Archive
André Previn, 1929-2019
Composer André Previn died on February 28, 2019, at home in Manhattan, New York, after a short illness. He was 89.
André George Previn was born in April 1929, in Berlin, Germany, and he showed early musical talent and began studying piano and composition as a child. Fleeing Nazi persecution, Previn’s family emigrated to Los Angeles in 1938, where his uncle Charles Previn, a music director at Universal Studios, introduced him to Hollywood’s burgeoning film industry. He graduated from Beverly Hills High School – where he was a classmate of Richard M. Sherman – and he went to work at MGM Studios as a teenager in the 1940s, where he quickly became a key figure in their music department. Over two decades, he composed, arranged, and conducted music for over 50 films. His film scores displayed a sophisticated blend of lush orchestration and accessibility, contributing significantly to the Golden Age of Hollywood.
His first scores were written when he was still in his early 20s, and he worked on a wide range of films, from westerns like Bad Day at Black Rock (1954) and The Fastest Gun Alive (1956) to dramatic epics like Elmer Gantry (1960) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1961), and lighthearted comedies like The Music Lovers (1970). His scores often reflected his classical training, jazz influences, and innate ability to capture the emotional essence of a story. Read more…
Michel Legrand, 1932-2019
Composer Michel Legrand died on January 26, 2019, in hospital in Paris, France, after a short illness related to a pulmonary infection. He was 86.
Michel Jean Legrand was born in Paris, France, in 1932, the son of composer-conductor Raymond Legrand and his wife, Marcelle Ter-Mikaëlian, who was the sister of conductor Jacques Hélian. Legrand studied music at the Conservatoire de Paris from age 11, working with Nadia Boulanger among others, and as both a composer and a pianist. He achieved early career success in 1954 age 22 when his original jazz album I Love Paris became a surprise hit in Europe. He released numerous more albums in the 1950s, including the popular Paris Jazz Piano in 1959, and then established himself as a jazz composer, pianist, and bandleader in the United States, working with jazz stars such as Miles Davis, Stan Getz, and Lena Horne.
Legrand dabbled in film music from the mid 1950s onwards, but achieved his first significant success in 1960 when he scored director Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking A Woman Is a Woman (Une Femme Est Une Femme) in 1961. Legrand quickly became a key musical component of the French New Wave, working for Godard and other directors such as Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda, among others, on such classics as Lola (1961), Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), La Baie des Anges (1963), Bande à Part (1964), and La Chinoise (1967). His score for Demy’s 1965 musical film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg earned him his first Academy Award nomination, and from that point on Legrand split his time between Hollywood and Europe, working on both big-budget American and films and more artistic French fare. Read more…
Francis Lai, 1932-2018
Composer Francis Lai died on November 7, 2018, at home in Paris, France, after a short illness. He was 86.
Francis Albert Lai was born in Nice, France, in April 1932. He moved to Paris in his twenties and began composing songs while working with lyricist Bernard Dimey. He accompanied Édith Piaf and wrote songs for French singers such as Mireille Mathieu and Yves Montand before transitioning into film scoring in the mid-1960s. His breakthrough came in 1966 with Un Homme et Un Femme [A Man and a Woman], directed by Claude Lelouch. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and Lai’s score – particularly its vocal theme – became a major success. He would go on to score more than 30 of Lelouch’s films, notably .
Lai’s most widely recognized international work came in 1970 with Love Story, starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw. Its theme became a chart-topping hit in both instrumental and vocal versions, and Lai received the Academy Award and a Golden Globe for the score. His other notable works include Mayerling (1968), Rider on the Rain (1970), Emmanuelle II (1975), Bilitis (1977), and International Velvet (1978). He also composed for television and collaborated with artists such as Carly Simon. Read more…
Stelvio Cipriani, 1937-2018
Composer Stelvio Cipriani died in Rome on October 1, 2018, at the age of 81, following a period of ill health after suffering an ischemia the previous year.
One of the most prolific composers working in Italian cinema during the 1970s, Cipriani wrote more than 200 film scores, encompassing westerns, thrillers, horror films, crime dramas, comedies and romances.
Cipriani was born in Rome on August 20, 1937. He studied piano and composition at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia and began his professional career accompanying popular singers, including Rita Pavone. He later spent time in the United States studying jazz before returning to Italy and entering the film industry during the mid-1960s.
His first feature score was for the 1966 western The Bounty Killer, followed by The Stranger Returns in 1967, starring Tony Anthony. The latter contained the sort of immediately memorable melody that would become a Cipriani trademark, and its main theme was subsequently recorded by Henry Mancini. Westerns provided some of his earliest opportunities, but Cipriani quickly expanded into almost every area of Italian genre cinema.
