Aaron Copland helped shape the sound of the Hollywood film industry and introduced the moviegoing public to modern musical styles. One of the most influential and beloved American composers, Aaron Copland played a critical role in shaping what is often recognized as the American sound. He is best known for achieving this through his works for the concert hall and ballet. Yet his film scores, were equally influential.

Alfred Newman was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1901 and at the age of eight he was already a child prodigy, playing in public with the utmost confidence and pleasure the Beethoven sonatas that riper virtuosos have always deemed ungrateful and unappealing. His preparations for a musical career brought him to the studios of Goldmark, Stojowski, and Wedge, and he won a variety of medals for composition and piano-playing.

The biographical facts about André Previn are the sort that make for interesting publicity stories. He was born in Berlin in 1929 and came to America in 1938. He is the youngest musical director in the film industry, being only twenty-one years old. He was "discovered" by Jose Iturbi at a concert of the California Junior Symphony Orchestra. He is a triple-threat musician, working with distinction as pianist, composer and conductor, and in one or more of these roles ...

Musically precocious, Bernard Herrmann won a composition prize at age 13, founded his own orchestra at age 20, and joined CBS as a staff conductor three years later, eventually becoming Chief Conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra. Through his work at CBS he met Orson Welles, writing or arranging music for Welles’ radio programs, and then following Welles into films; Citizen Kane was his first film score. Herrmann’s most famous relationship was with Alfred Hitchcock ...

Born in 1902 in Warsaw, Poland, Kaper studied at the Warsaw Conservatory of Music, then later worked as a composer and conductor in Warsaw, Berlin, Vienna, London, and Paris. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1935, and became a successful Hollywood composer. He not only wrote successful scores for MGM, but also many hit songs, usually with chief collaborator lyricist Gus Kahn. Kaper also worked in Hollywood as an arranger, conductor, and musical director.

At the age of 81, David Raksin appears to be a remarkably vital and busy man; he’s the president of The Society for the Preservation of Film Music and a teacher of film music theory and technique at USC. He took time off in October to come to Belgium as a guest of the International Film Festival in Ghent. This interview took place on Sunday morning, October 17, in a noisy hotel lobby. Of a quiet composure – he has seen and heard it all – but very outspoken in his views ...

The name Dimitri Tiomkin calls forth the image of one of Hollywood’s most distinguished and best-loved composers. Whether the genre was Westerns, drama, comedy, film noir, adventure, or war documentary, Tiomkin’s visceral, dramatic underscores helped bring more than 100 feature films to vivid life. The list of respected directors who continuously called on his services is impressive: Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and Alfred Hitchcock among them.

Lawrence Morton, film music critic and writer, discusses the composition of film music with Franz Waxman. This is the fourth of Mr. Morton's series of thirteen interviews with Hollywood composers. Franz Waxman is one of the most prolific composers in Hollywood today. Not only has he scored over sixty motion pictures since his arrival in the cinema capital, but he has also achieved fame and recognition for his achievements in other forms of composition ...

Gail Thompson Kubik was born in South Coffeyville, Oklahoma, September 5, 1914, the son of Henry Howard Kubik (1877-1972), a lumber merchant from Wisconsin, and Evelyn O. Thompson (1888-1960), a concert singer from Texas who studied under the Austrian-American contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936). A child prodigy and the youngest person to earn a full scholarship to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., Kubik graduated B.M. in 1934. 

Business was booming on old Broadway in the snowy December of 1927. While Herbert Stothart was conducting his operetta Golden Dawn to packed houses at the Hammerstein Theatre, other future film scorers were conducting musical shows to packed houses at neighbouring theatres. Max Steiner was conducting Vincent Youmans' Hit the Deck at the Belasco Theatre. Roy Webb was conducting Rodgers and Hart's A Connecticut Yankee at the Vanderbilt.

Hugo Friedhofer arrived in Hollywood in July ’29 and has composed the scores of some 70 films. He also contributed to the scores of 70 others. Indeed, he has worked as collaborator, adapter, arranger, orchestrator and utility composer* on more films than he can remember and in the highly specialized field of orchestration Friedhofer is regarded as The Master. He orchestrated more than 50 Max Steiner scores, and was the only man Erich Korngold fully trusted ...

