Again, I'd thought this would be easier: A score similar to Metropolis (futuristic, driven, "machine music"), not too many options are there. Battleship Potemkin is one of the finest, maybe THE finest silent film score. It's also, in my mind, of the greatest film scores ever written.
Making Edmund Meisel the composer, of course.
He also wrote another remarkable silent score, The Holy Mountain, a mountaineering drama, which is very different. More lush, more romantic. There is a nice two-fer available from EDEL, put together by my late, close friend Thomas Karban, that features these two excellent scores:
This is the famous "The Odessa Steps" sequence from Battleship Potemkin, and I honestly don't know how the music could be bettered:
Wow. The FSM board connection is known for time-outs, but today the connection seems to be extraordinarily flaky.
Anyway, I want to stay in that era just for one more candidate. I won't give many clues because the man's face will be recognized by anyone who's ever seen a photo of him. I found one with him enjoying his favorite pastime, one with which I myself have considerable empathy.
He didn't compose very many scores, and the best-known, relatively speaking, was for a genre I just mentioned above. He adapted a suite for concert use. It was originally scored for small orchestra, or "Salonorchester". It's not that the composer was snobbish about film or other music created for media; rather, on the opposite, he helped create and popularize a term which described music not written "for a higher purpose", so to speak.
This next one is a composer who always complained he wasn't asked to do more film scores, since he seemed to have enjoyed the opportunities that he DID get. In a sense he wasn't too dissimilar from Hindemith (except in style), because he too did not look down on "music for everyday use", rather, he thought that classical music should be approachable for the masses.
I think that's a great photo of this composer. Who is he?
Indeed, Aaron Copland. I just stumbled upon that picture some days ago and was intrigued.
Our next candidate enjoyed a far less high profile than Copland, but scored a lot more films, from shorts to features, over several decades. All for the same studio.
The Living Desert - The Vanishing Prairie. Seem to remember a 10" album of that somewhere. The studio would have been Disney and the composer is Paul J. Smith . I think...
Herman Stein, whose The Intruder lost Roger Corman money. Indeed.
I gather American B-picture composers aren't a great challenge.
But how about this man: He was a leading European film composer from the late 1960s into the 1990s, until illness put the brakes on his career, and, years later, his life. His work is predominantly connected with a single film maker.
That picture of Herman Stein was taken when he was losing his hair.
Oliver Wallace. Correct, just a little late. - Always watch out for the latest picture in the thread. I just don't want to spread this over hundred of individual threads.
I know that face.....
AFL?
Indeed, it's Angelo Francesco Lavagnino.
We return to Hollywood for a composer who scored Bs as well as As, in the 1950s mostly.
The one on the bottom who's nattily attired is Leith Stevens.
This was before he adapted the John Brown look (take a look at the inlay in the back of La La Land's "Lost In Space" C.D. set).
