David Arnold
David Arnold (born 23 January 1962) is an English film composer best known for scoring five James Bond films, the 1994 film Stargate, the 1996 film Independence Day, and the cult television series Little Britain.
In 2001, he provided a new arrangement of Ron Grainer's Doctor Who theme music for the Eighth Doctor audio dramas from Big Finish Productions. His version was used as the Eighth Doctor theme starting with 2001's Storm Warning until 2008, when it was replaced with a new version composed by Nicholas Briggs starting with Dead London.
Louis and Bebe Barron
In the early 50s, the Barrons collaborated with various celebrated filmmakers to provide music and sound effects for art films and experimental cinema. The Barrons scored three of Ian Hugo's short experimental films based on the writings of his wife Anaïs Nin.
The most notable of these three films were Bells of Atlantis (1952) and Jazz of Lights (1954). In 1956 the Barrons composed the very first electronic score for a commercial film – Forbidden Planet.
Wendy Carlos
Wendy Carlos' (born Walter Carlos) first release was entitled "Moog 900 Series - Electronic Music Systems" (R. A. Moog Company, Inc., 1967) and it was an introduction to the technical aspects of the machine. In 1971, Carlos composed and recorded music for A Clockwork Orange (1971). Carlos worked with Stanley Kubrick again on the score for The Shining, though in the end Kubrick mostly used pre-existing music cues by other composers.
Don Davis
Don Davis wrote scores mostly for television series up until 1995, in which he wrote a few of the cues for the animated Disney motion picture A Goofy Movie. He continued to score television series until the two then young directors, the Wachowski brothers, hired him to score their neo-noir film Bound.
Davis' magnum opus is Matrix trilogy: The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions. It was set apart from other film scores of its time for its atonality and avant garde style of composition, with influences from polytonal minimalist works like John Adams' Short Ride in a Fast Machine and cluster-like techniques prominent in the works of composer Witold Lutosawski.
Danny Elfman
He recalls that the first time he became aware of film music was in his youth during a screening of The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951). The music was by Bernard Herrmann, and that, he has said, was where his love of film music began (Russell and Young, 2000).
Elfman purposefully nodded towards Herrmann's The Day the Earth Stood Still score in Tim Burton's sci-fi spoof Mars Attacks! (1996). Elfman has recently started working in the classical world, beginning with Serenada Schizophrana for the American Composers Orchestra.
Brad Fiedel
A popular and progressive composer in the 1980s, Brad Fiedel worked on several successful movies, predominantly in the action and thriller genres, and pioneered the use of electronic instruments and synthesizers—almost disappearing from the mainstream at the end of the 1990s.
Fiedel has scored many popular and successful movies, including Fright Night (1985) and its sequel Fright Night II (1988), The Big Easy (1987), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), The Accused (1988), Blue Steel (1990), T2: Judgment Day (1991), Blink (1994), and True Lies (1994), although in recent years, Fiedel has not been in demand as much as he once was.
Jerry Goldsmith
Goldsmith is considered as one of the prominent film composers in the 20th century. He won five Emmy Awards, an Academy Award for The Omen, and was nominated for 17 other Oscars. He worked in various film and television genres, but is noticeably associated with action, science fiction, fantasy, and horror films.
Goldsmith provided tailor-made scores for many genres, including war films (Patton), film noir (Chinatown), action movies (Rambo), erotic thrillers, sports pictures, family comedies, westerns, comic book adaptations, animated features, fantasy (Legend) and science fiction (Planet Of The Apes, Total Recall, Alien, five Star Trek films).
Bernard Herrmann
An Academy Award-winner (for The Devil and Daniel Webster, 1941), Herrmann is particularly known for his collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock, most famously Psycho, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo.
He composed the scores for several fantasy films by Ray Harryhausen, and many TV programs (The Twilight Zone). Herrmann's involvement with electronic musical instruments dates back to 1951, when he used the Theremin in The Day The Earth Stood Still.
