Archive
Remembering Les Baxter, 1922-1996
Composer, arranger and conductor Les Baxter died ten years ago today in Newport Beach, California, on January 15, 1996, at the age of 73.
One of the most prolific and colorful figures in American popular music, Baxter enjoyed parallel careers as a recording artist and film composer, becoming a pioneer of the exotica movement while writing music for well over 100 films. His screen work ranged from low-budget crime pictures and westerns to teenage comedies and some of the most memorable horror films produced by American International Pictures.
Leslie Thompson Baxter was born in Mexia, Texas, on March 14, 1922. He studied piano before moving toward composition and arranging, and began his professional career as a performer. During the 1940s he sang with Mel Tormé’s vocal group the Mel-Tones and worked as an arranger and conductor, eventually becoming closely associated with Capitol Records.
Baxter first achieved national prominence through a series of lush orchestral recordings that combined traditional popular music with unusual percussion, voices and instrumental colors. His 1951 album Ritual of the Savage became one of the foundational recordings of what would later be called exotica, with pieces such as “Quiet Village” evoking imaginary tropical landscapes through percussion, strings and wordless voices. Albums including Tamboo!, Caribbean Moonlight, Ports of Pleasure and Space Escapade further established his distinctive mixture of orchestral sophistication and unabashed escapism. Read more…
Francesco De Masi, 1930-2005
Composer and conductor Francesco De Masi died in Rome, Italy, on November 6, 2005, at the age of 75, following a battle with cancer.
One of the most prolific figures in Italian film music, De Masi wrote scores for more than 200 films and numerous television productions and documentaries, but remains best known for the distinctive music he composed for spaghetti westerns during the genre’s golden age.
De Masi was born in Rome on January 11, 1930, and studied composition at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples with his uncle, Achille Longo. He also studied conducting with Franco Ferrara and Paul van Kempen and trained as a horn player, performing with orchestras including the RAI Symphony Orchestra in Rome. His interest in cinema began while assisting Longo on a film score, and in 1951 he composed the music for the documentary Fiat Panis. Several years of documentary work followed before he moved increasingly into feature films.
During the early 1960s De Masi worked extensively on the historical adventures and sword-and-sandal epics then dominating Italian popular cinema, including Hercules the Invincible. However, it was the explosion of the Italian western that provided him with his most characteristic body of work. Unlike many composers who entered the genre after the enormous success of Ennio Morricone’s scores for Sergio Leone, De Masi was already developing his own western sound and consequently retained a style that was distinctly his own.
Among his most notable westerns were A Coffin for the Sheriff (1965), Arizona Colt (1966), Seven Winchesters for a Massacre (1967), Any Gun Can Play (1967), and Kill Them All and Come Back Alone (1968). His music combined traditional symphonic scoring with electric guitars, percussion, whistles, choral writing and memorable title songs, while retaining a stronger orchestral foundation than many of his contemporaries. Arizona Colt was especially successful, with De Masi collaborating with guitarist and vocalist Alessandro Alessandroni on the score and its song “The Man from Nowhere.” Read more…
Remembering Brian Easdale, 1909-1995
Composer Brian Easdale died ten years ago today, on October 30, 1995, at his home in London, England. He was 86.
A distinguished composer of concert, operatic and film music, Easdale is best remembered for his long association with directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and especially for The Red Shoes, which made him the first British composer to win an Academy Award for a film score.
Easdale was born in Manchester on August 10, 1909, and was educated at Westminster Abbey Choir School before studying at the Royal College of Music with Gordon Jacob and Armstrong Gibbs. A precocious talent, he wrote his first opera, Rapunzel, at 17. During World War II he served with the Royal Artillery and later with the Public Relations Film Unit in India, where his experience writing music for government films helped prepare him for his subsequent career in cinema.