Ig­or Strav­in­sky lived in the heart of Hol­ly­wood from 1939 un­til shortly be­fore his death in 1971 - longer than in any oth­er single place. He came ex­pect­ing to find luc­rat­ive work com­pos­ing for the movies. Al­though ini­tially at­trac­ted to the cul­tur­al im­prim­at­ur of Strav­in­sky’s repu­ta­tion, the Hol­ly­wood Stu­di­os soon dis­covered that what they couldn’t con­trol, they couldn’t use. And as quickly as they sucked him in, they spat him out.

Johnny Green is a vital, candid, immensely knowledgeable man, who has won a series of successes in nearly every field of contemporary American music. For almost thirty years he has been outstanding as a song writer, pianist, band leader, recording artist, radio personality, arranger, conductor and film composer. He was educated at Horace Mann School and New York Military Academy, and he studied piano and theory with Herman Wasserman ...

Leigh Harline is probably the most modest and gentlemanly of Hollywood's composers. In his early forties, he is good-looking, blond, blue-eyed , and slightly paunchy. Not the least of his virtues is his excellence as a host. He extends hospitality with a gracious bow from the waist and makes each guest feel like the one person without whom the party could not be a success. On Christmas Harline usually invites his close friends in to share a bowl of Jul Gloegg. 

Maximilian Raoul Walter Steiner was born in Vienna on 10 May 1888, at a time when the Strauss family was still alive and well, but the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the end of its carefree society were already in sight. The Steiner family was more than well off: Maximilian Steiner, Max's grandfather, had directed the famous “Theater an der Wien” and produced the first operettas by Franz von Suppé and Johann Strauss Jr. 

Miklós Rózsa is one of the most important composers of the Hollywood Golden Age (1930s to 1960s). The Hungarian-born musician was introduced to classical music in his youth by his mother, Regina Berkovits, a pianist who studied with pupils of Franz Liszt, while his father Gyula was a specialist in traditional Hungarian folk music. Miklós Rózsa began playing the violin at the age of five with his uncle Lajos Berkovits, a violinist at the Budapest Opera.

Paul Lamkoff (1888-1953), a student of Alexander Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov at the Petrograd Conservatory, came to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1921 as Peter Lampkovitz, and for a time was married to the vocalist Bessie Millman (nine years his junior). He was among the earliest in America to compose and copyright a suite of eight original cues for the part-talkie MGM picture Mysterious Island (1929) starring Lionel Barrymore. 

Born in New York on the 3rd of October 1888, Webb was exposed to the Metropolitan Opera by his mother and the works of Gilbert and Sullivan by an uncle. Also a painter (of the artist variety, not an interior decorator!), Webb eventually worked on Broadway shows prior to going to Hollywood in 1929 to orchestrate RKO’s RIO RITA for Max Steiner. He returned in 1933 as Steiner’s assistant and remained at RKO for most of his career, where he became their next major music director.

When fellow-musicians in more sedate branches of the music field ask why on earth I chose to become a film composer, I am stumped for a ready answer. Why, indeed, would any trained musician let himself in for a career that calls for the exactitude of an Einstein, the diplomacy of a Churchill, — and the patience of a martyr? Yet, after doing some 350 film scores, I can think of no other musical medium that offers as much challenge, excitement, — and demand for ...

Virgil Thomson’s reputation as a composer of film music is out of all proportion to his output. He wrote scores for only eight movies, six of them documentaries. Yet these scores - and two of them in particular - exerted a lasting influence on the development of 20th-century American music, not only for films but in the concert hall as well.

William Franke Harling, a talented, sophisticated and thorough musician, was born in London, England, on January 18, 1887 - a year and country which were to see Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebrated with much splendour and rejoicing. His family emigrated in 1888 to the U.S. He received his musical training at New York’s Grace Church Choir School and, returning to England, the Royal Academy of Music, London. He specialized in the organ ...