Exhibition Conversation: The Godfather and the Mandolin with Ben Brussell

Exhibition Conversation: The Godfather and the Mandolin with Ben Brussell

Musician Ben Brussell explores the musical storytelling of The Godfather.

Join professional musician and composer Ben Brussell, grandson of Maxwell "Max" Gralnick, for a musical demonstration and presentation on the film score from The Godfather (1972) and musical storytelling. Brussell will explore the multitude of connections with his grandfather's mandolin on view in the gallery The Art of Moviemaking: The Godfather, part of the museum’s Stories of Cinema exhibition, as well as the history of the intergenerational legacy of music in his family.  Academy Museum Assistant Curator Sophia Serrano will introduce Brussell.

The conversation will take place in the Netflix Lounge on Level 2, near the entrance to the gallery The Art of Moviemaking: The Godfather.

Ben Brussell Bio

Ben Brussell

A San Francisco native, Ben Brussell is a producer, composer, conductor, educator, musician (violin, viola, mandolin, trumpet, flugelhorn), vocalist, and session and concert performer. 

Brussell studied violin and viola with San Francisco Symphony's Leonid Gesin and Daniel Kobialka and holds a bachelor's degree in Viola Performance and Musicology from San Francisco State University. Brussell is also a graduate of the master's program in Film Scoring Composition at the University of Southern California. Brussell has performed with the San Francisco Symphony, the Berkeley Symphony, Bakersfield Symphony, the Lamplighter’s pit orchestra, and toured with the Modern Mandolin Quartet and is the founder of the world music ensembles Sirba and KLEZMANIA! and the Bay Area classical music ensembles: 3 Strings & A Mandolin, Luna Nova Quartet, and String Theory Q.  

One of his more personal projects has been to create a unique instrumental voice for the mandolin, which has a deep family connection along with a prolific musical heritage. His grandfather, Maxwell “Max” Gralnick, was a world-class violinist, violist, and mandolinist and played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gralnick performed violin, viola, and mandolin in hundreds of Hollywood film score sessions with such renowned conductors as Arturo Toscanini and Leopold Stokowski. Some of his iconic mandolin performances are featured in major Hollywood film classics such as The Godfather films, Dr. Zhivago (1965), Zorba the Greek (1964), and Spartacus (1960), to name a few.

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