His breakthrough came when Powell and Pressburger hired him to score Black Narcissus in 1947. Easdale’s dramatic, sensuous music was an ideal complement to Jack Cardiff’s extraordinary Technicolor photography and the film’s atmosphere of suppressed desire and psychological tension. The success of the film led to Easdale becoming musical director for Powell and Pressburger’s Archers company, beginning one of the most important composer-director relationships in post-war British cinema.
Remembering Miklós Rózsa, 1907-1995
Composer Miklós Rózsa died ten years ago today, on July 27, 1995, at his home in Los Angeles, California, due to complications from a series of strokes. He was 88.
Born in Budapest in April 1907, Rózsa was a child prodigy who studied violin and composition from an early age. He completed his formal training in Leipzig, Germany, and initially made his name as a composer of concert music. In the 1930s he moved to Paris, and later London, having been encouraged by his friend, Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, to supplement his income writing music for cinema. His entry into film scoring came with Knight Without Armour (1937), produced by his fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda, and his success in British cinema led to a contract with MGM and a move to Hollywood in 1940.
Rózsa quickly distinguished himself in America with powerful, emotionally charged scores for films such as The Thief of Bagdad (1940), Lydia (1940), Sundown (1941), That Hamilton Woman (1941), Jungle Book (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), and Spellbound (1945), the latter of which earned him the the first of his three Oscar wins for Best Original Score. He was acclaimed for his ability to seamlessly blend traditional symphonic writing with dramatic storytelling, and often conducted extensive historical and ethnomusicological research to bring authenticity to his scores, resulting in a style that helped define the sound of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
He won his second Oscar for A Double Life (1947), and then a third for Ben-Hur (1959), which at time was heralded as one of the most ambitious film scores ever written, and which subsequently became a benchmark of epic film music. His other acclaimed and popular scores included such titles as The Lost Weekend (1945), The Killers (1946), The Red Danube (1949), Quo Vadis (1951), Ivanhoe (1952), Julius Caesar (1953), Knights of the Round Table (1953), Young Bess (1953), Valley of the Kings (1954), Lust for Life (1956), El Cid (1961), King of Kings (1961), Sodom and Gomorrah (1963), and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974). Read more…
Remembering Irwin Kostal, 1911-1994
Composer, arranger, orchestrator and conductor Irwin Kostal died ten years ago today, on November 23, 1994, in Studio City, California, at the age of 83, following a heart attack.
One of the great musical craftsmen of the Hollywood musical, Kostal’s career encompassed Broadway, television and cinema, and included two Academy Awards for his work on West Side Story and The Sound of Music. He was also closely associated with Walt Disney, supervising the music for several of the studio’s most celebrated live-action musicals.
Kostal was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 1, 1911, into a Czech-American family. He began playing piano as a child but was largely self-taught, learning orchestration by studying the scores of Beethoven, Debussy and other composers in his local library. After working as a dance-band musician in Chicago, he became an arranger for the NBC radio program Design for Listening. He moved to New York in 1946 and subsequently worked on television programs including Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and The Garry Moore Show.
By the late 1950s Kostal had become one of Broadway’s leading orchestrators. His most important early assignment was Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), whose complex mixture of jazz, Latin rhythms, symphonic writing and Broadway song was orchestrated by Kostal and Sid Ramin. He also worked on shows including Fiorello! and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
When West Side Story reached the screen in 1961, Kostal joined Saul Chaplin, Johnny Green and Ramin in adapting Bernstein’s music for the much larger resources of the film orchestra. The result retained the rhythmic ferocity of the stage score while giving numbers such as “Tonight,” “America,” “Maria” and the climactic ballet sequences an enormous cinematic sweep. The four men shared the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, one of ten Oscars won by the film. Read more…
Michel Colombier, 1939-2004
Composer, arranger, conductor and pianist Michel Colombier died at his home in Santa Monica, California, on November 14, 2004, at the age of 65, following a battle with cancer.
