MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer and arranger Herman Stein died at his home in Los Angeles on March 15, 2007, at the age of 91, from congestive heart failure.

One of the largely unsung architects of Universal’s science-fiction and horror sound of the 1950s, Stein contributed music to nearly 200 films and shorts, including It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, This Island Earth, Tarantula and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Much of his work went uncredited under the studio system, but his music became inseparable from a generation of monsters, aliens and atomic-age nightmares.

Stein was born in Philadelphia on August 19, 1915. A child prodigy, he began playing piano at three and was performing publicly by six. By his teens he was arranging professionally, eventually working in radio and with musicians including Count Basie, Bob Crosby and Fred Waring. After military service during World War II he moved to Los Angeles in 1948 and studied composition with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco before entering the film industry.

Universal-International hired Stein as an arranger in 1950 and promoted him to staff composer the following year. He worked alongside musicians including Henry Mancini, Hans J. Salter, Frank Skinner and Irving Gertz, often dividing individual films between several composers. Studio music supervisor Joseph Gershenson generally received the principal screen credit, leaving Stein and his colleagues anonymous even when they had written substantial portions of a score.

Stein became especially important to Universal’s new cycle of science-fiction films. For Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space (1953), he wrote the main title and substantial portions of the score, using the theremin alongside orchestral writing to create an eerie extraterrestrial atmosphere. The following year he devised the famous blaring three-note motif for the Gill Man in Creature from the Black Lagoon. Although that film incorporated music by several composers, Stein’s motif became its most recognizable musical signature.

His subsequent genre work included This Island Earth (1955), Tarantula (1955), The Mole People (1956) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). These scores helped establish the musical vocabulary of 1950s science fiction: forceful brass, dissonant harmonies, unusual instrumental colors and emphatic motifs suggesting technological wonder or monstrous threat. Stein’s cues were frequently reused by Universal in later productions, extending his influence far beyond the films for which they were originally written.

His career was considerably broader than horror. Stein contributed to westerns including The Duel at Silver Creek, Horizons West, The Far Country and Dawn at Socorro, as well as dramas and comedies featuring Abbott and Costello, Francis the Talking Mule and Ma and Pa Kettle. He was particularly proud of his music for Jack Arnold’s little-remembered Girls in the Night (1953), especially an extended chase sequence that he regarded as some of his finest film writing.

Stein left Universal in 1958 and freelanced thereafter. His last substantial theatrical score was Roger Corman’s The Intruder (1962), starring William Shatner in a serious drama about racial hatred. He subsequently concentrated on television, contributing to series including Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, Daniel Boone, Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

In later life Stein was surprised by the renewed enthusiasm for his genre scores, several of which were reconstructed and recorded by the Monstrous Movie Music label. His wife Anita, a former Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist whom he married in 1950, died in 2001; they had no children.