The Best Music in Film

Fred Karlin

(Composed the music for Michael Crichton's Westworld )

S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?
"I have no single favourite score, but I have many favourites. I look for three basic qualities in a score: a strong unifying concept that in most cases sums up the essence of the film; melodic material unique to the film that defines and as a rule helps to explain emotionally its psychological subtext; and music that is able to stand apart from the film. Although good film music is primarily responsible for serving the needs of the specific film and will not by any means invariable work well apart from the film, when looking for favourite scores this does become desirable. Keeping that criteria in mind, I would certainly include the following ten scores on my list of favourites, any of which I would have been proud to have written: Body Heat (1981; John Barry) Basic Instinct (1992; Jerry Goldsmith) Braveheart (1995; James Horner) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977; John Williams) East of Eden (1954; Leonard Rosenman) Edward Scissorhands (1990; Danny Elfman) Once upon a Time in the West (1968; Ennio Morricone) North by Northwest (1959, Bernard Herrmann) The Red Violin (1998; John Corigliano) To Kill a Mockingbird (1962; Elmer Bernstein) Although these titles only go back as far as 1954, there are others on my list of favourites that go back into the thirties and forties, including Charlie Chaplin's score for Modern Times (1936, arranged/orchestrated by David Raksin and Edward B. Powell), a work that sums up Chaplin's approach to scoring comedies touched with pathos; Spellbound (1945; Miklós Rózsa), in which Rózsa demonstrates the power of a specific solo instrument to express the psychological state of a character, in this case Gregory Peck (who plays "Dr. Edwards"); The Best Years of Our Lives (1946; Hugo Friedhofer), for which the composer greatly enriches the harmonic vocabulary of film music by drawing upon the Americana suggested by Aaron Copland; and Ben-Hur (1959; Miklós Rózsa), definitive of his spectacular epic scoring."
Last Updated: 29 Sep 2008