Intrada Soundtrack Forum

Interesting- Herrmann is chosen by all posters except one.

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WE HAVE COME TO VISIT YOU IN PEACE AND WITH GOOD WILL.

Except that neither Moross nor North scored any major feature films before 1950, which was the cutoff year. Alex North is one of my all time favorite composers, yet I didn't include him because his first real major motion picture came out in 1951. According to IMDB, Moross scored Close-Up in 1948, but I admit to never having heard of that movie.

Korngold
Rozsa
Waxman
Tiomkin
Steiner

Alfred Newman
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Hugo Friedhofer
Victor Young
Miklos Rozsa

5. Hugo FRIEDHOFER
4. Bronislau KAPER
3. Alfred Newman
2. Alex NORTH
1. Miklos ROZSA

Walt

It's interesting to see how many times those same handful of legendary guys (Rozsa, Herrmann, Friedhofer, etc.) show up. Also interesting to find Steiner sometimes just hangs in there right on the edge of the top five. I admit he didn't make my list.

We'll have to get another list going that covers the period between 1950 and 1970 or so. It'll allow for so many other legends, several sadly no longer with us as well!
--Doug

1. Erich Korngold

2. Bernard Herrmann

3. Miklos Rozsa( Rozsa is my favorite)

4. Alfred Newman

5. Franz Waxman, A. Copland, William Walton(3 way tie)

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Robert M Eastman

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"If music doesn`t sing, or dance, or have an interesting harmonic concept, then it shouldn`t be there at all. A film score should burn with its own fire, not merely glow in the dark like a pretty charcoal." – John Barry, 1972

Max Steiner was a highly influential composer and he has provided some classy, classic scores for such movie milestones as Gone With The Wind and King Kong. I like some of his work, among my favorites is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but for me, some of his music is too mickey-mousy, too mawkish, too much.

Though Steiner has composed what is one of the absolut highlight cues in dramatic film scoring:

That scene when Humphrey Bogard storms out to Dooley Wilson and sees that Ingrid Bergman has, of all the places in all the world, picked his one, and Steiner then takes the song "As Time goes by" and interpolates it into his cue... well, that gets me every single time, that's movie (music) magic pure.

Steiner's tendency for overscoring is one thing that really turns me off about him in general. Dmitri Tiomkin *really* had that problem too. I just watched Shadow of a Doubt, one of the most highly regarded Hitchcock films (top 250 on IMDb, and apparently his own personal favorite of his work), and I thought it wasn't a particularly good film OR score, except for a few good things. I was watching it with a couple friends who like Hitchcock in general and they decided to stop watching!

Alfred Newman and Miklos Rozsa only did that very rarely (I'd say parts of The Black Swan and especially Spellbound come to mind at the moment).

Also, I might get crucified for this because I know Steiner and Tiomkin have a lot of fans here (again, I like lots of their work, I just recognize their weaknesses and prefer other composers), but I also think their music has less of an original "voice" compared with the other composers on my list. Now I can always tell a Tiomkin score and almost always recognized a Steiner, too, but in terms of unique, original sounds/ideas...I dunno...it's hard to express what I feel lacking from them. Tiomkin's famous Oscar speech: "For my award, I would very much like to thank Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Johann Baptist Strauss, Josef Strauss, Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner, Beethoven, Schubert, Hayden, Mendelssohn, Rimsky-Korsakov ..."

Now while that speech makes me appreciate the man more, I do think his style is really largely a mish-mash of a whole lot of romantic composers. I have a couple friends who are really into classical music but look down on film scores, and when I've played them bits of Tiomkin or Steiner, they tend to dismiss the music as "Hollywood pastiche" but they sat up and took notice when I played the Main Title, De Vargas Family Escape, The Shores of Villa Rica, and Conquest from Captain from Castile. They also liked Korngold (and lots of classical snobs seem to nowadays...his star's really been rising this past decade in the concert hall) and especially Herrmann. I think that all three of those composers have a style in which their influences from other composers are not readily apparent.

Yavar