James Horner
Horner's first major film score was for the 1979 film, The Lady in Red. He made a breakthrough in 1982, when he had the chance to score for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), establishing himself as a mainstream composer.
Aliens earned Horner his first Academy Award nomination. He has been nominated an additional nine times since. Horner's scores have been sampled in film trailers for other movies. The climax of the track Bishop's Countdown from his score for Aliens ranks fifth in the most commonly-used soundtrack cues for film trailers.
Cliff Martinez
Cliff Martinez's first job composing was for the popular television show Pee Wee's Playhouse. At the time, however, he was more interested in rock bands, and played drums in a variety of them, mostly in a temporary capacity.
Eventually, his interests shifted and he focused his attention toward film scoring. His first soundtrack was for the film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, directed by Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh would later call on Martinez to produce soundtracks for a number of his films, notably Traffic in 2000 and Soderbergh's 2002 adaptation of Solaris (2002).
Bear McCreary
In 2003, McCreary became the sole composer on the the re-imagined series of Battlestar Galactica. McCreary also composes for Caprica, a prequel series set in the fictional Battlestar Galactica universe.
To date, six Battlestar Galactica soundtrack albums have been released, and have garnered a great deal of critical acclaim and commercial success. The soundtracks for season two and three ranked amongst Amazon.com's Top 30 Music Sales on their first days of release.
Basil Poledouris
Poledouris became renowned for his powerfully epic style of orchestral composition and his intricate thematic designs, and he garnered attention for his scores to The Blue Lagoon; Conan the Barbarian (1982); Conan the Destroyer (1984); Red Dawn (1984), RoboCop (1987; dir: Verhoeven); The Hunt for Red October (1990); Free Willy (1993); Starship Troopers (1997; and For Love of the Game (1999).
Poledouris's score for Conan the Barbarian is considered by many to be one of the finest examples of motion picture scoring ever written.
Max Steiner
The score for King Kong (1933) made Steiner's reputation; it was one of the first American films to have an extensive musical score. He conducted the scores for several Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals, including Top Hat (1935) and Roberta (1935).
In 1939, Steiner was borrowed from Warner Bros. by David O Selznick to compose the score to Gone with the Wind which earned him Academy Award nominations, however, he lost to the score of The Wizard of Oz. Many feel that Steiner deserved the award. The score was ranked by the AFI as the second greatest American film score of all time.
Steiner received his next Oscar nomination for the 1940 film The Letter, his first of several collaborations with legendary director William Wyler. A further nomination followed the next year for Sergeant York.
In 1942 Steiner won his second Oscar for Now, Voyager, and was also nominated for Casablanca, which remains one of his most famous scores. He received his third and final Oscar in 1944 for Since You Went Away.
Excerpts from:
Wikipedia.org
moviemusic.com (for Blade Runner)
sputnikmusic.com (for Sunshine)
nefisa.co.uk (for Solaris 2002)
tracksounds.com
(for The Matrix, King Kong 1933)
artistdirect.com
(for The Bride of Frankenstein)
soundtrack.net
(for Alien, Children of Dune)
filmtracks.com
(for T2: Judgment Day, Robocop, Stargate)
soundtrackgeek.com
(for Star Wars, Star Trek The Motion Picture)
filmmusicmag.com
(for Back to the Future, Mars Attacks!,
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
mfiles.co.uk
(for The Day the Earth Stood Still,
2001: A Space Odyssey)
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SFMZ's Greatest Sci-Fi Soundtracks
Composed By T.F. Powell
The soundtrack of a sci-film or television is arguably just as critical as the visual awe we experience from the greats such as 2001: A Spaced Odyssey, Blade Runner, Alien, Star Wars and many more. A dynamic score adds punch to a great sci-fi visual scene, without it, the scene's impact diminishes. Before the age of soundtracks recorded on film, some silent movies were presented with live orchestras or pianists such as D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915).
