Theme from the soul

R.I.P., Lou Teicher

Date published: 8/8/2008

By and white

IN THE FAR DISTANT past--archaeological digs confirm this--those who desired to view a motion picture had no DVDs, iPods, laptops, TiVos, or Netflix mailers. What they had was a neighborhood movie theater with one screen, a TV set with three or four channels, and a TV Guide that told them when and on which of those channels a film they enjoyed would, by remotest chance, appear. And, oh yes, they had LPs (the Ancient Ones coined a few electronic-entertainment initials themselves) produced by the likes of Arthur Ferrante and Lou Teicher.

Mr. Ferrante and Mr. Teicher first met in the 1930s as child piano prodigies at the Juilliard School of Music. Later they taught there, when they weren't hanging out making improvisational music--they tied all kinds of objects to piano strings just to see how the sounds would change--with 88 keys and the limitless human imagination.

They preferred the classical genre, but the Manhattan clubs where they moonlighted pushed them toward pop. Ferrante & Teicher--the names, denoting "the Grand Twins of the Twin Grands," became as indivisible as Smith & Wesson--had a small fan base until they recorded "Theme From 'The Apartment.'" The lushly orchestrated instrumental, which captured the wackiness and the poignancy of the 1960 comedy-drama, was providentially named: It carried the pianists to the penthouse of celebrity.

They occupied those digs for decades, banging out chart-toppers like the theme from "Exodus" and "Tonight" from "West Side Story," eventually garnering 22 gold-record awards and playing before 18 million people.

Before the Age of Access, there was the Age of Memory, when fond things were less often consumed than evoked. Lou Teicher, dead at 83, was one half of a team of magical evokers who could paint the grandeur of great movies from elongated pallets of black and white. Poor primitives of their era--all they had was romance.

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Date published: 8/8/2008