One of the most versatile French composers to enjoy a substantial Hollywood career, Colombier wrote music for more than 100 film and television productions while also working extensively in jazz, pop, ballet and concert music.
Colombier was born in Lyon on May 23, 1939, and grew up in Mulhouse, where his father played in the local opera orchestra. He studied piano and violin before entering the Paris Conservatoire and developed an early fascination with American jazz. In 1961 he became musical director for Barclay Records, arranging for Charles Aznavour, and later worked with artists including Serge Gainsbourg and Petula Clark.
His film career began in France during the 1960s, and he subsequently worked with directors including Claude Chabrol, Vittorio De Sica, Marcel Carné and Claude Lelouch. Particularly notable were Jean-Pierre Melville’s austere crime drama Un Flic (1972), Philippe Labro’s The Inheritor (1973), and Jacques Demy’s ambitious all-sung musical Une Chambre en Ville (1982). Colombier’s ability to combine classical technique with jazz, pop and electronic textures quickly distinguished him from more traditionally symphonic composers. Read more…
Carlo Rustichelli, 1916-2004
Composer Carlo Rustichelli died in Rome, Italy, on November 13, 2004, at the age of 87.
One of the most prolific and versatile composers in Italian cinema, Rustichelli wrote music for more than 250 films during a career spanning some five decades, working in virtually every genre from neorealist drama and comedy to horror, historical epics and spaghetti westerns.
Rustichelli was born in Carpi, near Modena, on December 24, 1916, into a musical family. He studied piano in Bologna before continuing his training in composition at Rome’s Santa Cecilia Academy, initially working in opera and theatre. He entered the film industry during the 1940s, but cinema became the focus of his career after meeting director Pietro Germi, beginning a collaboration that would last more than 25 years.
Their first significant collaboration was Lost Youth in 1947, followed by In the Name of the Law (1949) and The Path of Hope (1950). Rustichelli subsequently scored almost every major Germi film, including The Railroad Man (1956), A Man of Straw (1958), The Facts of Murder (1959), Divorce Italian Style (1961), Seduced and Abandoned (1964), The Birds, the Bees and the Italians (1966), and Alfredo, Alfredo (1972). His music became an essential part of Germi’s cinema, equally comfortable with intimate drama, Sicilian folk influences, sentiment and biting comic irony.
Divorce Italian Style, starring Marcello Mastroianni, was perhaps their most internationally famous collaboration. Rustichelli’s witty, deliberately exaggerated music perfectly complemented Germi’s savage satire of Sicilian morality and helped establish the composer’s reputation outside Italy. His gentler dramatic writing was equally effective, and A Man of Straw earned him his first Nastro d’Argento for Best Music in 1959.
The early 1960s were among Rustichelli’s busiest years. He scored Nanni Loy’s powerful wartime drama The Four Days of Naples (1962), Florestano Vancini’s The Long Night of ’43 (1960), Bernardo Bertolucci’s debut La commare secca (1962), and worked with Pier Paolo Pasolini on Accattone, Mamma Roma, Ro.Go.Pa.G. and The Gospel According to St. Matthew. His ability to draw on folk music, classical traditions and immediately memorable melodies made him exceptionally adaptable to the rapidly changing Italian cinema of the period. Read more…
Gil Mellé, 1931-2004
Composer, jazz musician, artist and electronic-music pioneer Gil Mellé died at his home in Malibu, California, on October 28, 2004, at the age of 72, following a heart attack.
One of the most unconventional figures in American film and television music, Mellé wrote scores for more than 125 productions, but remains best remembered for Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain and his groundbreaking use of electronic instruments.
Gilbert John Mellé was born in New York City on December 31, 1931. A gifted visual artist as well as a musician, he began playing saxophone as a teenager and was performing in Greenwich Village jazz clubs before he was 16. At 19 he signed with Blue Note Records, becoming the label’s first white musician, and recorded a series of albums including Patterns in Jazz and 5 Impressions of Color. He also designed album artwork for musicians including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins.
