Artist: Jerome Moross Genre(s):
Pop
Musical
Classical
Vocal
Soundtrack
Discography:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Year: 2005
Tracks: 23
The Cardinal Year: 1999
Tracks: 10
The Big Country Year: 1995
Tracks: 18
The War Lord Year: 1994
Tracks: 11
Classic Scores (cd2) Year:
Tracks: 10
Jerome Moross was one of those composers world Health Organization, despite some far-famed winner, was curst by namelessness earlier the populace for lots of his life history. He wrote at least iI of the most well-known pieces of film euphony associated with Western subjects of all time to come extinct of Hollywood -- the music for William Wyler's
The Big Country (1958) and the principal theme from the long-running series
Coaster wagon Train, which is still directly recognizable 40 years after the show left wing the air -- yet few outside of the "the business" ever knew his call. In some other reality, he'd have been at least as well known as Elmer Bernstein, or might've seen the concert hall achiever of his elderly contemporary Aaron Copland, only he wasn't to live foresightful sufficiency even to interpret tributes to his work as a moving picture composer.Moross was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1913, the midsection of tercet sons in a Jewish family that had no particular contact with the humanities, omit for enjoyment. Jerome made up for that, learning to play the forte-piano by pinna when he was four and composing starting at age ashcan School. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, where one of his old classmates and best friends was Bernard Herrmann. He was so modern academically, that he complete up skipping quaternion grades between elementary schooling and highschool school, and so was 14 when he finished high school -- an impressive achievement, merely one that besides left wing him very solitary for practically of his boyhood, as he had few peers his own old age to whom he could relate, owing to his deep interest in the modern music organism composed in the twenties. He attended New York University and likewise entered the Juilliard School of Music, starting there while in his senior class at NYU as a conducting fellow. Ironically, for a man world Health Organization became best known for the music he wrote, Moross ne'er actually studied opus -- he took everything relating to it, including concord, counterpoint, fugue, only as he told scholar John Caps in a 1978 interview, "I forever mat up: I don't want to larn how someone else writes." He knew the workings of an orchestra, having played in pit orchestras from his mid-teens, and was already composing in his own style -- at 17, he'd already written one orchestral piece, "Paeans," and there was nix that Juilliard could supply to the counseling that his work was taking, in terms of composition teaching. Working on his possess, he tried and abandoned the successive composition speech espoused by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, and then turned toward the music around him -- like Gershwin, merely in his have style, he developed a stylus influenced by blues and idle words, and at 19 published an orchestral slice called "Those Everlasting Blues." His goals were loftier than authorship arrive at tunes, or level getting a successful musical mounted, nonetheless -- he byword the dramatic art as a vehicle for multi-tiered originative efforts, desegregation history, dance, and song on a level closer to opera than to the light confections that Broadway favored in the thirties. He was a man beyond his time -- in decades to come up, figures such as Stephen Sondheim would realize some of what Moross proposed to do, in the surroundings in which he wished to do it, just in the thirties he was proposing to proffer what amounted to symphonies to a public that wanted songs. As a composer of serious music, he was as successful as most work force of all time get to be in their possess time, with a symphonic music that was performed and ballets (almost notably Frankie and Johnny) that were presented, and he fifty-fifty proverb some limited achiever on Broadway in the early '50s, just he was eclipsed in the concert hall by Copland, and in vanguard theatre by his more media-friendly (some would aver shamelessly publicity conscious) Boston-born present-day Leonard Bernstein. Moross turned to the Hollywood soundstage for a living just after World War II, ab initio as a composer in the field of low-budget B-movies --
Obstruct (1948), dealing with neo-Nazis in America, was his number 1, just by the early '50s he'd touched up to major studio productions, including
When I Grow Up (1951) and
Captive City (1952) at United Artists, the latter a fact-based crime floor directed by Robert Wise. He worked intermittently on his possess motion-picture show scores passim the fifties, as well orchestrating those composed by others, in between and about his one heavy Broadway success, The Golden Apple. In 1958, Moross wrote the music for two movies,
The Proud Rebel and
The Big Country. The latter -- which had a score near as long as some solid movies -- proven to be one of Moross' most long-suffering achievements in the field. From the main form of address theme to the last parallel bars, the 74 minutes of euphony proved a reach with the producers, world Health Organization -- seeing what they had in hand -- turned this into Moross' get-go commercial-grade soundtrack album release, on the neophyte United Artists pronounce, and later it became a stumble with audiences. It at long last earned Moross his only Academy Award nominating speech. As popular and prestigious as the latter score was, however, Moross' work on a moving picture the following yr, called
The Jayhawkers, proved to be much more remunerative -- the series
Wagon Train, which had been running since 1956, was undergoing a retooling with its jump to ABC in 1962, and Moross took one of the cues from
The Jayhawkers, a rangy piece of music originally designated "Deuce Brothers," and transformed it into the new deed of conveyance theme for the series. The latter ran weekly right into the center of the sixties, and for long time later on that in syndication across the United States. During this same flow, Moross is as well credited by some sources with composition music for
Gunsmoke and other Western series.Moross continued to lick on musical projects until the first of the sixties and as well wrote an opera, Sorry, Wrong Number, and a big dead body of sleeping room music, just it was his film and television set exploit that unbroken him resolution and fussy, on pictures such as
The Cardinal,
The War Lord,
Rachel Rachel, and
The Valley of Gwangi -- the latter, a fantasy-Western involving dinosaurs, recalled
The Big Country, as did his title music for the two-season CBS oater
Lancer. Moross' last stately compositions dated from the late '70s. The
Big Country score lingered in the memory, even though the soundtrack album was deleted, and, ironically, the title subject served as a jumping-off point for the progressive tilt grouping Yes on their adaptation of the Richie Havens song ""No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed," the piece's string-laden marking transformed into a compelling Hammond hammond organ riff by Tony Kaye. Moross passed aside in 1983 just a few days short of his seventieth birthday, of congestive heart failure and complications from a stroke. In the decades since his death, his music has last been given the respect that it merited. In addition to a total re-recording of his music from
The Big Country and his other nearly popular movie loads, in 1997 RCA released a CD of the original cast recording of Moross' 1954 phase success Golden Apple, and as of 2005 there were at least two full anthologies of his film music out of CD.
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