MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Michael Small died in New York City on November 25, 2003, at the age of 64, from prostate cancer.

One of the most distinctive American film composers of the 1970s, Small became especially associated with psychological thrillers, creating unsettling, frequently unconventional scores for Klute, The Parallax View, Marathon Man, The Stepford Wives and Night Moves. Over a career lasting more than three decades he scored more than 50 films and television productions.

Small was born in New York City on May 30, 1939, and grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey. His father, Jack Small, was an actor who became general manager for the Shubert theatrical organization, and Michael initially dreamed of becoming a Broadway composer. He studied English at Williams College, where he wrote musicals and played jazz piano, and later spent a year studying at Harvard. Only after returning to New York in 1962 did he undertake formal musical training, studying orchestration privately with composer Meyer Kupferman.

Small entered films almost accidentally when producer Edward Pressman heard his work through the BMI musical-theatre workshop and hired him to score Out of It (1969), starring Jon Voight. Two years later he began the collaboration that would define his career when director Alan J. Pakula hired him for Klute (1971). Small’s sparse chamber score used unusual percussion, microtonal xylophone, electronics and a ghostly female voice to reflect both the danger surrounding Jane Fonda’s character and her complicated psychological world.

Small and Pakula reunited for The Parallax View (1974), arguably the composer’s masterpiece. Its ominous music transformed the sound of patriotic ceremony into something corrupt and threatening, with an intentionally distorted anthem recurring throughout the film. For the celebrated psychological-test montage, Small moved between pastoral Americana, electronic textures and psychedelic rock, producing music that was simultaneously seductive and deeply disturbing. The score became one of the defining musical expressions of the conspiracy and political paranoia that permeated American cinema during the 1970s.

That reputation led John Schlesinger to hire Small for Marathon Man (1976). Using nervous string writing, keyboards, electronics and stark recurring motifs, Small created a score whose anxiety seems embedded in the fabric of the film rather than imposed upon it. Although Schlesinger specifically wanted echoes of The Parallax View, Small developed an individual musical language for the film, and Marathon Man became perhaps his best-known score.

The mid-1970s produced an extraordinary run of other thrillers. Bryan Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975) allowed Small to contrast seemingly idyllic suburban music with increasingly sinister undercurrents, while Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) employed a melancholy jazz language colored by the film’s Florida setting. He also scored Stuart Rosenberg’s The Drowning Pool, Robert Wise’s supernatural drama Audrey Rose (1977), and Walter Hill’s minimalist car-chase film The Driver (1978), for which he deliberately avoided conventional action scoring.

Small’s talents extended well beyond suspense. For Pakula’s western Comes a Horseman (1978) he wrote warm Americana featuring guitar and harmonica, while his romantic score for Bob Rafelson’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) demonstrated a lyrical side sometimes overlooked by directors who regarded him primarily as a specialist in paranoia. Rafelson subsequently hired him for Black Widow (1987), Mountains of the Moon (1990), and the television film Poodle Springs. The expansive orchestral music for Mountains of the Moon, depicting nineteenth-century exploration of Africa, became one of Small’s most ambitious later scores.

Other credits included Going in Style (1979), Continental Divide (1981), Rollover (1981), The Star Chamber (1983), Target (1985), Brighton Beach Memoirs (1986), Jaws: The Revenge (1987), Mobsters (1991) and Consenting Adults (1992). He also wrote music for hundreds of commercials and documentaries, including the bodybuilding film Pumping Iron (1977). His score for The China Syndrome (1979) was ultimately discarded, leaving the finished film almost entirely without conventional underscore.

Small is survived by his wife Lynn and their sons Jonathan and David.