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Barry
Herrmann
Rota
Goldsmith
North
If I could add 5 more:
Morricone
Jarre
Rozsa
Schifrin
Bernstein
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Mine would be Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, John Barry, Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini - probably in that order. But ask me tomorrow and it'll probably change.
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If it's greatest of all time (which was a secondary point by Lukas), rather than just personal preference, then I think it's not possible to list except in periods. Because film music does change over time and what once was influential eventually becomes the thing people turn away from. Even if they turn back later (like Golden Age influence on Star Wars)
Hans Zimmer is every bit as important to films of the past thirty years as John Williams was to the 20-30 years before. Doesn't matter who likes him around here, what he led has defined the sound of movies for multiple generations.
Probably means Max Steiner and maybe Rozsa are as important to the period of the 40s and 50s as Herrmann. (Honestly don't think Korngold can count because of the smaller number of scores, though so influential. And maybe not fair to leave out Newman, but I don't think Waxman qualifies as top.)
Herrmann could conceivably be the most important film composer ever because he did the most to familiarize the principles of reduction that led to minimalism, which has been a dominant influence in music for the last 40-50 years, across genres (including film music, from Morricone to Zimmer to ambient scores to straight up Glass/Reich clones).
Here's my personal five favorites, but not saying they are the best ever:
1. Goldsmith
2. Rozsa
3. Broughton
4. Williams
5. Barry or Zimmer or E. Bernstein or Morricone or RR Bennett etc... (that's right, I really only have a top four)
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A "My Bottom 5 Film Composers" would make for a nice change of pace.
1. Marco Beltrami
2. Michael Kamen
3. Marc Shaiman
4. John Ottman
5. Brian Tyler
6. John Debney
7. Elmer Bernstein
8. Alexandre Desplat
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Selections listed below are not based upon any historical significance, influence or status.
Richard Rodney Bennett
Alex North
Piero Piccioni
Toru Takemitsu
Pierre Jansen
My preferences are for those who have written music in various idioms (freely atonal, jazz, consonant-sounding tonality, big 'tune's, persuasive source music cues) with leanings outside Hollywood mainstream.
Piccioni & North, in particular, I can listen to on any day and never tire of repeated listenings to their works.
Jansen's scores for Chabrol films resemble forms of contemporary classical music ... and both Takemitsu & Bennett have had dual careers writing for concert hall or cinema.
[FYI: years ago, Jerry Goldsmith was within my Top 5 - but now he's in my Top 10 (which also includes Leonard Rosenman)]
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Posted: |
Sep 28, 2022 - 11:38 PM
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By: |
Night
(Member)
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Interesting article that I just found that I thought I would share: Who is the greatest film composer of all time? https://slate.com/culture/2006/10/who-s-the-greatest-film-composer-of-all-time.html
We all know that trying to decide who’s “the best” in matters of the arts, and especially who’s best in the art of music, is a bad idea. But let’s be bad. Let’s do it: Here’s my nomination for best film composer of all time.
A little background. It’s been said that to be a true film composer, you have to be a master of every style but your own. There’s some truth in that, as rampant eclecticism is the rule. But in fact one style dominated movies for a long time: Max Steiner’s faux-primitive ooga-booga music for the 1933 King Kong was the first full film score of the talkie era, and it set a number of precedents. Steiner was a Viennese who could emit late-19th-century music, redolent of Strauss and Mahler, by the kilo. Outside Skull Island, that plush orchestral sound would dominate film scores for the following decades: the Austro-German-Hollywood grand style epitomized by Steiner and another Austrian, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. (In recent years, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and others have returned, or regressed, to that approach, as channeled by John Williams in Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and so on.) Second, Steiner’s King Kong score established the idea of wall-to-wall music behind films—his Gone With the Wind score shuts up for only about 20 minutes of the movie. Third, he popularized the kind of obsessive musical mimesis called “Mickey Mousing.” When a horse jumps over a fence in Gone With the Wind, Steiner’s harp glissando follows her up and over.
Steiner scored hundreds of movies, but not everybody adored him. When Bette Davis was filming the scene in Dark Victory (1939) where she climbs the stairs in the middle of going blind, she stopped halfway up and came down to demand of the director: “Is Steiner doing the music for this?” The director admitted Steiner was. “Then I’m not going up those stairs,” Davis said. “If Max is doing the movie it’ll be me and him both going up the stairs, and it’ll wreck my scene.” The director promised Davis no music. In the end, though, Steiner did score the scene and, inevitably, mucked it up.