His greatest popular success came with director Enrico Maria Salerno’s romantic drama The Anonymous Venetian (Anonimo Veneziano) in 1970. Cipriani’s melancholy central melody, usually led by piano and strings, perfectly captured the film’s story of lost love and impending death against the decaying beauty of Venice. The score became enormously popular in its own right and earned Cipriani the Nastro d’Argento for Best Music, establishing him as one of Italy’s most sought-after film composers. Read more…
Patrick Williams, 1939-2018
Composer, arranger and conductor Patrick Williams died in Santa Monica, California, on July 25, 2018, at the age of 79, from complications of cancer.
One of the most versatile American screen composers of his generation, Williams scored nearly 50 feature films and an enormous body of television while maintaining a parallel career in jazz and concert music. He received an Academy Award nomination, won four Emmy Awards and two Grammys, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music.
Patrick Moody Williams was born in Bonne Terre, Missouri, on April 23, 1939, and grew up in Connecticut. A trumpeter and enthusiastic jazz musician, he led his own band while still in school before studying history at Duke University, where he directed the Duke Ambassadors jazz ensemble. After graduating in 1961 he moved to New York, studied composition and conducting at Columbia University, and began working as an arranger and writer of advertising jingles.
Encouraged by Henry Mancini, Williams moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and quickly established himself in film and television. His early feature assignments included How Sweet It Is! (1968), followed during the 1970s by films such as Casey’s Shadow (1978), Richard Lester’s Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979) and Cuba (1979). His music drew naturally on jazz, big-band writing and the classical orchestral tradition, allowing him to move comfortably between comedy, romance and drama. Read more…
Arthur B. Rubinstein, 1938-2018
Composer Arthur B. Rubinstein died on April 23, 2018, in Los Angeles, after a short illness. He was 80.
Arthur Benjamin Rubinstein was born in Brooklyn, New York, in March 1938. He studied at the University of Hartford and the Juilliard School, and began his career in theater and concert music before moving into film and television.
Rubinstein’s subsequent career spanned over four decades. A frequent creative partner of director John Badham, Rubinstein’s propulsive electronic score for Blue Thunder (1983) and the suspenseful, thematically rich music for WarGames (1983) remain among his best-known works. His other acclaimed scores include titles such as Short Circuit (1986), Stakeout (1987), The Hard Way (1991), Another Stakeout (1993), and Nick of Time (1995).
He also wrote scores for numerous TV series, including episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, the 1985 reboot of The Twilight Zone, Amazing Stories, Wiseguy, The Love Boat, Sledge Hammer, and even The Simpsons. He won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore) for the episode “We’re Off to See the Wizard” from Scarecrow and Mrs. King in 1986. Read more…
Jóhann Jóhannsson, 1969-2018
Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson died on February 9, 2018, at his home in Berlin, Germany, of an accidental drug overdose. He was 48 years old.
Jóhann Jóhannsson was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in September 1969. After graduating from university he started his musical career in the mid-1990s as a guitarist playing in various Icelandic indie rock bands, before founding Kitchen Motors, an art organization that encouraged musical collaborations between artists from numerous different genres. He began scoring television projects and films in his native Iceland in 1999, beginning with the TV series Corpus Camera and the theatrical feature The Icelandic Dream [Íslenski Draumurinn] for director Robert Ingi Douglas, and went on to write several acclaimed scores for Icelandic directors over the next several years.
Jóhannsson scored his first English-language film, Personal Effects for director David Hollander, in 2009, first came to international prominence in 2013 when he was asked to score the dark thriller Prisoners starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal by director Denis Villeneuve. He followed this with the score for the Steven Hawking bio-pic The Theory of Everything in 2014, for which he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score, a BAFTA Award for Best Film Music, and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. Read more…
John Morris, 1926-2018
Composer John Morris died on January 25, 2018, at his home in Red Hook, New Jersey, following complications from a respiratory infection. He was 91.
John Leonard Morris was born in October 1926, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. After his family moved to Kansas while he was young, Morris continued studying piano, and by the late 1940s he moved back to the New York City are, where he studied at both Juilliard School and at The New School. He pursued a career as a concert pianist and musical director before transitioning to composing for theater and film. Morris began his long and fruitful collaboration with writer-director Mel Brooks in the late 1950s, and together they worked on two musicals, Shinbone Alley (1957) and All-American (1962).
Morris and Brooks continued to work together when Brooks brought his play ‘Springtime for Hitler’ to the big screen as The Producers in 1967, and their collaboration continued through a string of hits including Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World, Part I (1981), and Spaceballs (1987), among many others. His deft orchestral parodies and lovingly crafted pastiches matched Brooks’ irreverent humor beat for beat. Read more…
Dominic Frontiere, 1931-2017
Composer Dominic Frontiere died on December 21, 2017, in his home in Tesuque, New Mexico, after a short illness. He was 86.
