Archive
Remembering Georges Delerue, 1925-1992
Composer Georges Delerue died ten years ago today, on March 20, 1992. He had a stroke, just hours after recording the last cue for the soundtrack to his last film, Rich in Love, and died two days later. He was 67.
Georges Henri Jean-Baptiste Delerue was born in Roubaix, France, in March 1925. A clarinet and piano player as a child, Delerue attended the Turgot Institute, the Roubaix conservatory, and the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied composition with Darius Milhaud and Henri Büsser. His friends there included Maurice Jarre and Pierre Boulez, and together the three of them would make often make money on the side performing jazz in piano bars near the Paris Opera House.
He began writing stage music during the late 1940s, for the Théâtre National Populaire, the Comédie-Française, and the Théâtre Babylone, before being hired to direct the orchestra of the Club d’Essai for French National Radio and Television. His work for FRNT led directly to him scoring his first major project, television drama, Princes du Sang, in 1952. Read more…
Academy Award Nominations 2001
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have announced the nominations for the 74th Academy Awards, honoring the best in film in 2001.
In the Best Original Score category, the nominees are:
- JAMES HORNER for A Beautiful Mind
- RANDY NEWMAN for Monsters, Inc.
- HOWARD SHORE for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
- JOHN WILLIAMS for A.I. Artificial Intelligence
- JOHN WILLIAMS for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
This is the first Oscar nomination for Shore, the 6th nomination for Horner, the 8th nomination for Newman, and the 35th and 36th nominations for Williams, Horner previously won for Titanic in 1997. Williams previously won for Fiddler on the Roof in 1971, Jaws in 1975, Star Wars in 1977, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial in 1982, and Schindler’s List in 1993.
In the Best Original Song category, the nominees are:
- ENYA BRENNAN, NICKY RYAN, and ROMA RYAN for “May It Be” from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
- PAUL McCARTNEY for “Vanilla Sky” from Vanilla Sky
- RANDY NEWMAN for “If I Didn’t Have You” from Monsters, Inc.
- GORDON SUMNER (STING) for “Until” from Kate & Leopold
- DIANE WARREN for “There You’ll Be” from Pearl Harbor
The winners of the 74th Academy Awards will be announced on March 24, 2002.
BAFTA Nominations 2001
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has announced the nominations for the 55th British Academy Film Awards, honoring the best in film in 2001.
In the Best Original Music category, which is named in memory of the film director Anthony Asquith, the nominees are:
- CRAIG ARMSTRONG and MARIUS DE VRIES for Moulin Rouge!
- ANGELO BADALAMENTI for Mulholland Drive
- HARRY GREGSON-WILLIAMS and JOHN POWELL for Shrek
- HOWARD SHORE for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
- YANN TIERSEN for Amélie
These are the first nominations for Badalamenti, Gregson-Williams, Powell, and Tiersen. It is the second nomination for Armstrong, the second nomination for De Vries, and the second nomination for Shore. Armstrong and De Vreis previously won for William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet in 1997.
The winners of the 55th BAFTA Awards will be announced on February 24, 2002.
Remembering Ken Darby, 1909-1992
Composer, arranger, conductor and choral director Ken Darby died at his home in Sherman Oaks, California, ten years ago today, on January 24, 1992, at the age of 82, following a history of heart problems.
One of Hollywood’s most accomplished specialists in vocal and musical arranging, Darby won three Academy Awards for The King and I, Porgy and Bess and Camelot, and contributed to such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, South Pacific and How the West Was Won.
Kenneth Lorin Darby was born in Hebron, Nebraska, on May 13, 1909, and moved with his family to California as a child. He began studying piano at five and trumpet at nine, later receiving private instruction in harmony, counterpoint and composition. While attending college he earned money playing piano and organ in cinemas showing silent films, giving him an early practical understanding of the relationship between music and images.
