Archive
Michael Small, 1939-2003
Composer Michael Small died in New York City on November 25, 2003, at the age of 64, from prostate cancer.
One of the most distinctive American film composers of the 1970s, Small became especially associated with psychological thrillers, creating unsettling, frequently unconventional scores for Klute, The Parallax View, Marathon Man, The Stepford Wives and Night Moves. Over a career lasting more than three decades he scored more than 50 films and television productions.
Small was born in New York City on May 30, 1939, and grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey. His father, Jack Small, was an actor who became general manager for the Shubert theatrical organization, and Michael initially dreamed of becoming a Broadway composer. He studied English at Williams College, where he wrote musicals and played jazz piano, and later spent a year studying at Harvard. Only after returning to New York in 1962 did he undertake formal musical training, studying orchestration privately with composer Meyer Kupferman.
Small entered films almost accidentally when producer Edward Pressman heard his work through the BMI musical-theatre workshop and hired him to score Out of It (1969), starring Jon Voight. Two years later he began the collaboration that would define his career when director Alan J. Pakula hired him for Klute (1971). Small’s sparse chamber score used unusual percussion, microtonal xylophone, electronics and a ghostly female voice to reflect both the danger surrounding Jane Fonda’s character and her complicated psychological world. Read more…
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…
Remembering Stanley Myers, 1930-1993
Composer Stanley Myers died ten years ago today in London on November 9, 1993, at the age of 63, following a battle with cancer.
One of Britain’s most prolific film composers, Myers wrote music for more than 100 film and television productions during a career spanning three decades, working with directors including Nicolas Roeg, Stephen Frears, Jerzy Skolimowski, Volker Schlöndorff and Michael Cimino.
Myers was born in Birmingham on October 6, 1930. By the 1960s he had established himself in cinema, with early successes including Jack Smight’s Kaleidoscope (1966) and Joseph Strick’s controversial adaptation of Ulysses (1967). Other notable scores from this period and the early 1970s included The Night of the Following Day, Michael Powell’s Age of Consent, The Walking Stick, Bryan Forbes’s The Raging Moon and the Oliver Reed thriller Sitting Target.
It was The Walking Stick (1970) that produced Myers’s most enduring composition. Its gentle guitar theme, “Cavatina,” was later expanded and recorded by classical guitarist John Williams. Eight years later Michael Cimino used Williams’s performance as the principal theme for The Deer Hunter (1978), where its delicate melancholy provided an unforgettable contrast to the film’s harrowing depiction of war and its aftermath. “Cavatina” became internationally famous and earned Myers an Ivor Novello Award.
Myers was never restricted to a single genre. During the 1970s he became closely associated with director Pete Walker’s distinctly British brand of exploitation horror, scoring House of Whipcord (1974), Frightmare (1974), House of Mortal Sin (1976) and Schizo (1976). Elsewhere he wrote for dramas, thrillers and international productions, including Ted Kotcheff’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Volker Schlöndorff’s Coup de Grâce. His strongest music invariably reflected a considerable melodic gift, even when working within darker or more experimental material. Read more…
Remembering Roy Budd, 1947-1993
Composer Roy Budd died ten years ago today, on August 7, 1993, of a brain hemorrhage in hospital in London, UK. He was 46.
Roy Frederick Budd was born in London, England, in March 1947. A musical prodigy from a young age, Budd made his public debut on the piano at age six and was performing professionally by his teens. Deeply influenced by jazz legends such as Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson, Budd quickly carved out a name for himself as a dynamic live performer, often appearing on British television and radio in the 1960s.
His entry into film scoring came in the late 1960s, but it was the 1971 crime thriller Get Carter that cemented his legacy, which he wrote when he was just 24 years old. The minimalist, percussive theme, composed and recorded in just a few days, went on become one of the most instantly recognizable pieces in British cinema history. Budd’s deft combination of jazz, funk, and moody atmospherics would become his signature, earning him further acclaim for scores to films such as Soldier Blue (1970), Fear Is the Key (1972), The Stone Killer (1973), The Marseille Contract (1974), Diamonds (1975), Paper Tiger (1975), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977),The Wild Geese (1978), and The Sea Wolves (1980).
Over the course of his career, Budd scored more than 40 films, often working on films starring major British actors of the 1960s and 70s including Michael Caine, Richard Burton, and Roger Moore. In addition to his film work, he remained a passionate jazz performer, frequently recording albums and touring. Read more…
Johnny Douglas, 1920-2003
Composer, arranger and conductor Johnny Douglas died at his home in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, England, on April 20, 2003, at the age of 82, following a battle with prostate cancer.
