To set the stage, musically speaking, for the Academy Awards television broadcast on Sunday, March 7, WWFM will air a marathon of movie music beginning Friday, March 5. “Lights, Camera…Music!” will feature a daylong tribute to the music of Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, John Williams, and others. The festival will include tracks from Tiomkin’s scores for Friendly Persuasion, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and Land of the Pharaohs. The fundraising program will run from 7 a.m. to midnight.

“Over 80 years of sound motion pictures have yielded some of the most memorable music of the past century,” says WWFM weekend morning host Ross Amico. “The popularity of film has had the effect of introducing the general public not only to the power and emotional richness of the symphony orchestra, but also to, at times, some astoundingly complex and sophisticated compositional techniques.” Amico became a lifelong film music fan and soundtrack collector after being dazzled by John Williams’s score for Star Wars at age ten. For WWFM, Amico explores the unusual, the forgotten, and the extraordinary in the world of classical music in his weekly Sunday night program, “The Lost Chord.” This past weekend Amico paid tribute to Tiomkin’s biographer, Christopher Palmer, in his program, “A Palm for Palmer – Orchestrator and Arranger Christopher Palmer.” {Listen here.}

Music lovers in Central Jersey are already familiar with radio station WWFM The Classical Network. The station, which began broadcasting in 1982, serves New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and portions of Delaware and Maryland and reaches listeners around the world through www.wwfm.org. WWFM, the only full-time classical music station in New Jersey, operates out of Mercer County Community College. The celebration will continue through Sunday as a “Film Music Theme Stream”—an online-only program available via the station’s Internet streaming.

For more information, contact David Osenberg at info@wwfm.org.

Thanks to Ross Amico for bringing this to our attention.