Then and now, producers and directors spoke a different language than musicians. What does a composer do with a direction like, “Write something hopeful, but with a sad undertone and a little sexy.” You nod, do what you want, and hope for the best. When William Wyler heard one of Aaron Copland’s cues for The Heiress, he said, “No, Aaron, it’s all wrong. What I want for this scene is a nice lesbian tune.” Nice lesbian tune, thought Copland. What he did was to go home and stick a few funny notes into the same tune, then bring it back to Wyler, who cried: “That’s it exactly! A lesbian tune!” (Copland won an Oscar for The Heiress. I once asked him what he thought about writing for film. “It pays really well,” was all he had to say.)
A lot of people will declare, as I would have at one time, that the greatest film composer of all, hands-down, is Bernard Herrmann. His résumé starts spectacularly with Citizen Kane in 1939, and he died virtually in the saddle in 1976, hours after the last recording session for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. En route, Herrmann scored Hitchcock films including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. Herrmann’s most famous moment is also, I submit, the quintessential movie-music cue: the shower scene in Psycho. It’s one of those bits (the shark music in Jaws is another) that you only need to “sing,” or rather, howl—as in Reeeek! Reeeek! Reeeek!—to conjure up the whole bloody affair. Psycho is as much state of mind as movie, and the shower scene embodies that. The music is utterly expressive of the action: The string glissandi make a nasty slicing sound that equally suggests female screams and the shrieks of predatory birds (recall Norman’s little taxidermic hobby). Above all, the cue is perfect because it’s nearly invisible, so imbedded in the moment that I suspect a lot of people don’t realize there’s “music” in the scene at all.
Herrmann did a row of classic movies and pioneered modern film-scoring, but he’s no longer my nominee for greatest of all. My new champion is a composer who’s scored nearly 100 films, from thriller to arty, who had an encyclopedic command of style as well as a singular voice of his own, and who is numbered in the highest rank of modern concert-hall composers—something many film composers aspired to but only one achieved: Toru Takemitsu.
Takemitsu was an amazing figure: a first-rate straight composer, detective novelist, and fanatic of film and pop music. (“My teachers,” he said, “are Duke Ellington and nature.”) Despite his success in the concert hall, he’s not properly recognized in the United States for his movie work simply because many of his movies never made it here. But there’s enough that can be found in your video store to show what he could do, including Woman in the Dunes and, near the end of his life, Akira Kurosawa’s Ran.
In terms of imagination and musical technique, Takemitsu simply had chops beyond Herrmann or anybody else. And if you want to talk about style: Woman in the Dunes has unearthly music close to his concert-hall voice; Rikyu, about a tea-ceremony master, uses short, almost inaudible washes of sound alternating with Renaissance-style viola da gamba music that Takemitsu imitated dead-on. When I first heard the wonderfully cheesy, neo-Burt Bacharach title tune for Kurosawa’s Dod’es-kaden, I thought, Takemitsu can’t possibly have written this. But he did, and it shows in the scoring: Phrase by phrase, the saccharine little tune is rendered into something new and surprising, starting with marimba and ending with Bach trumpet and recorder. That title tune is the movie: A story about a retarded kid living in a junkyard, which could have been dark and maudlin but is made with a light touch. Takemitsu’s sweet-sad tune tells us that from the start.
For the epic battle sequence of Ran, Kurosawa’s version of King Lear, the director told Takemitsu he wanted something like Mahler. What Takemitsu gave him is and isn’t Mahler. It has a big orchestral sound spread over wide spaces and a Mahleresque sense of doom, but the music is modern, keening with tragedy and horror, utterly unclichéd, as indelibly wedded to the images as the shower scene in Psycho. Together, the music and visuals make the battle in Ran, I propose, one of the most eloquent sequences in all of film.
As he lay dying, Takemitsu lamented that he’d been too sick to go to the movies. In his prime he went several times a week, and he had the means to turn that obsession into something marvelous in an art too little celebrated—and let’s face it, much of the time not all that worth celebrating. The ultimate test of Takemitsu’s talent is that, like some of Herrmann’s, his film scores can work splendidly on their own. Listen to the waltz from The Face of Another. You’ve probably never heard of the movie, you’d certainly never guess who wrote it, but it sweeps you off your feet.
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Lukas' list is EXACTLY my list except I'd bump Williams down to 5 and everybody else up 1.
The funny thing is, I say myself Williams is the Greatest of All Time, but not my favourite—and as I like to point out, greatest and favourite are two very different questions.
Cheers
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