In 1929 Darby formed the male vocal quartet The King’s Men, which became enormously successful on radio, records and in films. The group was a longtime fixture on Fibber McGee and Molly and appeared in numerous Hollywood productions, including several Hopalong Cassidy westerns. Darby later expanded his vocal arranging activities through the Ken Darby Singers, one of the most respected studio choral ensembles of the period. Read more…
Mario Nascimbene, 1913-2002
Composer Mario Nascimbene died on January 6, 2002, at his home in Rome, Italy, after a short illness. He was 88.
Born in Milan in 1913, Nascimbene studied composition and orchestration at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory. His early work in Italian cinema during the 1940s quickly brought him attention for its originality and subtle emotional shading. He became one of the first Italian composers to find international success in Hollywood, scoring major American productions during the 1950s and 1960s.
Nascimbene’s distinctive style, which often incorporated unconventional instruments and electronic effects alongside traditional orchestration, set him apart. He was an early adopter of tape loops and ambient sound in film scoring, helping to modernize the language of cinematic music. He collaborated with legendary directors including Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Roberto Rossellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni, and scored over 150 films across genres, from historical epics to psychological dramas.
His score for Alexander the Great (1956), starring Richard Burton, and his evocative work on titles such as The Barefoot Contessa (1954), A Farewell to Arms (1957), The Vikings (1958), Room at the Top (1959), Solomon and Sheba (1959), Barabbas (1961), Light in the Piazza (1962), Swordsman of Siena (1962) earned him a place among the leading Italian film composers of his generation. Later in his career Nascimbene worked on several films for the Hammer studio in the UK, notably titles such as One Million Years B.C. (1966), The Vengeance of She (1968), The Mummy (1969), When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), and Creatures the World Forgot (1971). Read more…
Golden Globe Nominations 2001
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) has announced the nominations for the 59th Golden Globe Awards, honoring the best in film and American television of 2001.
In the Best Original Score category, the nominees are:
- CRAIG ARMSTRONG for Moulin Rouge!
- ANGELO BADALAMENTI for Mulholland Drive
- PIETER BOURKE and LISA GERRARD for Ali
- JAMES HORNER for A Beautiful Mind
- HOWARD SHORE for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
- JOHN WILLIAMS for A.I. Artificial Intelligence
- CHRISTOPHER YOUNG for The Shipping News
- HANS ZIMMER for Pearl Harbor
These are first nominations for Armstrong, Shore, and Young. It is the second nomination for Bourke, the second nomination for Badalamenti, the third nomination for Gerrard, the fourth nomination for Zimmer, the fifth nomination for Horner, and the nineteenth nomination for Williams. Gerrard previously won for Gladiator in 2000. Zimmer previously won for The Lion King in 1994 and Gladiator in 2000. Williams previously won for Jaws in 1975, Star Wars in 1977, and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in 1982.
In the Best Original Song category, the nominees are:
- DAVID BAERWALD for “Come What May” from Moulin Rouge!
- ENYA BRENNAN, NICKY RYAN, and ROMA RYAN for “May It Be” from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
- PAUL MCCARTNEY for “Vanilla Sky” from Vanilla Sky
- GORDON SUMNER (STING) for “Until” from Kate & Leopold
- DIANE WARREN for “There You’ll Be” from Pearl Harbor
The winners of the 59th Golden Globe Awards will be announced on January 20, 2002.
Ralph Burns, 1922-2001
Composer, arranger and pianist Ralph Burns died in Los Angeles on November 21, 2001, at the age of 79, from pneumonia and complications following a stroke.
One of the most distinguished arrangers to emerge from the big-band era, Burns enjoyed an unusually varied career spanning jazz, Broadway, film and television. He won two Academy Awards for Cabaret and All That Jazz, an Emmy for Baryshnikov on Broadway, and a Tony Award for the musical revue Fosse.