When the first talkie - The Jazz Singer (1927) arrived, soundtracks recorded on film virtually ended the career of 'film theater musicians.' Some film leaders revived the art of live theater musicians such as Francis Ford Coppola, who presented Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) including a live orchestra. We have gathered a crop of sci-fi soundtracks submitted by site visitors here along with some audio clips and highlights of the sci-fi soundtrack composers.
Please understand that this top ten list is voted by site visitors and the term "greatest" is subjective. The poll is for entertainment purposes only and it reflects their opinions only. This poll will be closed when it reaches 1,000 votes total.
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The Day The Earth Stood Still: There are two main reasons for the music's influence. Firstly there is the composer's characteristic intensity, resulting from the way he employs short musical fragments and uses these building bricks to construct a powerful, atmospheric score.
Secondly Herrmann, who is well-known for the careful way he selects his instrumentation, on this occasion chose to add the Theremin to that sound palette. He was certainly not the first to use this electronic instrument in a film, but Herrmann's usage went beyond mere sound effect. Where used, the instrument plays a vital role, its unusual tones bringing it to the fore as a solo instrument. The conviction of its use made this the instrument of choice of science fiction composers for many years to come.
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Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: There are some soundtracks that signal a major voice in film scoring has arrived, like the time you heard the raging brass of King Kong or the trumpeting first bars of Star Wars.
A huge bolt from the blue was hearing the nautical space adventure stylings of James Horner’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It was a score that stands as a highpoint in science fiction that would make Horner one of the dominant musical forces in Hollywood.
Horner was smart enough to make even more use of the TV TREK theme in the score before going into his own “Main Title.” Taking a lot of the notes out of the kind of seafaring sound inspired by the likes of Claude Debussy’s “La Mer.”
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A Clockwork Orange: The music is a thematic extension of Alex’s (and the viewer’s) psychological conditioning. The soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange comprises classical music and electronic synthetic music composed by Wendy Carlos. Some of the music is heard only as excerpts, e.g. Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 (aka Land of Hope and Glory) ironically heralding a politician’s appearance at the prison.
The main theme is an electronic transcription of Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, composed in 1695, for the procession of Queen Mary’s cortège through London en route to Westminster Abbey. “March from A Clockwork Orange” was the first recorded song featuring a vocoder for the singing; synthpop bands often cite it as their inspiration.
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Star Trek: The Motion Picture: You will leave this album floored, impressed, and dying to go back for more of this unique, gripping musical journey. Even the little parts, like the brief introduction to the Klingon theme Goldsmith would use in his later scores or the wondrous but short “Flying Office”, dazzle in their intricacy.
Goldsmith’s finest score, for it enraptures you like few other works, plus it boasts a wealth of themes and variations that no future Trek score comes anywhere close to. With most Trek scores nowhere close to this level of quality, the original shines even brighter than it did 30 years ago. You cannot call yourself a true film music lover (or “soundtrack geek”, for benefit of our site name) until you’ve truly experienced this music. To do otherwise would be…illogical.
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The Matrix: The Matrix was a refreshing bit of cinema that came just before the turn of the century. No small part of the success of the film was due to the net result of Don Davis' score coupled with Jason Bentley's source cue selection. Cues like "Spybreak" and "Clubbed to Death" have since been used in a variety of commercial means and along with The Matrix itself have become a significant part of film history.
The most entertaining cues tend to come from scenes that are within The Matrix itself. As Mr. Thomas Anderson begins his journey down "the rabbit hole" he finds himself in a dark, dance club, where he is to meet the infamous, hacker "Trinity." A mix of "Minefields" by Prodigy and "Dragula" by Rob Zombie are featured as source in the atmospheric club scene.