Mellé’s interests increasingly turned toward technology and electronic music. After moving to Los Angeles during the 1960s, he built his own synthesizers and other electronic devices and formed the Electronauts, an all-electronic jazz ensemble which performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival. His 1967 album Tome VI explored electronic jazz at a time when synthesizers were still a novelty.
His defining film assignment was The Andromeda Strain (1971), Wise’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s science-fiction novel. Mellé created an almost entirely electronic sound world of pulses, oscillations, distorted tones and mechanical textures that perfectly complemented the film’s clinical laboratories and technological paranoia. He even recorded sounds at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory while researching the score. The result was one of the pioneering electronic scores for a major Hollywood film and earned Mellé a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score. Read more…
Elmer Bernstein, 1922-2004
Composer Elmer Bernstein died on August 18, 2004, at his home in Ojai, California, after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was 82.
Bernstein was born in New York City in April 1922, the son of immigrants from Ukraine and Austria-Hungary. He studied piano as a child and showed early promise as a performer; during his childhood, he performed professionally as a dancer and an actor, but then switched to music and trained at the Juilliard School where he was encouraged by prominent figures such as Aaron Copland. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Forces, where he composed and arranged music for military radio programs.
Bernstein moved to California in in the early 1950s, when he was hired to score the thriller Sudden Fear in 1952. However, along with many other artists in Hollywood, Bernstein faced censure during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, and was called by the House Un-American Activities Committee. After he refused to name names, pointing out that he had never attended a Communist Party meeting, he found himself composing music for Z-grade sci-fi movies such as Robot Monster and Cat-Women of the Moon.
His work on The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), one of the first major studio films to feature a jazz score, brought him back into the mainstream, earned him his first Oscar nomination and marked him as a daring and contemporary voice in film music. His score for The Ten Commandments (1956), an epic of biblical scale, demonstrated his facility with grand orchestration and established him as a composer of serious dramatic substance. He followed it with the heroic and unforgettable theme to The Magnificent Seven (1960), whose galloping rhythms and bold brass fanfares became one of the most enduring musical signatures in film history. Read more…
David Raksin, 1912-2004
Composer David Raksin died on August 9, 2004, in Los Angeles, after a short illness. He was 92.
Raksin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in August 1912. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Curtis Institute of Music, and later with Isadore Freed in New York and Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles. He worked as an arranger for Charlie Chaplin on the score for Modern Times in 1936 when he was just 24 years old, and soon after began a long career as a composer for studio films.
With a career spanning more than six decades, Raksin composed music for over 100 films and numerous television programs, earning a reputation for melodic sophistication and dramatic sensitivity. His theme for the 1944 classic Laura is often cited as one of the most memorable in film history, and became a popular standard, with lyrics later added by Johnny Mercer. Raksin’s theme song for the 1953 film The Bad and the Beautiful (also called “Love is For the Very Young”) was also a hit.
Rakin’s other major composing credits include Forever Amber (1947), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), Force of Evil (1948), Whirlpool (1950), The Magnificent Yankee (1950), Across the Wide Missouri (1951), The Big Combo (1955), Bigger Than Life (1956), Separate Tables (1958), and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), among many others. He received two Academy Award nominations and numerous honors for his work, which was admired for its lyrical beauty, harmonic depth, and keen dramatic sense. One of his last major scores was for the critically acclaimed nuclear holocaust-themed TV drama The Day After in 1983. Read more…
Piero Piccioni, 1921-2004
Composer, pianist and conductor Piero Piccioni died in Rome, Italy, on July 23, 2004, at the age of 82.
One of the most prolific and distinctive voices of post-war Italian cinema, Piccioni combined jazz, lush orchestral writing, pop, lounge music and the avant-garde across a career encompassing hundreds of compositions for film, television and radio.
