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Leonard Rosenman, 1924-2008
March 6, 2008

I wanted to note the passing of prolific Hollywood composer Leonard Rosenman, an artist whose name I wasn’t familiar with until I read his obituary in today’s New York Times. He died on Tuesday, March 4, of a heart attack. He was 83 years old.

 

No, I didn’t know his name, but I certainly knew much of Rosenman’s work – in his 50-year career, he provided the scores for nearly 100 films and TV shows. Along with composers Bernard Herrmann and Alex

North, Leonard Rosenman was widely credited with introducing avant-garde music—or, at very least, contemporary music—to Hollywood cinema. This can best be seen (heard?) in the methods of atonality he created in his scores for such films as The Cobweb (1955), Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970). Not that he wasn’t wholly at east writing traditional film scores, as was the case in his compositions for The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960) and the James Dean films Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and East of Eden (1955).

 

It was Dean, interestingly, who introduced the Brooklyn-born Rosenman to East of Eden director Elia Kazan, who then hired Rosenman to write the score, his first ever, for the film. (Several years earlier, Rosenman had supported himself after moving in Manhattan by teaching piano and one of his students had been the up-and-coming actor.)

 

Rosenman went on to win two Academy Awards for Musical Adaptation and Conducting for the films Barry Lyndon (1975), which drew on the music of George Frideric Handel, and Bound for Glory (1976), which had a score based on Woody Guthrie songs.

 

 

Posted by Laurence Lerman on March 6, 2008 | Comments (0)