JABULANI SIKHAKHANE: Love for heroes such as Henry Mancini limits our view of success

When the success of an individual is appraised the tendency is often to ignore how much of it was situational. All the focus falls on “how he or she did it”. This approach is flawed but fits in with the human love for heroes, people who overcome the odds to achieve success.

Many factors come to bear on individual success — whether it be on the sports field, in entrepreneurship or a professional career. The career of Henry Mancini, the man who blessed the world with the Pink Panther theme, is a good example of the mutually beneficial interaction of individual (including talent and effort) and situational factors.

Mancini emerged in the post-World War 2 era to transform film scoring, becoming “the first publicly successful and personally recognisable film composer in history”. Mancini helped turn what had been background music to the movies into part of pop culture.

As John Caps, author of Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music, points out, Mancini’s drive and talents had a big role to play in all of this. However, there were situational factors too.

Post-war America, particularly what Caps describes as the Kennedy-era optimism of the 1960s, created a receptive environment for Mancini’s compositional approach. Mancini came up with the sound that spoke to ’60s audiences.

The introduction of stereo technology, which included a recording process using several microphones and stereo vinyl discs, enhanced home listening and therefore created a new market for soundtracks to be repackaged and sold as records.

Caps says Mancini was “perfectly placed, by time and temperament”, to bridge the traditions of the World War 2 big band period and “the eclectic impatience of the baby boomer generation” that followed, the big formal orchestral film scores of Hollywood’s so-called golden years and “a modern American minimalist approach”.

Mancini’s music spoke to three American generations, a unique feat. It appealed to the war veterans, the newlyweds in the ’60s, and the baby boomers (those born between the end of World War 2 and the mid-’60s). These were different generations: the war veterans were struggling with middle age; the young newlyweds had just bought homes (with the most modern television and music systems); while the boomers were “lucky enough to enjoy the freedom of choice” between a path “to new suburbia” or joining the protest movements of the late ’60s.

The ’50s and ’60s were, according to the Los Angeles Times, part of the middle-class American dream — “an idyllic alternative to the cities and the urban ills that plagued them”. Mancini’s film scoring was different to the approaches that preceded him. The ’30s and ’40s soundtracks had more of a formal European symphonic style. The ’50s were characterised by atonal and chromatic compositional styles.

“None of that music seemed quite right for the free-spirited, forward-looking, optimistic baby boomer stories and movie stars that followed. For that young Kennedy-era generation, Mancini offered his own bright and clear sophisticated style — as clean and courteous as mainstream pop, but as cool and knowing as modern jazz,” argues Caps.

Mancini’s music travelled easily from the movie theatres into people’s homes. It spoke to the new and growing middle-income families that were interested in pop and jazz, movies and television and outreach politic, families that were also keen on “conventional stay-at-home comforts”. The confluence of Mancini’s talents and these situational factors helped turn him into “the first multimedia music superstar”.

Another situational factor that explains Mancini’s success has to do with his early career in Hollywood, a point that talks to the importance of one’s formative years, a period that often doesn’t get credit because it doesn’t involve visible success. When he arrived in California the era of what Caps describes as “the big assembly-line movie studios” was winding down. However, Mancini worked for one of the last of these studios, where he wrote background music for “mediocre formula films”.

“There he would practice how to score typical movie chase sequences and gushing love themes; he could perfect the orchestral scream, the instrumental chuckle, and a ‘safe’ corporate version of rock music (actually as mild as a sock hop).”

As Mancini’s story shows, success is about far more than individual effort and talents — the how she or he did it. Situational factors come into play too. Of course, how one interacts with or takes advantage of those situational factors can make all the difference.

• Sikhakhane, a former spokesperson for the finance minister, National Treasury and SA Reserve Bank, is editor of The Conversation Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.