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T2: Judgment Day: The score that Brad Fiedel would produce for Terminator 2 is largely a technological update of the first score, utilizing many of the same motifs and synth effects, and there were positives and negatives to this retainment. On the plus side, Fiedel does have a knack for conjuring obnoxiously effective electronic sounds that adequately represent some of the technological horror you witness on screen.
Additionally, the carry-over of the primary theme and supporting motifs into any sequel is important, and Fiedel does an outstanding job of incorporating all of the elements from the first score into the second one. If you enjoyed the stark, groaning atmosphere of the first Terminator score, then Terminator 2 will surely impress you.
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Alien: Jerry Goldsmith split the score into two styles. The theme for the spacecraft Nostromo and its doomed crew is a romantic trumpet and orchestra theme ("Main Title") that is followed by a mysterious two-note echoing motif. It suggests both primal wonder for the great unknown and the nagging fear that follows it. Goldsmith very well knew that to suggest something "alien" he had to create sounds both unfamiliar and threatening.
A great score is one that makes every track a winner, and Goldsmith gives us every variation of building suspense there is without a false note. There's moody environmental cues like "The Lab" and "The Eggs". There's slow build suspense cues such as the "The Shaft" and "Hanging On." There's high energy action cues like "It's A Droid" and "Out The Door."
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2001: A Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick always had a reputation for individuality in his film-making. He invariably created films which stretched the boundaries of established practice in terms of concept, story, camera work and direction. With 2001: A Space Odyssey he also confounded expectations in the soundtrack department.
He chose to ignore Alex North's specially composed music and stick to his original "temp track" consisting of classical works of his own choosing. The rest as they say is history. His choices of music ranged from the conventional to the positively weird, taking some courageous risks with his creation, but those choices complemented the storyline perfectly and created a soundtrack legend along the way.
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Blade Runner: Vangelis' futuristic composition of Los Angeles' dark future is a beautiful and haunting collection. It has many memorable themes that go perfectly with the tone of the dark, rainy, neon-lit alleys of the under world of the city. Themes such as "Rachels Song," "Damask Rose," "Blade Runner Blues," and the emotional "Tears in Rain" are pure masterpieces.
It certainly made Ridley Scott's film a serious piece of work. The overall mood of the score is often dark and somewhat surreal - Vangelis' synthetic forte of electronic scoring is a perfect match for this tale of the future. Unlike Chariots of Fire's chart-topping soundtrack album success in 1981, at least twelve years expired before an official release of Blade Runner music was made available to the public.
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Star Wars Episode IV: The music of Star Wars has become so engrained in pop culture that it has become nearly impossible to say anything new about it. US pop culture has been drenched with familiarity with its main titles. It has featured stronger development in one (some would argue two) sequel score, not to mention expansions through the prequel trilogy scores.
The closing action cues get more powerful and driving, and the force theme fanfare that kicks off the exceptional end credits is crisp, regal, and emotionally engaging. It’s the kind of momentum one can only sense when you play through the whole score; the score proves to be the rare breed that can tell a story all by itself. At the end of the day Star Wars is one of the few scores that lives up to its critical AND mainstream hype.
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Battlestar Galactica: In 2003, McCreary became the sole composer on the the re-imagined series of Battlestar Galactica. McCreary also composes for Caprica, a prequel series set in the fictional Battlestar Galactica universe.
To date, six Battlestar Galactica soundtrack albums have been released, and have garnered a great deal of critical acclaim and commercial success. The soundtracks for season two and three ranked amongst Amazon.com's Top 30 Music Sales on their first days of release.
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The Bride of Frankenstein: Franz Waxman's score for James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein has held up better than almost any other movie music of the 1930s.
In addition to their association with the movie for which they were composed, major parts of Waxman's score later turned up in the Flash Gordon serials (like The Bride of Frankenstein, made at Universal), especially Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars, and fragments also showed up in various westerns and B-thrillers.
