The prolific, groundbreaking film music composer Leonard Rosenman died earlier this week, and always happens, when the obituaries listed the myriad of films he was associated with, the enormity of his talent and output becomes truly overwhelming.  In a Hollywood career which lasted nearly fifty years, he was involved in well over a hundred productions, which doesn’t include the multiple contributions of individual television episodes.  Perhaps some of your favorite movie scores are among his achievements.

One of the most interesting aspects of Rosenman is how he came to Hollywood in the first place.  It seems that the serious young New York classical music composer also worked on music for plays, one of which starred the up-and-coming actor James Dean.  Dean, impressed by Rosenman and his music, started to take private piano lessons from the brilliant young composer, and they became good friends.  In turn the composer introduced Dean to director Elia Kazan.  Not so very much later Dean, Kazan and Rosenman found themselves in Hollywood, working on a feature film together — 1955’s East of Eden.  His evocative score for this classic American drama was an artistic and critical triumph, and it put Leonard Rosenman firmly in Hollywood’s bosom.

The list of films scored by Rosenman during his early years in Hollywood is full of familiar titles, and some not as well-recalled:  Rebel Without a Cause, The Cobweb, Pork Chop Hill, The Bramble Bush, Convicts 4, The Chapman Report, among them.  During his time he also worked steadily in television, scoring an episode of the original The Twilight Zone, as well as the western series Law of the Plainsman, the much-admired courtroom drama The Defenders, episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and the memorable martial theme and incidental music for the WW II-set action drama Combat!.  Perhaps his first cult favorite assignment came in 1967 with his score for 1967’s Fantastic Voyage, but at the same time he continued his TV work with scores for TV movies and National Geographic specials, plus the theme to the earnest medical drama Marcus Welby, M.D., which probably is still rattling around in many a baby boomer’s brainpan.  He scored the John Wayne oil firefighters movie The Hellfighters, and had a critical triumph with his music for A Man Called Horse in 1970, then went science fiction again with Beneath the Planet of the Apes. 

Television work took up a lot of his time in the mid-1970s, including his Emmy-winning scores for the Sally Field miniseries Sybil in 1976, and 1979’s TV movie Friendly Fire.  He also won the Oscar for his work as music adaptor for 1975’s Barry Lyndon, and for 1976’s Bound for Glory, the Woody Guthrie biopic.  Among his other major works were the animated The Lord of the Rings, the monster movie The Prophecy, Neil Diamond’s modern remake of The Jazz Singer, the Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s bio Cross Creek (Academy Award nominee), the daring gay-themed drama Making Love, then one of his fan favorite scores, the Oscar-nominated Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (the one with the whales) in 1984, and RoboCop 2.  Simultaneously with his movie and television work, Leonard Rosenman continued working on well-regarded classical music compositions. 

Of course, reading about all these films makes you want to hear the music, and this should send you straight to the DVD player to listen to his wonderful scores.  There are also a few places on the web where you might be able to get a taste of Leonard Rosenman’s work.  On Amazon you can sample short bits from his scores for the 1978 Lord of the Rings, his scores for East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, and RoboCop 2.  Elsewhere you can find his theme for Combat!, and on YouTube there are a few nice bits, including a long clip from Beneath the Planet of the Apes (the eerie underground church choir) , the Star Trek IV theme (played on a pipe organ, I think it is), a nice montage of East of Eden shots with James Dean, to Rosenman’s score, and another montage of Barry Lyndon shots to the score.  Also highly recommended are at least a couple of excellent write-ups, including this obituary from the Music from the Movies website, and an older piece, written on Rosenman’s 80th birthday, which has a lot of great background information about Rosenman’s early days in Hollywood with his friend James Dean. 

Leonard Rosenman, 1924 – 2008.