Dominic Carmen Frontiere was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in June 1931. A classically trained accordion prodigy who performed at Carnegie Hall as a teenager, Frontiere went on to study at the Juilliard School before beginning a career in Hollywood that spanned more than four decades. He first gained recognition as musical director at 20th Century Fox, where he collaborated with Alfred Newman and contributed to a variety of studio productions.
His association with director and producer Leslie Stevens led to Frontiere scoring his first major film, The Marriage-Go-Round, in 1961. That relationship led Frontiere to became an executive of the television and film production company Daystar Productions, a company Stevens run. He composed several famous television themes of the 1960s, such as those for The Outer Limits, The Rat Patrol, Branded, and The Flying Nun, as well as The Invaders, The Fugitive, and 12 O’Clock High for producer Quinn Martin.
In cinema, he earned acclaim for his scores to films including Hang ‘Em High (1968), starring Clint Eastwood, and Freebie and the Bean (1974) while his score for The Stunt won a Golden Globe Award and earned him a Grammy nomination in 1980. Other notable films scored by Frontiere include On Any Sunday in 1971, Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold in 1975, Brannigan in 1975, The Aviator in 1985, and Color of Night in 1994, which was his final major work. Read more…
Luis Enríquez Bacalov, 1933-2017
Composer Luis Enríquez Bacalov died on November 15, 2017, at his home in Rome, Italy, after suffering a stroke. He was 84.
Bacalov was born in August 1933 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a Bulgarian Jewish family and studied music from an early age; his teachers included Enrique Barenboim, the father of famed conductor Daniel Barenboim, and pianist Berta Sujovolsky. Bacalov relocated from Argentina to Italy in the 1950s, and spent the majority of the rest of his life living and working there.
He scored his first film, a low-budget ghost story called Questi Fantasmi, in 1954, and then for many years fronted a rock group in the 1960s called Luis Enrique and His Electronic Men, but first came to prominence in 1964 when he arranged the music for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to St. Matthew, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Music Adaptation or Treatment when the film was released in the United States in 1967.
Bacalov quickly established himself as one of the most popular and successful composers in the Italian film industry in the 1960s and 70s; his most famous scores were for spaghetti westerns such as Django (1966), Sugar Colt (1966), Quién Sabe (1967), Lo Chiamavano King (1971), and Il Grande Duello (1972), and gritty crime thrillers such as The Summertime Killer (1972), Milano Calibro 9 (1972), Il Boss (1973), and I Padroni Della Città (1976). He scored Federico Fellini’s City of Women in 1980, Fellini’s first film after the death of Nino Rota, and then achieved arguably his most prominent international success when he won the Academy Award for Best Score in 1995 for Il Postino, The Postman. Read more…
James Horner, 1953-2015
Composer James Horner died on June 22, 2015, when the single-engine S-312 Tucano aircraft he was piloting crashed in the Los Padres National Forest near Santa Barbara, California. He was 61.
One of the most successful and recognizable film composers of his generation, Horner wrote music for more than 100 films during a career spanning almost four decades, including Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Aliens, Field of Dreams, Glory, Braveheart, Apollo 13, Titanic, A Beautiful Mind and Avatar. His combination of sweeping melody, unusual instrumental colors, electronics and powerful orchestral writing made him one of Hollywood’s dominant musical voices of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
James Roy Horner was born in Los Angeles on August 14, 1953, the son of Austrian-born production designer and director Harry Horner and his wife Joan. His father enjoyed a distinguished Hollywood career of his own, winning Academy Awards for his art direction on The Heiress and The Hustler. James began playing piano at the age of five and spent part of his youth in England, studying at London’s Royal College of Music. He subsequently returned to California, studied music at USC and continued his graduate studies at UCLA, where he also taught music theory. Initially intending to pursue a career in concert music and academia, Horner discovered film scoring after composing for student productions at the American Film Institute.
Like many important Hollywood filmmakers of his generation, Horner received his first professional opportunities from Roger Corman. His early assignments included The Lady in Red, Humanoids from the Deep and Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), the latter allowing him to write an ambitious orchestral science-fiction score on an extremely limited budget. The production also brought him into contact with future director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd, beginning relationships that would become enormously significant later in his career. Read more…
Edgar Froese, 1944-2015
Composer, musician and electronic-music pioneer Edgar Froese died in Vienna, Austria, on January 20, 2015, at the age of 70, after suffering a pulmonary embolism.
