score by Maurice Jarre With Lawrence of Arabia, both the film and its score are so iconic as to have transcended themselves and become synonymous with the Middle East in the Western cultural imagination. When we imagine the Arabian Peninsula, we...
score by Howard Shore Composer Howard Shore had his work cut out for him when he agreed to compose all three films in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Middle-earth has a dazzling variety of locales (Hobbiton, Minas Tirith,...
score by Bernard Herrmann In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle’s yellow cab is heralded with the marshal twomp of snare drums. Then, with a burst of Norse timpani and cascading harp, the dishwater-canary beast emerges from an expressionistic pyre...
score by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and his collaborator Atticus Ross both won Oscars for the downbeat, ambient soundscape they created for The Social Network. And while every aspect of David Fincher’s Silicon...
score by Nino Rota There are a few scores which are completely inseparable from their source film, so iconic that to think of one is to immediately think of the other, the best of them operating as seamless sense memory....
score by Ennio Morricone After a film like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, how exactly would Sergio Leone make another western? By making an elegiac, somber farewell to both the west and the Hollywood Western. For that, he’d...
score by John Carpenter Good film scores heighten the emotion of a scene or build up the tension or pretty much do whatever the filmmaker wants it to; great film scores, I think, are inseparable from the images they accompany....
score by John Williams How do you top the music of Star Wars? You don’t – you just add to it. Just as The Empire Strikes Back built upon the foundation of George Lucas’ film, deepening and enriching the Star...
score by Carter Burwell Carter Burwell’s score for Fargo is the perfect aural expression of the film’s chief theme of hardscrabble Midwestern dignity. The lilting main melody is lifted from a Norwegian folk song, appropriate given the ethnic makeup of...
score by Vangelis A pop star composer and a pop star director, both fresh from polar opposite victories (Chariots of Fire and Alien), achieved in Blade Runner a perfect marriage of tone, subtlety and style. Vangelis was the critical film...
