Dave Brubeck, and others. As his career blossoms, he plays for Lena Horne on the occasion of her being the first Black artist to sing in a Florida nightclub. He also becomes the first White artist to record for Motown Records. He serves as musical director for "The Mike Douglas Show" for six years and conducts for Pearl Bailey in her appearances at the White House.

Although Harnell is able to develop the stoicism necessary for his professional life in music and entertainment, a life both unstable and extraordinarily demanding, his personal life eventually becomes unbearable. Like many artists before him, he is torn by the dilemma of what to put first--art or love. Tension with family is fueled by a perfectionism that contributes to career success but makes it difficult for him enjoy life's small pleasures or to be comfortable with himself.

Harnell describes warm friendships with men, as well as many brief, mainly sexual, encounters with women. His family life, for the first five decades of his life, is, however, a shambles. At the age of twenty-three, he becomes responsible for the care of his younger sister and two brothers when his mother dies young and their father becomes chronically ill for the remaining thirty years of his life. Harnell's goal growing up had been to be a "good boy," and his disciplinary orientation was strict, like his father's. He writes that his youngest brother, Stew, leaves home because he is "fed up with me telling him that he had to eat all of the food on his plate; otherwise I would stuff it down his throat." Details such as this tell, in some ways, more about Harnell's character at that time than do generalizations about his emotionally distant behavior with his third wife. Her story is only sketched, but the reader is left with the impression of a self-absorbed husband who drinks himself into stupors regularly and, in the lowest sinks of despair, wishes to die.

"My life has been a counterpoint between the professional and the personal," Harnell begins, and Counterpoint proves to be a collection of reminiscences of a life of personal struggle blended with an obsession with the world of musical performance. His memories of the latter are particularly strong. During pauses in Bernstein's conducting, Harnell recalls, musicians "with their cigars in their mouths" would read "the stock market pages on the floor at their feet." Harry Richman, a lisping Lothario, finds he can no longer sing "ah." He compensates by singing "Deep in the hcccht of Texas." While Harnell is musical director on "The Mike Douglas Show," one of the band members uses "string, threads, scotch tape, candy wrapper and papers of various sizes to build a cocoon around his drum set and himself, leaving a little hole" so that he can watch Harnell. When he isn't playing, the drummer sits "back there undisturbed, smoking marijuana, having a drink, or working on his hobby, which was carving dildos."

Counterpoint is often a hilarious book. It is rich in the black humor of the transplanted and alienated New York Jew, and it is impossible not to laugh when Harnell describes how, in preparing for a trip to Minneapolis in winter, he buys a pair of battery-operated electric socks (his shoes catch fire), or how he is playing a New Year's Eve party in a New Orleans nightclub owned and frequented by mobsters, when a balloon pops (all the men leap to their feet, with their guns drawn), or how, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono co-host "The Mike Douglas Show," Lennon blows marijuana smoke into a cage full of chimpanzees who are about to perform a live routine on scooters (hysteria results as the stoned primates run amok through the audience).

Harnell was the producer, musical director and conductor for the Israel Founders Orchestra Gala for the Jewish National Fund at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in Los Angeles in 1993. More recently, he was Musical Director for the Ella Fitzgerald Music Festival in Newport News, Virginia, Fitzgerald's birthplace. He continues his concert appearances as a pianist/conductor in addition to his activities as a lecturer and teacher of film scoring at the University of Southern California. In the end, one cannot but wonder at his emotional and artistic breadth. By courageously viewing professional triumphs in the cold light of personal failures, a feat possible because he is a recovering alcoholic and has finally found contentment with his children and with Alice, his wife of sixteen years, Harnell creates a fascinating, generous memoir.

4.0 out of 5 stars the kindle version is available, October 1, 2011

By 

D. W. Horne (5263 BS Vught, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Counterpoint: The Journey of a Music Man (Hardcover)

I'm about a third of the way through the book and while it is interesting, it is not a literary masterpiece.

At any rate, this book is available in the Kindle format but you wouldn't know it by looking only in Books. I was invited to tell the publisher that I would like to see this book in Kindle format but I later discovered it already was.

4.0 out of 5 stars humerous and honest, May 2, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Counterpoint: The Journey of a Music Man (Hardcover)

COUNTERPOINT, the frank account of the varied and exciting life of Joe Harnell, pianist, composer, arranger, bandleader, will be sure to appeal to anyone who's a fan of mid to late 20th century popular culture and it's major players, louis armstrong, marlene dietrich, etc.
While not always pretty (Harnell has no desire to gloss over the more unpleasent aspects of his life), it is an always honest and very revealing account of the artistic and personal development of a musician's musician. After reading this book, it is difficult not to be touched by Harnell's humanity whether or not one is aware of his work and contributions to popular and television music over the last five decades.