David Grusin (born June 26, 1934 in Littleton, Colorado) is a jazz pianist, composer, and arranger whose works in films and TV have garnered him numerous awards. Grusin has a filmography of about 100 credits with many awards including an Oscar for best original score for The Milagro Beanfield War, as well as Oscar nominations for The Champ, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Firm, Havana, Heaven Can Wait, and On Golden Pond.
Gabriel Yared (Arabic: جبرائيل يارد) (born 7 October 1949) is a Lebanese-French composer, best known for his work in French and American cinema. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, his work in France included the scores for Betty Blue and Camille Claudel. He later began working with American film directors, winning an Oscar for his score for The English Patient and a nomination for The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain.
Franz Waxman (December 24, 1906 – February 24, 1967) was a Jewish German American composer, known for his bravura Carmen Fantasie for violin and orchestra, based on musical themes from the Bizet opera Carmen, and for his musical scores for films. Waxman was born Franz Wachsmann in Königshütte (Chorzów) in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia. He orchestrated Frederick Hollander's score for the 1930 film Blue Angel (1930) and wrote original scores for several German films in the early 1930s.
Bacharach studied music at McGill University and the Mannes School of Music. In the 1950s and the early 1960s he was the pianist, arranger and bandleader for Marlene Dietrich with whom he toured. He teamed with lyricist Hal David and others to write many popular songs in the 1960s and 1970s. Bacharach's music has been sung by a number of popular singers including The Beatles,The Carpenters, Aretha Franklin, Jack Jones, Tom Jones, Dusty Springfield, Luther Vandross and The Drifters. He met Dionne Warwick, with whom he would form a famed collaboration.
Jerrald King "Jerry" Goldsmith (February 10, 1929 – July 21, 2004) was a famous and prolific American film score composer from Los Angeles, California. Goldsmith was nominated for eighteen Academy Awards (winning one, for The Omen), and also won five Emmy Awards. Goldsmith learned to play the piano at age six. At fourteen, he studied composition, theory and counterpoint with teachers Jacob Gimpel and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
Zbigniew Preisner (b. 1955) is one of Poland's leading film score composers, best known for his work with film director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Preisner was born on 20th May 1955 in Bielsko-Biała. He studied history and philosophy in Kraków; never having received formal music lessons, he taught himself about music by listening and transcribing parts from records. His compositional style represents a distinctively spare form of tonal neo-Romanticism.
Max Steiner was an Austrian composer who achieved legendary status as the creator of hundreds of classic American film scores. As a child he was astonishingly musically gifted, composing complex works as a teenager and completing the course of study at Vienna's Hochschule fuer Musik und Darstellende Kunst in only one year, at the age of sixteen. He studied under Gustav Mahler and, before the age of twenty, made his living as a conductor and as composer of works for the theater, the concert hall, and vaudeville.
Stewart Armstrong Copeland (born July 16, 1952) is an American musician. He was the drummer for the band The Police and is an influential drum stylist. Copeland is also popular for a wealthy catalogue of SOUNDTRACKS. During the early days of The Police he also released music under the (then secret) pseudonym of Klark Kent. In the late 80's's Copeland formed the band Animal Logic, who released two albums before their demise. He is also a member of the supergroup Oysterhead.
Alex North (December 4, 1910 - September 8, 1991) was an American composer responsible for the first jazz-based film score (A Streetcar Named Desire). North was nominated for 15 Oscars, but did not win until receiving the lifetime achievement Academy Award in 1986. Among his many film scores are Spartacus, Cleopatra, Streetcar Named Desire, Death of A Salesman, Dragonslayer, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Viva Zapata.