MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Leonard Rosenman died on March 4, 2008, at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. He had been suffering with dementia for many years, and died of a heart attack. He was 83.

Leonard Rosenman was born in September 1924, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Poland. After service in the Pacific with the United States Army Air Forces in World War II he studied piano and composition at Brooklyn College, and later at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his most influential teachers were Arnold Schoenberg and Roger Sessions – figures whose serialist and atonal techniques deeply informed Rosenman’s own compositional voice.

Rosenman’s entranc into the film world came through his friendship with actor James Dean; the two had met at a party for the cast of a Broadway play, and two weeks later Dean appeared at Rosenman’s doorstep wanting to take piano lessons. Dean later personally recommended him to director Elia Kazan for East of Eden in 1955, which proved to be a major breakthrough for the composer. Rosenman followed it later that year with Rebel Without a Cause, further establishing his reputation as a composer capable of capturing psychological intensity through unconventional harmonic language. These early scores were groundbreaking in their integration of dissonance and modernist techniques into mainstream Hollywood cinema.

In a period when lush romanticism was the norm, Rosenman dared to be different. His music for The Cobweb (1955) was among the first film scores to employ a twelve-tone row, challenging audiences with its cerebral structure and uncompromising tone. He continued this trend with scores such as Edge of the City (1957), Fantastic Voyage (1966), and the Planet of the Apes sequels Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), all of which mixed avant-garde textures with science fiction imagery.

He won his first Academy Award in 1975 for adapting classical music for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, followed by a second Oscar for Bound for Glory (1976), a biopic of folk singer Woody Guthrie. Though these scores involved adaptation and arrangement rather than original composition, they demonstrated Rosenman’s versatility and sensitivity to historical and cultural context.

Among his later work were scores for The Lord of the Rings (1978 animated version), The Jazz Singer (1980), Cross Creek (1983, an Oscar nominee) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986, an Oscar nominee), and RoboCop 2 (1990), each infused with Rosenman’s unmistakable flair for orchestral drama and structural rigor. Rosenman also found success on television, composing for series such as Combat! and Marcus Welby, M.D.

He wrote his last score in 2001 for the Italian drama film Jurij, but was forced to retire shortly thereafter after being diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a degenerative brain condition with symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s disease.