Favorite Composers

By: Seth Farmer

My favorite film composers. I strongly encourage everyone to listen to the track samples.
Honorable mention to Howard Shore.

BERNARD HERRMANN

Best known for his work with Hitchcock. I think most people recognize his North by Northwest and even more so his Taxi Driver themes. Perhaps most important is his work on Citizen Kane, who’s underscore helped (like most aspects of that film) set new standards. This is a great documentary on Herrmann that shows the breadth, influence, and importance of his work, but also reveals his distate for film music in general. I think his scores reflect this, expressing the frustrations of a man trapped in a business he didn’t much care for, but still had a burning passion for his art, driven by the need to excel. As important to the development of motion pictures as any single man.

track samples:
North by Northwest
Taxi Driver

MICHAEL KAMEN

I absolutely love Kamen’s work. He may be my all time favorite film composer. His melodies are so succinct yet exponentially expressive, as if each note has been painstakingly chosen as the single best representative of the feelings being evoked. My favorite of his work, the Lethal Weapon score on which Eric Clapton collaborated. Of note there are the instruments used to embody the two main characters, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover). Murtaugh is a saxophone: cool, intricately melodic, rusted and bronzedly brazen. Riggs is the total opposite: a cranky guitar, edgy and sharply schizophrenic. The entire film centers around this duality, and Kamen’s extension of that into the themes is brilliant. Also, the “ending” theme for Die Hard is one of the greatest things ever written. This is the passionate and unrelentingly sweeping schmaltz that plays when McClane finally meets Sgt. Powell face to face. But apparently I’m the only one who thinks so highly of it; I would have a link ready for this theme as well, but not only can I not find any sample of it anywhere on the Internet, it isn’t even on the official soundtrack. Life sucks I guess. There is no copy of Die Hard’s finale, and Michael Kamen has been dead for seven years. He is missed.

track samples:
Lethal Weapon
Brazil

JOHN WILLIAMS

Without a doubt my first interest in and love for underscore. What kid didn’t know John Wiliams? He brought terror to the deep. Transported us to a galaxy far, far away. Made us believe a man could fly. Gave adventure a name. I’m leaving out so, so much, but I have to. What is there to say that hasn’t been said a million times? The man is an undeniable master of the genre.

track samples:
Star Wars
Superman: The Movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind

ENNIO MORRICONE

I will never forget the first time I saw The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. There are many reasons for this, but one of the biggest ones is Ennio Morricone. I had heard the main theme parodied countless times, to finally experience its original context and understand its impact filled a great, vacuous void in my life. Remains to this day one of the few film soundtracks I actually own on CD and regularly listen to. Again, like Williams, Morricone is a freaking behemoth, so my little paragraph will add little to his legacy. The fact that Quentin Tarantino siphons random pieces of Morricone’s music and sticks them in his films, and they sound fantastic, is about the best proof of the composer’s genius there is.

track samples:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
The Mercenary
The Thing

MICHAEL GIACCHINO

His page on the Auteurs is not a very good representation of his work, and his skill reaches far beyond the film medium. Television, video games, only in recent years has he really focused on film music. 2009 wasn’t a great year for him, the two films he worked on that I saw, Up and Star Trek, were forgettable films with forgettable music. However his previous work with Pixar on both The Incredibles and Ratatouille was excellent. Speed Racer is his best work yet. A phenomenal tribute to the legendary anime, beautifully and perfectly melding big, brass orchestration with the pop sensibilities of the 1960s. Giacchino is an up and comer if there ever was one.

track samples:
Ratatouille
Speed Racer