Piccioni was born in Turin on December 6, 1921. Largely self-taught as a musician, he developed an early passion for American jazz, especially Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, and first performed on radio in 1938. Following World War II he led his own jazz ensemble, Orchestra 013, and spent time in New York, where he immersed himself further in American jazz. He initially pursued a career as a lawyer, working with film companies including Titanus and De Laurentiis, before abandoning law for music.
Piccioni entered cinema during the early 1950s, initially using the pseudonym Piero Morgan. His first feature score was Gianni Franciolini’s Il Mondo le Condanna, followed by Alberto Lattuada’s La Spiaggia. His jazz background immediately distinguished his music, with improvisation, sophisticated harmonies and rhythmic vitality becoming recurring characteristics of his work.
One of Piccioni’s most important relationships was with director Francesco Rosi, for whom he scored 13 films. Their collaboration began with I Magliari in 1959 and continued through Salvatore Giuliano (1962), Hands Over the City (1963), The Moment of Truth (1965), More Than a Miracle (1967), The Mattei Affair (1972) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987). Rosi’s politically charged cinema brought out a more austere side of Piccioni, notably in the sparse music for Salvatore Giuliano and the largely electronic textures of The Mattei Affair. His work on Salvatore Giuliano earned him the Nastro d’Argento.
Piccioni was equally renowned for his long friendship and collaboration with actor-director Alberto Sordi. Scores including An Italian in America (1967), Amore Mio Aiutami (1969) and Polvere di Stelle (1973) revealed another side of his personality: warm, melodic, playful and frequently steeped in jazz, bossa nova and contemporary popular music. His ability to move between Rosi’s serious political dramas and Sordi’s bittersweet comedies demonstrated his exceptional versatility. Read more…
Remembering Hans J. Salter, 1896-1994
Composer, conductor and musical director Hans J. Salter died at his home in Studio City, California, ten years ago today, on July 23, 1994, at the age of 98.
An Austrian émigré who became one of the principal architects of the classic Universal horror sound, Salter worked on more than 200 films during nearly three decades at the studio. His music accompanied werewolves, vampires, Frankenstein monsters, Sherlock Holmes adventures, westerns and musicals, and brought him six Academy Award nominations.
Hans Julius Salter was born in Vienna on January 14, 1896. He studied at the University of Vienna and Vienna Music Academy with teachers including Guido Adler, Franz Schreker, Felix Weingartner and, briefly, Alban Berg. After working in opera, Salter moved into cinema during the late 1920s, first conducting in Berlin movie theatres and then composing for UFA. As a Jewish musician he was forced out of the German film industry after the Nazi rise to power and eventually emigrated to the United States in 1937.
Universal hired Salter initially as an orchestrator in 1938, but he was soon promoted to composer and became one of the studio’s busiest musical craftsmen. Working frequently with Frank Skinner and other staff composers, he supplied music for everything from Deanna Durbin musicals and Abbott and Costello comedies to serials, melodramas and horror pictures. Much of this work went uncredited or was subsequently recycled as stock music throughout Universal’s productions. Read more…
Jerry Goldsmith, 1929-2004
Composer Jerry Goldsmith died on July 21, 2004 at his home in Beverly Hills, California, after a battle with cancer. He was 75.
One of the most prolific, versatile and influential film composers of the twentieth century, Goldsmith wrote music for more than 200 film and television productions during a career spanning half a century. He received 18 Academy Award nominations, winning for The Omen, and created landmark scores including Planet of the Apes, Patton, Chinatown, Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Poltergeist, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and L.A. Confidential.
Jerrald King Goldsmith was born in Los Angeles on February 10, 1929. He began playing piano as a child, later studying with pianist Jakob Gimpel and composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. At the University of Southern California he attended classes taught by Miklós Rózsa, whose score for Spellbound had helped inspire Goldsmith’s ambition to write for films. He later studied at Los Angeles City College before joining CBS as a clerk-typist in its music department.