Ralph Jose P. Burns was born in Newton, Massachusetts, on June 29, 1922. He began playing piano as a child and studied briefly at the New England Conservatory of Music, although he later said that much of his real education in jazz arranging came from listening to records and painstakingly transcribing what he heard. After early work with Charlie Barnet’s orchestra, Burns joined Woody Herman’s band in 1944 as pianist and arranger.
Burns quickly became one of the principal architects of the celebrated Woody Herman sound. His arrangements and compositions included “Apple Honey,” “Bijou” and the ambitious Summer Sequence, whose final movement evolved into “Early Autumn” and became an important showcase for the young tenor saxophonist Stan Getz. Burns’s sophisticated harmonies and unusually subtle orchestral colors distinguished him from many of the more aggressively rhythmic big-band arrangers of the period. Read more…
Remembering Alex North, 1910-1991
Composer Alex North died ten years ago today, on September 8, 1991, at his home in Los Angeles, California, after a short illness. He was 80.
North was born Isadore Soifer in December 1910, in Chester, Pennsylvania, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. His father died during surgery for appendicitis in 1915, leaving the family in severe with financial hardships. In the late 1920s, Isadore’s older brother Jacob began writing articles for radical labor publications, and to shield his family from right wing political persecution, Jacob adopted the pseudonym “Joseph North”. Soon the family followed his lead, and Isadore Soifer became Alex North.
In the Second World War, North served as a captain in the U.S. Army Special Services division, where he was responsible for “self-entertainment” programs in mental hospitals. He also composed music for more than twenty-six documentary films for the Office of War Information, which kick-started his love for film music.
After the war North studied at the Curtis Institute, the Juilliard School in New York, and in Moscow with noted Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. A lifelong advocate for serious music in American life, he began his career composing for theater and modern dance, working with such figures as John Steinbeck and choreographer Anna Sokolow.
North’s Hollywood breakthrough came in 1951 with director Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, where his use of dissonance, blues motifs, and psychological underscoring created a new musical language for film. North’s score for director Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), with its sweeping orchestral palette and stirring themes, remains a landmark of epic film scoring. Read more…
Remembering Bruno Nicolai, 1926-1991
Composer, conductor, and pianist Bruno Nicolai died ten years ago today in Rome on August 16, 1991, at the age of 65.
One of the most accomplished figures in Italian film music during the 1960s and 1970s, Nicolai wrote scores for more than 100 films and television productions while also enjoying an important career as a conductor, publisher and advocate for contemporary classical music. His own work was particularly associated with spaghetti westerns, gialli and European horror cinema.
Nicolai was born in Rome on May 26, 1926. He studied piano with Aldo Mantia and composition with Goffredo Petrassi and Antonio Ferdinandi at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, as well as organ at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music. From 1950 to 1964 he performed as pianist, organist and harpsichordist with the Santa Cecilia and RAI orchestras, while also writing extensively for theatre and television.
At Santa Cecilia Nicolai became friends with fellow student Ennio Morricone, beginning one of the most important—and sometimes misunderstood—professional relationships in Italian film music. Nicolai became Morricone’s preferred conductor and conducted many of his most famous scores, including For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He also collaborated with Morricone as composer and conductor on several projects before their partnership ended during the 1970s. Nicolai’s extensive contribution to Morricone’s recordings sometimes led to confusion over authorship, but both men maintained substantial composing careers of their own. Read more…
James Bernard, 1925-2001
Composer James Bernard died in at his home in Jamaica on July 12, 2001, at the age of 75.
Although his career included radio, theatre and occasional non-horror films, Bernard is remembered above all as the musical voice of Hammer Films. Over an association lasting almost two decades, his pounding rhythms, abrasive harmonies and muscular brass writing helped define the sound of British Gothic horror, accompanying Dracula, Frankenstein and many of Hammer’s other celebrated monsters.
