Film Music Publishing and the Rise of Library Music in Italy: Between Autorship and Anonymity

The music used in the popular HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999–2024), created by Larry David, includes a significant number of tracks from renowned Italian composers of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Luis Bacalov, Ennio Morricone, Riz Ortolani, Piero Piccioni, Armando Trovajoli and Piero Umiliani among others. A good percentage of this music, including ‘Frolic’, the series’ title theme composed by Luciano Michelini, had previously been part of original film scores. Obviously, Curb Your Enthusiasm was not attempting to intentionally quote the soundtrack of the little-known film La bellissima estate (The Beautiful Summer, Sergio Martino, 1974), which featured ‘Frolic’ under a different title. Instead, what likely caught the attention of the series’ producers was the ‘circus atmosphere’ conveyed by this and the other selected cues, which were ‘immediately evocative of Nino Rota’s scores for Fellini and the dolce vita lifestyle of the carefree Italy of the 1950s and 1960s … the perfect parallel as Larry David’s life unfolds on the LA streets in an almost transatlantic mirror image of the Italian director’s classics’ (Compton 2006). HBO music supervisor Steve Rasch indeed compiled all the Italian tracks from a unique repository, namely the BMG Production Music (BPM) series, now merged into the Universal Production Music (UPM) catalogue....