I would say roughly when I was ten or eleven years old. I started taking piano lessons, but I didn’t have the patience to practice like I should, so I turned off of piano and turned to the flute. I became a good flautist. I played in football bands—got to see the football games free!—but it got me started, and I picked it up in a hurry. I became an usher at the Philharmonic Symphony, Hollywood Bowl, and very rapidly became wild about music.

Born in Brooklyn in 1919, Katz won scholarships at an early age in cello and piano, soon playing with Lean Barzin and the National Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and later with Hans Kindler and the National Symphony of Washington. As a self-taught arranger and composer, Katz wrote for the ‘Treasury Bond Wagon Shows’ and conducted the Federal Employees Chorus. He was invited twice as a guest of President and Mrs. Roosevelt to conduct a choral performance...

Born in Vienna in 1896, Salter had conducted in opera houses and silent movie palaces - including performances of Fritz Lang's WOMAN IN THE MOON - before writing music for early talkies at the famous U.F.A. Studios in Berlin. The coming of Hitler led to an exodus which eventually brought Salter to Hollywood in the late 1930s. The chance to score one scene in THE RAGE OF PARIS (1938) led to a career at Universal, though his chores during the first few years...

Born in Philadelphia in 1915, Herman Stein was a self-taught musician who became a noted arranger for jazz orchestras and radio programs in New York during the 1930s and 40s. In 1948 he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied formally with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, joining the music staff at Universal Pictures in 1951, where he remained until 1958. The Universal films of that period were scored by a team of composers working under music director Joseph Gershenson...

Les Baxter is the originator of the Exotica sound. His innovative recordings, arrangements, and compositions have influenced a wide range of artists from Jefferson Airplane to Quentin Tarantino. Les recorded for Capitol Record, Reprise, and others, scored over 200 films, and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Baxter worked in films in the 1960s and 1970s. He worked on movie scores for B-movie studio American International Pictures.

The whole thing really revolved around what I thought during the Army, because I had three choices. One, to go back to Yale where I was studying my Master’s advanced degree; to go back to St. Louis where I came from and head up an entire music studio I (which was a rather flattering offer at the age of twenty-two). And the other was to go to Hollywood and try to write music for films, for which I felt I had a certain bent, since my whole background was drama...

CAT PEOPLE marked Webb’s first collaboration with producer Val Lewton. Webb, along with RKO music director Constantin Bakaleinikoff, were brought into the picture before even the screenplay was written, an unusual practice as most composers, in those days as now, were normally consulted only during post-production. Lewton, however, did not want to settle for the pastiche scores often assembled for low-budget pictures, and involved Webb even in the story sessions...

While most of Werner Heymann’s scores were for lighthearted romances, he demonstrated an effective penchant for the dramatic and horrific with his music for ONE MILLION B.C. (1940). Since this prehistoric adventure fantasy had no intelligible dialog, it depended entirely upon the visual action and Heymann’s driving, dramatically punctuated score to carry it along. The score is heavy on brass, laying the music on thickly to accompany a prehistoric soap opera...

The 1930’s were the great training ground for film music. Although music for motion pictures actually had its roots in the scores written or recorded to accompany silent movies, film music faced its greatest challenges and developments in the 30’s, as producers struggled to determine the proper place for musical accompaniment. The decade gave us such ground-breaking scores as Max Steiner’s KING KONG which perhaps more dramatically than any other demonstrated...