Bernard was born on September 20, 1925, in Kochel am See, Bavaria, Germany into a British Army family, He later re-located to British India with his family, before moving back to England in the 1940s. He was educated at Wellington College, where he met Benjamin Britten while still a teenager, and Britten encouraged his interest in composition. After wartime service in the RAF, Bernard studied with Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music and later worked as a copyist and assistant on Britten’s opera Billy Budd.
Before becoming a film composer, Bernard had already won Hollywood’s highest honor, although not for music. With his partner, writer Paul Dehn, he devised the story for the nuclear thriller Seven Days to Noon (1950), for which the pair shared the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture Story. Bernard subsequently concentrated on music for radio and theatre, and his score for a BBC production of The Duchess of Malfi attracted the attention of Hammer musical director John Hollingsworth.
Hollingsworth recommended Bernard for The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), beginning the relationship that would dominate his career. Working initially with just strings and percussion, Bernard produced a tense, dissonant score whose unusual sonorities perfectly suited Hammer’s stark science-fiction horror. He followed it with X the Unknown (1956), Quatermass 2 (1957), and then the film that transformed Hammer’s fortunes, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957). Read more…
Remembering Carmine Coppola, 1910-1991
Composer, conductor and flautist Carmine Coppola died ten years ago today in Los Angeles on April 26, 1991, at the age of 80, after suffering a stroke.
Although much of his film career was closely connected with his son, director Francis Ford Coppola, he created memorable music for some of the defining American films of the 1970s and 1980s, including The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now, The Black Stallion and The Godfather Part III. His work brought him an Academy Award and a Golden Globe.
Carmine Valentino Coppola was born in New York City on June 11, 1910, into an Italian-American family. He studied flute and composition at the Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music and became an accomplished professional flautist. He performed under Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra before increasingly turning to composition, arranging and conducting.
Coppola’s connection with cinema became significant when Francis asked him to contribute music to The Godfather (1972). Nino Rota wrote the principal score, but Carmine supplied additional music, including material heard during the Corleone wedding festivities. The collaboration continued more substantially on The Godfather Part II (1974), where Coppola contributed original material alongside Rota’s themes, including music associated with the film’s early twentieth-century American sequences. Rota and Coppola shared the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score, giving Carmine his greatest professional honor. Read more…
Academy Award Winners 2000
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have announced the winners of the 73rd Academy Awards, honoring the best in film in 2000.
In the Best Original Score category, Chinese composer Tan Dun won the Academy Award for his score for Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In his acceptance speech Tan said:
I prepared something exactly forty-five seconds. My music is to dream without boundaries. Tonight, with you, I see boundaries being crossed. As a classical music composer I’m thrilled to be honored here. “Crouching Tiger” bridged East and West, romance and action, high and low cultures. Thank you, Ang Lee, Yo-Yo Ma, Peter Gelb, Michael Gorfaine, James Schamus, Bill Kong. Thank you, Sony Classical, CAMI and G. Schirmer for their long support. Last, this is for two tigers in my family: my wife Jane, Ian, [my] son, both born in the year of tigers. Thank you, Academy.
The other nominees for Best Original Score were Rachel Portman for Chocolat, Hans Zimmer for Gladiator, Ennio Morricone for Malèna, and John Williams for The Patriot.
In the Best Original Song category, legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan won the Academy Award for “Things Have Changed” from Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys. Dylan was touring Australia at the time of the ceremony and appeared from Sydney by satellite.
The other nominees for Best Original Song were Randy Newman for “A Fool in Love” from Meet the Parents; Björk, Lars von Trier and Sjón Sigurðsson for “I’ve Seen It All” from Dancer in the Dark; Jorge Calandrelli, Tan Dun and James Schamus for “A Love Before Time” from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and Sting and David Hartley for “My Funny Friend and Me” from The Emperor’s New Groove.
Remembering Howard Ashman, 1950-1991
Lyricist, playwright, director and producer Howard Ashman died in New York City ten years ago today, on March 14, 1991, at the age of 40, from complications related to AIDS.
