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In Remembrance: Leonard Rosenman
Leonard Rosenman, the two time Academy Award winning composer, has passed away on March 4, 2008 in Woodland Hills, California. He was 83.
Already a well
regarded composer before he began work in Hollywood, Rosenman lead
the way in incorporating more modern musical ideas into the
predominantly 19th century romantic European style of
film soundtrack composition. In addition to his back-to-back Oscar
wins for Barry Lyndon (1975) and Bound For Glory
(1976), he was also nominated twice more for his work on Cross
Creek (1983) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). Born in Brooklyn, New York on September 7, 1924, Rosenman studied piano as a youth. After serving in World War II, he studied with composers Arnold Schoenberg and Roger Sessions. He also studied with Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. Already gaining notice as a promising young composer, Rosenman met actor James Dean at a party in New York City, where the actor was working on stage and in television. The two became friends, eventually sharing an apartment together.
While working on the film East Of Eden (1955), Dean brought Rosenman to the attention of director Elia Kazan, who hired the composer to supply the music for the film. Although his score mixed standard film music ideas with more contemporary ones, he was immediately seen as a sell out by many of his contemporaries in New York. Rosenman would score another film featuring his friend Dean Nicholas Ray’s landmark Rebel Without A Cause (1955).
Rosenman would also compose scores for such films as Pork Chop Hill (1959), Hell Is For Heroes (1962), Fantastic Voyage (1966), Hellfighters (1968), A Man Called Horse, Beneath The Planet Of The Apes (both 1970), director Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation Lord Of The Rings (1978), The Jazz Singer (1980) and Robocop 2 (1990). He also composed music for numerous television series and made-for-TV movies, earning Emmys for his contributions to the TV movies Sybil (1976) and Friendly Fire (1979). |