As the founder and only constant member of Tangerine Dream, Froese helped transform the possibilities of synthesizer-based music and became an important figure in film scoring, contributing to more than 60 soundtracks including Sorcerer, Thief, Risky Business, Firestarter, Legend and Miracle Mile.
Edgar Willmar Froese was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, on June 6, 1944, and grew up in West Berlin. He studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Arts while pursuing music, initially concentrating on guitar. After encounters with Salvador Dalí and the experimental culture of the late 1960s, Froese founded Tangerine Dream in Berlin in 1967 and increasingly turned toward synthesizers, tape manipulation and electronic sequencers.
Tangerine Dream’s international breakthrough came with Phaedra (1974), recorded by Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann. Its hypnotic sequencer patterns, vast electronic textures and slowly evolving melodies became a landmark of the so-called Berlin School of electronic music. Albums including Rubycon, Stratosfear and Force Majeure consolidated the group’s reputation and attracted the attention of director William Friedkin. Read more…
Antoine Duhamel, 1925-2014
Composer and conductor Antoine Duhamel died in Paris on September 10, 2014, at the age of 89.
One of the musicians most closely associated with the French New Wave, Duhamel wrote more than 60 film scores and worked with directors including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Bertrand Tavernier, Patrice Leconte and Fernando Trueba. His music combined rigorous classical technique with a willingness to experiment, resulting in scores that could be romantic, ironic, austere or deliberately disruptive.
Duhamel was born in Valmondois, near Paris, on July 30, 1925, the son of novelist Georges Duhamel and actress Blanche Albane. He studied with two of the most important figures in post-war European music, Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz, the latter introducing him to twelve-tone and serial techniques. Alongside cinema, Duhamel maintained a substantial career as a concert composer, writing orchestral and chamber works, songs, oratorios and operas.
His first important film collaboration was Jean-Daniel Pollet’s experimental Méditerranée (1963), but it was Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) that established his reputation. Duhamel’s music—by turns lyrical, fractured and dramatically emphatic—was used by Godard with characteristic freedom, sometimes interrupting scenes rather than conventionally supporting them. He subsequently scored Godard’s Made in U.S.A. (1966) and Weekend (1967), cementing his association with the New Wave. Read more…
Ken Thorne, 1924-2014
Composer, conductor and arranger Ken Thorne died on July 9, 2014 in hospital in the West Hills area of Los Angeles, California, at the age of 90.
Best known for his long association with director Richard Lester, Thorne enjoyed a career spanning more than five decades, encompassing film, television and popular music. He won an Academy Award for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and later became familiar to a generation of filmgoers through his scores for Superman II and Superman III.
Thorne was born in Dereham, Norfolk, on January 26, 1924. A pianist from an early age, he began his professional career playing with British dance and big bands during the 1940s before turning increasingly to arranging and composition. By the beginning of the 1960s he had entered the film industry, with early credits including Three on a Spree and Richard Lester’s musical comedy It’s Trad, Dad!
His career changed significantly when Lester invited him to provide the incidental music for the Beatles’ second film, Help! (1965). Unlike A Hard Day’s Night, whose score had been overseen by George Martin, Help! required Thorne to weave the Beatles’ songs into a broader comic-adventure soundtrack. He arranged several pieces in deliberately incongruous styles and provided original incidental material, resulting in a score whose musical wit complemented Lester’s fast-moving visual comedy. The soundtrack earned Thorne a Grammy nomination.
Thorne’s greatest professional recognition followed with Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966). Working with Stephen Sondheim’s songs, he adapted, arranged and conducted the music for the screen, while also providing additional instrumental material. His work won the Academy Award for Best Scoring of Music—Adaptation or Treatment, making it the most prestigious honor of his career.
John Cacavas, 1930-2014
Composer, arranger and conductor John Cacavas died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, on January 28, 2014, at the age of 83, following a period of declining health.
A prolific figure in American film and television music, Cacavas scored hundreds of television episodes, numerous television movies and a smaller but memorable group of feature films, including Horror Express, Airport 1975 and Airport ’77. He remains especially associated with Kojak, for which he composed music for more than 100 episodes.
Cacavas was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, on August 13, 1930, into a Greek-American family. He became interested in music as a teenager, taught himself saxophone and was leading his own dance band by the age of 14. After studying at Northern State College, he transferred to Northwestern University, where he studied composition and theory. Military service subsequently took him to Washington, D.C., where he worked as an arranger for the United States Army Band.
After leaving the Army, Cacavas moved to New York and worked as an arranger, songwriter and conductor, eventually joining CBS. During this period he collaborated frequently with broadcaster Charles Osgood. Among their projects was Senator Everett Dirksen’s spoken-word recording Gallant Men, which became a major success and won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Recording in 1967. Read more…
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