With its strange, sweeping yet disquieting melodies and unusual timbres, it was some of the most ambitious music ever written for the screen. Waxman's music for The Bride of Frankenstein gave the movie the impact and sweep of a Wagnerian opera (although the finale recalls the Mahler "Symphony No. 2").
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Children of Dune: Up-and-coming talent Brian Tyler was hired to provide the music and surpassed all expectations, Children of Dune became one of the most popular soundtracks of 2003. The score is epic in scope along the lines of Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings and creates a soundscape worthy of the full breadth of Herbert's science fiction vision.
The album opens with "Summon the Worms" with a powerful thematic performance of the main theme in the brass and racing strings. Much of the score consists of ethnic percussion, woodwinds, and vocals, but Tyler never lets it fade into the filler music. Children of Dune elevated Tyler above the "new composer" status while breaking him out of the typecast horror composer. Overall, it is one of the best scores of 2003.
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Forbidden Planet: Forbidden Planet's innovative electronic music score (credited as "electronic tonalities" - partly to avoid having to pay any of the film industry music guild fees - was composed by Louis and Bebe Barron.
The MGM producer Dore Schary discovered this couple quite by chance at a beatnik nightclub in Greenwich Village while on a family Christmas visit to New York City. Schary hired them on the spot to compose his film's musical score.
The theremin (which was not used in Forbidden Planet) had been used as early as 1945, in the movie Spellbound, but the Barron's score is widely credited with being the first completely electronic score. This soundtrack preceded invention of the Moog synthesizer (1964) by eight years.
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King Kong 1933: In 1933, the legendary MAX STEINER wrote a score that was epic, romantic and terrifying, setting the standard for the key elements that audiences have come to associate with Kong.
Steiner’s grand score celebrates the golden age of adventure, but also retains a kind of playful naiveté with the music. For today’s audience, the “Jungle Dance” cue does sound like a very contrived idea of what “exotic” music might sound like (an idea that would be hinted at later in Peter Jackson’s 2005 adaptation.)
But for delving ears first into the strange and adventurous elements of a authentic-to-the decade “Kong”, Steiner’s work is unmatched, and therein lies the fascination with the score.
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Mars Attacks!: No entry in the Burton-Elfman cannon is quite as audaciously splattered about like 1996’s MARS ATTACKS, an all-star salute to a gory collection of 1962 Topps’ gum cards that ended up as a love-it / hate-it affair of the best kind.
Elfman’s DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL-on-acid salute to all things musically sci-fi about the late 1950’s and early 60’s, is an ooo-wee-oooo era besieged by theremins, lava lamps, ridiculous-looking aliens, cheeseball effects. It’s everything approximated by Elfman’s Herrmann-meets-Esquivel score.
Danny Elfman’s humor is bitingly sharp from the get-go as patriotic Americana horns and percussion proudly roll for “Barb Shares / Ode BG” before the Martian theme arrives to the mock happiness of “Landing.”
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Robocop: For RoboCop, Poledouris would be able to tinker with a trend that would soon become a passion of his: combining synthesizers with hugely orchestral constructs.
The resulting experiment was suitable for the half-human, half-machine cyborg at the heart of the story, and score collectors should be grateful that the producers of the film ultimately elected for this approach rather than the tempting, totally synthetic or hard rock alternative.
The title theme, appearing after the emergence of the cyborg in the film and featuring two distinct phrases, is one of confidence and rightful revenge. It is heroic in attitude and almost mechanized in its progression.
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Solaris (2002): The score completed the film Solaris. Cliff Martinez embalmed us with this orchestral-ambient-electronic suite, and in the process, he has quite possibly signaled a shift/evolution in how we look at film scores.
The instrumental beauty speaks to us in a very mature manner. Its message (delivered with gentle calm) is that in principle, soundtracks don't always have to rely on the 'classical' method of arranging instruments.
The overall feel could be described as cold, the music evokes images of snow and feelings of isolation, however the warmth and emotion is present in every song, always bringing you out of the jouney feeling positive.