One of the stalwarts of British light music, Douglas wrote scores for around three dozen feature films while maintaining an enormous career in radio, recordings and television. He is remembered above all for Lionel Jeffries’s The Railway Children, whose warmly nostalgic score earned him a BAFTA nomination.
John Henry Douglas was born in Hackney, London, on June 19, 1920, and grew up in Bermondsey. A musical prodigy, he began piano lessons at four and was studying arranging and orchestration before his teens. He formed a dance band while still at school and made his professional debut in 1939 with the Neville Hughes Sextet. During World War II he served in the RAF, where an arm injury temporarily prevented him from playing and encouraged him to concentrate on arranging and composition.
After the war Douglas arranged for bandleaders including Ambrose, Ted Heath and Edmundo Ros before becoming heavily involved in recording. He provided hundreds of arrangements for Decca and in 1958 began a long association with RCA’s Living Strings series, ultimately arranging and conducting more than 80 albums for the label. His polished string writing and gift for melody made him one of Britain’s busiest practitioners of easy-listening orchestral music. Read more…
Ron Goodwin, 1925-2003
Composer Ron Goodwin died on January 8, 2003, at his home near Reading, England. He was 77. Earlier that evening he had completed conducting a series of Christmas concerts with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and died in his sleep that night.
Ronald Alfred Goodwin was born in Plymouth, Devon, in February 1925, and raised in London . He studied trumpet and piano, eventually attending the Guildhall School of Music. After beginning his career in the 1940s as a music copyist and arranger for music publishers, he found early success orchestrating for dance bands and providing musical direction for celebrated vocalists such as Petula Clark and Jimmy Young, including the orchestration of Young’s hit “Too Young”.
Goodwin made his feature film debut in 1958 with Whirlpool, but it was in the following decade that he rose to prominence as a film composer. He became best known for his dynamic music for war and adventure films, notably 633 Squadron (1964), Where Eagles Dare (1968), and Battle of Britain (1969). His score for 633 Squadron, with its soaring main theme and martial energy, became a classic of the genre and remains one of his most widely recognized works, especially in the UK. Read more…
Buddy Baker, 1918-2002
Composer, arranger and conductor Buddy Baker died at his home in Sherman Oaks, California, on July 26, 2002, at the age of 84.
One of the most prolific musicians in the history of Walt Disney Productions, Baker composed, arranged or conducted music for more than 200 films, television programs and theme-park attractions during an association with the studio that lasted almost three decades.
Norman Baker was born in Springfield, Missouri, on January 4, 1918. After studying music at Southwest Baptist College, he moved to California and began working as an arranger for radio and big bands. Among his early successes was his arrangement of “And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine” for Stan Kenton’s orchestra, and he later became musical director for Bob Hope’s radio program. Baker also taught arranging and composition at Los Angeles City College, where one of his students was future film composer Jerry Goldsmith.
Baker joined Walt Disney Productions during the mid-1950s, initially assisting composer George Bruns, and gradually became one of the studio’s principal musical figures. His early Disney work encompassed television, animated shorts and documentaries before he moved increasingly into feature films. His scores included Toby Tyler (1960), A Tiger Walks (1964), The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1964), The Gnome-Mobile (1967), Rascal (1969), The Million Dollar Duck (1971), The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975), The Shaggy D.A. (1976) and The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979). Read more…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Remembering Aaron Copland, 1900-1990
Composer, conductor and teacher Aaron Copland died ten years ago today in North Tarrytown, New York, on December 2, 1990, at the age of 90, following years of declining health.
Widely regarded as one of the defining voices of American concert music, Copland also enjoyed a brief but highly influential career in Hollywood, bringing to films the spacious harmonies, direct melodies and unmistakably American character that had already distinguished works such as Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring.
Copland was born in Brooklyn on November 14, 1900, the youngest of five children in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family. After studying in New York he travelled to Paris, where he became one of the first American pupils of the influential teacher Nadia Boulanger. Returning home in the 1920s, Copland gradually developed a musical language that combined European modernism with jazz, folk material and an increasingly accessible style intended to speak directly to American audiences.
His first film assignment was Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke’s documentary The City (1939), produced for the New York World’s Fair. That same year Copland entered Hollywood with Lewis Milestone’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Rather than imitate the lush late-Romantic style then dominant in studio scoring, Copland used clear textures, folk-like melodies and restrained orchestration, allowing the rural setting and loneliness of the characters to emerge without excessive sentimentality. The score received Academy Award nominations for both original score and scoring. Read more…
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