Composers - The Unforgettables
by radegeddon | created - 20 Aug 2014 | updated - 9 months ago | PublicSui generis composers, of a grand-cosmic vein.
1. Ennio Morricone
Composer | The Hateful Eight
A classmate of director Sergio Leone with whom he would form one of the great director/composer partnerships (right up there with Eisenstein & Prokofiev, Hitchcock & Herrmann, Fellini & Rota), Ennio Morricone studied at Rome's Santa Cecilia Conservatory, where he specialized in trumpet. His first ...
2. Henry Mancini
Soundtrack | Breakfast at Tiffany's
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, but brought up in Pennsylvania, where he played the flute in a local band, as a youth, before sending some arrangements to Benny Goodman. Goodman offered him a job and, after serving in WWII, he joined the rearranged Glenn Miller band. In 1952, he was given a two-week ...
3. Jean-Michel Jarre
Soundtrack | Nine 1/2 Weeks
Jean-Michel Jarre is a French composer, performer, music producer and designer. With Vangelis and Mike Oldfield in the 1970s, he is regarded as a pioneer in the electronic, synth-pop, ambient and New Age genres, as well as an organizer of spectacular outdoor events and concerts, which feature the ...
4. Vangelis
Composer | Blade Runner
Vangelis was a composer and performer who worked almost exclusively with electronic instruments. With Jean-Michel Jarre and Mike Oldfield in the 1970s, Vangelis was a pioneer in the instrumental music and a main influence in the creation of the musical genre "new age," a style related to spiritual,...
5. Mike Oldfield
Composer | The Killing Fields
Mike Oldfield was born on May 15, 1953 in Reading, Berkshire, England, UK. He is a composer and actor, known for The Killing Fields (1984), Weird Science (1985) and The Exorcist (1973).
6. Ry Cooder
Soundtrack | Primary Colors
Born in Santa Monica, Ca., Ry Cooder, at the age of four had an accident which left him blind in one eye. He became a bit secluded and began playing the guitar. His biggest influences include Blind Willie Johnson, Arthur "Blind" Blake, Joseph Spence and Curtis Mayfield. Cooder has played on several...
7. Hans Zimmer
Composer | Gladiator
German-born composer Hans Zimmer is recognized as one of Hollywood's most innovative musical talents. He featured in the music video for The Buggles' single "Video Killed the Radio Star", which became a worldwide hit and helped usher in a new era of global entertainment as the first music video to ...
8. Zoran Simjanovic
Composer | Miris poljskog cveca
Zoran Simjanoviæ was born in Beograd in May, 1946. At the age of six he first begun to play piano, then he attended the music school "Mokranjac" and finally the Music Academy in Beograd.
Since 1961 he founded and played in some of the most recognized rock bands in Yugoslavia and abroad. He also ...
9. Jerry Goldsmith
Composer | L.A. Confidential
Born on February 10, 1929, Jerry Goldsmith studied piano with Jakob Gimpel and composition, theory, and counterpoint with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He also attended classes in film composition given by Miklós Rózsa at the Univeristy of Southern California. In 1950, he was employed as a clerk ...
10. Miklós Rózsa
Composer | Ben-Hur
A child prodigy, Miklos Rózsa learned to play the violin at the age of five and read music before he was able to read words. In 1926, he began studying at the Leipzig Conservatory where he was considered a brilliant student. He obtained his doctorate in music in 1930. Moving to Paris the following ...
11. George Gershwin
Soundtrack | Manhattan
He was born Jacob Gershowitz, 26 September 1898, in Brooklyn, New York, of Russian-Jewish immigrants. As a boy he could play popular and classical works on his brother Ira's piano by ear. In 1913 he quit school to study music and began composing for Tin Pan Alley; by 1919 he had his first hit "...
12. Danny Elfman
Music_department | The Nightmare Before Christmas
As Danny Elfman was growing up in the Los Angeles area, he was largely unaware of his talent for composing. It wasn't until the early 1970s that Danny and his older brother Richard Elfman started a musical troupe while in Paris; the group "Mystic Knights of Oingo-Boingo" was created for Richard's ...
13. Joe Kraemer
Composer | Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
Joe Kraemer has been scoring films since the age of 15, when he composed the soundtrack for his high school classmate's The Chiming Hour, a feature-length indie shot on Super 8 in 1986. This lead to three career-defining projects for Kraemer: The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher, and Mission: ...
14. Giorgio Moroder
Soundtrack | Top Gun
Giorgio Moroder was born on April 26, 1940 in Urtijëi, Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy. He is a composer and actor, known for Top Gun (1986), Over the Top (1987) and Flashdance (1983).
15. Alan Silvestri
Composer | The Polar Express
In his ongoing, decades-long career as a composer, Alan Silvestri has blazed an innovative trail with his exciting and melodic scores, winning the applause of Hollywood and movie audiences the world over. With a credit list of over 100 films Silvestri has composed some of the most recognizable and ...
16. Max Steiner
Composer | Casablanca
Austrian composer Max Steiner achieved legendary status as the creator of hundreds of classic American film scores. He was born Maximilian Raoul Walter Steiner in Vienna, Austria, the son of Marie Mizzi (Hasiba) and Gabor Steiner, an impresario, and the grandson of actor and theater director and ...
17. Jerry Fielding
Composer | The Wild Bunch
A three-time Oscar nominee, Jerry Fielding was among the boldest and most experimental of all Hollywood film composers. His music typically utilized advanced compositional procedures, producing dense, often richly dissonant orchestral textures, sometimes flavored with jazz. Fielding's film music ...
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