Although his career was tragically brief, Ashman played a crucial role in revitalizing both the American musical theatre and Disney animation. With composer Alan Menken he wrote the songs for Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, while his final work on Aladdin was completed shortly before his death. He won two Academy Awards for Best Original Song, the second posthumously.
Howard Elliott Ashman was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 17, 1950, and developed an early interest in theatre. He studied at Boston University and Goddard College before earning a master’s degree from Indiana University. Moving to New York in 1974, he worked briefly in publishing while writing plays and became involved with the small WPA Theatre, eventually serving as its artistic director.
Ashman’s first collaboration with Alan Menken was the 1979 musical God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, adapted from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel. Their breakthrough came three years later with Little Shop of Horrors, based on Roger Corman’s low-budget 1960 comedy about a man-eating plant. Ashman wrote the book and lyrics and directed the original production, while Menken composed the music. Its mixture of 1960s pop, Motown, comedy and horror became an enormous Off-Broadway success. Read more…
Piero Umiliani, 1926-2001
Composer, pianist and conductor Piero Umiliani died in Rome on February 14, 2001, at the age of 74.
One of the most distinctive figures in post-war Italian film music, Umiliani wrote more than 150 scores during a career encompassing comedy, thrillers, westerns, gialli, documentaries and exploitation cinema. A gifted jazz musician and enthusiastic electronic experimenter, he is also remembered internationally for the irresistible “Mah Nà Mah Nà,” one of the most unlikely soundtrack themes ever to become a worldwide popular standard.
Umiliani was born in Florence on July 17, 1926. Fascinated by jazz at a time when the music was discouraged by Italy’s Fascist regime, he listened avidly to Duke Ellington and other American musicians on foreign radio during World War II. He subsequently became an accomplished jazz pianist, performed and recorded with leading Italian musicians, and studied counterpoint and fugue at Florence’s Luigi Cherubini Conservatory. After moving to Rome he worked as an arranger for Armando Trovajoli before establishing himself in cinema.
His breakthrough came with Mario Monicelli’s classic comedy I Soliti Ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958). Monicelli specifically wanted a jazz score, and Umiliani responded with music that brought a strikingly contemporary sound to Italian cinema, including the memorable “Blues for Gassman.” The score was among the earliest Italian films to use jazz so extensively as dramatic accompaniment and immediately established Umiliani as a composer with a musical personality very different from the traditional symphonic school. Read more…
Academy Award Nominations 2000
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have announced the nominations for the 73rd Academy Awards, honoring the best in film in 2000.
In the Best Original Score category, the nominees are:
- TAN DUN for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
- ENNIO MORRICONE for Malèna
- RACHEL PORTMAN for Chocolat
- JOHN WILLAMS for The Patriot
- HANS ZIMMER for Gladiator
This is the first Oscar nomination for Tan, the 5th nomination for Morricone, the 3rd nomination for Portman, the 34th nomination for Williams, and the 6th nomination for Zimmer. Portman previously won for Emma in 1996. Williams previously won for Fiddler on the Roof in 1971, Jaws in 1975, Star Wars in 1977, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial in 1982, and Schindler’s List in 1993. Zimmer previously won for The Lion King in 1994.
In the Best Original Song category, the nominees are:
- TAN DUN, JORGE CALANDRELLI, and JAMES SCHAMUS for “A Love Before Time” from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
- BOB DYLAN for “Things Have Changed” from Wonder Boys
- BJÖRK GUÐMUNDSDÓTTIR, LARS VON TRIER, and SJÓN SIGURÐSSON for “I’ve Seen It All” from Dancer in the Dark
- RANDY NEWMAN for “A Fool In Love” from Meet the Parents
- GORDON SUMNER (STING) and DAVID HARTLEY for “My Funny Friend and Me” from The Emperor’s New Groove
The winners of the 73rd Academy Awards will be announced on March 25, 2001.
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