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Michael Kamen, 1948-2003
Composer Michael Kamen died on November 18, 2003 in London, England, after suffering a heart attack. He was 55.
Michael Arnold Kamen was born in New York in April 1948, where he attended The High School of Music and Art and the Juilliard School, where he specialized in composition and oboe performance. After being a part of the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble with fellow composer Mark Snow as a youth, Kamen moved to England in the 1970s and found work as ballet composer and as an arranger for pop and rock bands, notably for artists such as Kate Bush, David Bowie and Pink Floyd, for whom he arranged the album The Wall in 1979.
Having already dabbled in film music during the late 1970s, Kamen began embracing cinema fully in the early 1980s, writing the music for acclaimed films such as The Dead Zone and Brazil, and the TV mini-series Edge of Darkness, before cracking the Hollywood big-time with a trio of massively successful action scores between 1986 and 1989 – Highlander, Lethal Weapon and Die Hard. Read more…
THE IRON GIANT – Michael Kamen
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The thing which distinguishes The Iron Giant from the vast majority of other film scores is that, by and large, there are no recurring themes anywhere. Written in the short gap between finishing his historic “S&M” collaboration with Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and re-commencing work on his millennium symphony, “The New Moon in the Old Moon’s Arms”, composer Michael Kamen tackled The Iron Giant like a mini-symphony of its own, with each individual cue a standalone piece intended to depict a certain feeling or moment in childhood. Read more…
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