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Stargate: It took the young Brit David Arnold, to storm onto the scene and remind the industry of the glory of its own classic epics, drawing several comparisons in reviews to the popular works of John Williams. With sweeping themes and a grand orchestral style, Arnold approached the film from the perspective of Maurice Jarre's Lawrence of Arabia.
In doing so, he captured the high swings of emotion that old adventure scores delighted in delivering to audiences, with themes flexible enough to both grace the quiet interludes as well as explode during explosive action scenes with thousands of CGI extras. With the snare drum and layered brass already in full force, Arnold's flair for patriotic music would serve him well in Independence Day two years later.
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Sunshine: This soundtrack isn’t all about intensity, “Mercury” seemingly lures you into believing it will began as the previous track, instead it grabs the listener and sends them in a euphoric state; it gives you a sense of absolution and freedom – which is quite uplifting. The title track is inspiring as it gradually gains momentum. The piano introduces the heightened sense of dramatic atmosphere and splashes of electronic buzzes go in and out.
Sunshine doesn’t hold the same theme, but a mixture of them. Hope, disparity, intensity, eeriness, and claustrophobic touches with every track hold the soundtrack together as it fits perfectly with the film. The electronic grittiness and eerie feel of many of these tracks keeps you weaved within its atmosphere.
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Alan Silvestri
Silvestri is best known for his collaborations with director Robert Zemeckis, having scored Romancing the Stone, the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump, Contact, Cast Away, The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol.
Silvestri is also known for his work on Predator and Predator 2, both of which are considered preeminent examples of action/science fiction film scores. He has also scored the films The Mummy Returns in 2001, Van Helsing in 2004 and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra in 2009.
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Brian Tyler
Tyler's cues for Frank Herbert's Children of Dune [Original Television Soundtrack] were used in the theatrical trailers for Star Trek (2009), Master and Commander, Sahara, Cinderella Man, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
A cue from The Final Cut was used for the theatrical trailer for The Da Vinci Code, and a track from Tyler's score for Annapolis was used for the theatrical trailer for World Trade Center. Besides films, Tyler's music has also been featured in the 2004 and 2006 Olympic Games, the 2006 NBA Finals, the 2006 Super Bowl, and the 2006 U.S. Open Golf Championship.
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Vangelis
He is best known for his Academy Award winning score for the film Chariots of Fire, and scores for the films Blade Runner and 1492: Conquest of Paradise. Vangelis began his musical career working with several popular bands of the 1960s.
In a career spanning over 49 years, writing and composing more than 40 albums, Vangelis is generally regarded by music critics as one of the greatest composers of electronic music of all time.
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Franz Waxman
Waxman orchestrated Frederick Hollander's score for the 1930 film Blue Angel and then wrote original scores for several German films. He was commissioned to write the score for Bride of Frankenstein, his first American film, by director James Whale who had admired his score for Liliom.
During his career, Waxman received 12 Academy Award nominations, winning in consecutive years for Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun. Franz Waxman worked with the director Alfred Hitchcock in four films, including Rebecca, Suspicion, The Paradine Case, and Rear Window.
Although Miklos Rozsa wrote most of the music for Spellbound, some of Franz Waxman's music was also used. Franz Waxman had two Oscar Nominations for his scores with Alfred Hitchcock: Rebecca and Suspicion.
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John Williams
While skilled in a variety of twentieth-century compositional idioms, Williams's most familiar style may be described as a form of neoromanticism, inspired by the same large-scale orchestral music of the late 19th century—especially Wagnerian music and its concept of leitmotif—that inspired his film-composing predecessors.
Williams produced a grand symphonic score for Star Wars (1977) in the fashion of Richard Strauss and Golden Age Hollywood composers Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner. Its main theme—"Luke's Theme"—is among the most widely recognized in motion picture history. The film and its soundtrack were both immensely successful, and Williams won an Academy Award for Best Original Score.
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