ELMER BERNSTEIN: Elmer Bernstein, the Academy Award-winning composer who created some of the most recognisable music in American films, has died at his home in California, at 82.
Bernstein, whose career spanned more than 50 years and included more than 200 films, was nominated for Oscars 14 times, winning in 1967 for Thoroughly Modern Millie. Among his other nominated scores were To Kill A Mockingbird, The Magnificent Seven, The Man With the Golden Arm, True Grit, and The Age of Innocence. He also wrote for television, including The Big Valley in the 1960s and many mini-series and documentaries. In 1963, he won an Emmy for The Making of the President: 1960.
Marilyn Bergman, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) president, said on Wednesday that Bernstein "was among a group of composers who stood in the pantheon of film composing". His scores for The Man With the Golden Arm and The Magnificent Seven are considered classics, she said, and his credit sequence for Mockingbird "stands as one of the best main titles, visually and musically".
Bernstein once said he began to see that the basic sound of its score should be childlike, because the film portrayed adult problems seen through the eyes of children.
"The art of really scoring a film dramatically, where the composer is almost an extension of the screenplay - that's very rare today, and it makes it all the sadder," Bergman observed.
In the 1970s, Bernstein gave his career another dimension when he scored such comedies as National Lampoon's Animal House, Airplane!, Stripes, Meatballs, Ghostbusters and Trading Places. He also created lyrical scores for My Left Foot, The Birdman of Alcatraz, Rambling Rose and other movies.
Bernstein was born in 1922, in New York City, the son of a high school teacher who loved jazz. He studied piano and composition and auditioned for composer Aaron Copland at 12. Bernstein gave his first piano performance at 15 in New York's Steinway Hall. He attended the Juilliard School of Music on a scholarship and New York University.
With the encouragement of Copland, Bernstein studied composition with Roger Sessions, Stefan Wolpe, and others before the second World War, during which he wrote music for the Armed Forces Radio Network. After the war, he continued writing scores for UN radio broadcasts, among others.
His first film score was for Saturday's Hero, a 1951 college football film starring John Derek and Donna Reed. Others soon followed but ithe 1950s, Bernstein's career was stymied when he was "gray-listed" during the McCarthy era for his sympathies to left-wing causes. During that time, he worked on low-budget science fiction films with such titles as Cat-Women of the Moon.
Then, Cecil B. DeMille, directing The Ten Commandments, hired Bernstein to "do for Egyptian music what Puccini did for Japanese music in Madame Butterfly", Bernstein once related. The composer, then 32, wrote the "source" music for the film, including the songs and dances featured throughout.
About the same time, Bernstein also wrote an innovative score for The Man With the Golden Arm, with its memorably jazzy sound, and his career took off.
Bernstein was valued in the industry for his youthful optimism and energy. At 79, still with no plans to retire, he told the Los Angeles Times: "I can't think of anything else that I'd have rather done with my life. I think I made a difference. It is an amazing human privilege to look back at your life and simply be able to say that you had some part in making millions and millions of people feel better, two hours at a time."
He is survived by his wife, Eve, two sons, and two daughters.
Elmer Bernstein: born April 4th, 1922; died August 18th, 2004.