At CBS, Goldsmith progressed from selecting library music to composing for radio and live television. His early credits included Climax!, Playhouse 90, Perry Mason, Gunsmoke and The Twilight Zone, an extraordinarily demanding training ground in which music often had to be written and recorded at great speed. His first credited feature score was the western Black Patch in 1957, although television remained an important part of his career throughout the following decade.
Goldsmith’s breakthrough in cinema came during the early 1960s. Lonely Are the Brave (1962) displayed his gift for western Americana, while John Huston’s Freud (1962) brought his first Academy Award nomination with a dark, psychologically unsettling score. He followed with The List of Adrian Messenger (1963), Seven Days in May (1964), A Patch of Blue (1965), In Harm’s Way (1965), The Blue Max (1966) and The Sand Pebbles (1966), rapidly establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s most inventive dramatic composers. Read more…
Remembering Henry Mancini, 1924-1994
Composer Henry Mancini died ten years ago today, on June 14, 1994, at his home in Los Angeles, California, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 70 years old.
Enrico Nicola Mancini, nicknamed Henry or Hank, was born in April 1924 in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Italian immigrants, and raised in a rural steelworking town in nearby Pennsylvania. He showed early musical promise and studied at the Juilliard School, but his education was interrupted by World War II, during which he served in the Army and worked with the Glenn Miller Air Force Band. After the war, Mancini joined Universal-International’s music department, where he gained experience scoring dozens of B-movies, including classics such as Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954).
Mancini’s big break came in 1958 when he collaborated with director Blake Edwards on the television series Peter Gunn, which featured a groundbreaking jazz score that became a hit in its own right. Their partnership continued through numerous films, with Mancini’s music often becoming as iconic as the films themselves. He won an Oscar for scoring Edwards’s film Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961, and co-wrote the iconic song “Moon River” for lead actress Audrey Hepburn. He won another Oscar in 1962 for the title song for Edwards’s film Days of Wine and Roses, received an Oscar nomination for timeless slinky jazzy main theme from The Pink Panther in 1964, and earned critical acclaim for his work on several other Edwards-directed films including The Great Race (1965), Darling Lili (1970), 10 (1979), and Victor/Victoria (1982), among many others.
Mancini had a rare ability to blend classical technique with contemporary popular styles, from swing and jazz to lush romantic ballads. Throughout the 1960s and 70s Mancini combined his scoring career with an equally successful parallel career as a songwriter, recording artist, touring conductor, and media personality, which made him one the most famous and popular American classical musicians of his era. His songs were recorded by the most popular vocalists of the day – Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, dozens of others – and many of them topped the charts. Read more…
Fred Karlin, 1936-2004
Composer, arranger and trumpeter Fred Karlin died in Culver City, California, on March 26, 2004, at the age of 67, following a battle with cancer.
An exceptionally versatile musician, Karlin wrote more than 130 scores for films and television productions, won both an Academy Award and an Emmy, and became particularly admired for his ability to move effortlessly between jazz, folk, rock, classical and electronic music.
Frederick James Karlin was born in Chicago on June 16, 1936. He began playing trumpet and studying jazz while still a teenager, learning composition with William Russo before attending Amherst College, where his honors thesis was a string quartet. After moving to New York in 1958 he worked as a composer and arranger for musicians including Benny Goodman and Harry James, while also writing for documentaries, commercials and Radio City Music Hall.
Karlin entered feature films with Robert Mulligan’s Up the Down Staircase (1967), starring Sandy Dennis. He quickly became a sought-after composer, following it with Yours, Mine and Ours (1968), Robert Mulligan’s western The Stalking Moon (1968), and Alan J. Pakula’s The Sterile Cuckoo (1969). The latter featured “Come Saturday Morning,” with music by Karlin and lyrics by Dory Previn; the song became a hit for the Sandpipers and earned an Academy Award nomination. Read more…
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