Information about Bernstein's background:
Born in New York City on April 4th, 1922, Elmer Bernstein as a boy showed a consuming
interest in music, especially on the piano. He was a natural prodigy and early on, his
teacher recognized a tendency on his part to improvise on the piece he was playing, an
ability that he was encouraged to develop. Bernstein also had a serious interest in
folk music, which was to serve him in good stead in the decades that followed. When
Bernstein was 13, his music teacher arranged for the boy to audition for Aaron
Copland, who was sufficiently impressed to arrange for him to study with one of his
own students. He subsequently enrolled at the Juilliard School in New York, where he
continued as a piano student and also took up composition. His composition teachers in
the late '30s included Stefan Wolpe and Roger Sessions.
World War II interrupted any plans that Bernstein might have had to pursue a career in
the concert hall. Luckily, he was assigned to an entertainment unit after being
drafted and it was while serving in uniform that he got his first formal opportunity
to write music. He was assigned as an arranger of traditional American songs for Glenn
Miller and the United States Army Air Force Band, which led to his being assigned to
write the music for Armed Forces Radio programs. By the time he returned to civilian
life, Bernstein had written the music for more than 80 broadcasts and wanted to pursue
a career as a composer. The post-war era offered ever-decreasing opportunities for
composers, as entertainment and music were changing (and no one was sure how, or into
what).
In 1949, he got a new chance to write music when he was commissioned to write the
score for a United Nation radio program on the founding of the State of Israel. Radio
was still a huge medium in those days and the dominant home entertainment medium, and
the broadcast was also carried by NBC. One network executive who heard it was
impressed with Bernstein's music and offered him the chance to compose the music for a
network program. That program, in turn, led to an offer -- increasingly rare in that
time of ever-tightening budgets and personnel lists -- to come out to Hollywood and
work in movies. Bernstein arrived in Hollywood just as the studio system was entering
a period of decline (and ultimate collapse), in the wake of the birth of commercial
television and the consent decree signed by the studios that forced them to give up
their theater chains. Still, there was work available and he spent the early '50s
moving between the smaller major studios like RKO and Columbia and independent
companies such as Astor Films. It was at Astor that Bernstein scored two of his
stranger film vehicles, the notoriously bad (though campily funny) Robot
Monster and Cat Women of the Moon.
He gradually moved up to doing films at the majors, including MGM and 20th Century
Fox, where he got to write the music for some of their smaller-scale films.
Bernstein's professional breakthrough took place in 1955 with Otto Preminger's film
The Man With the Golden Arm. The movie itself was a breakthrough in terms of
subject matter (drug addiction) and the fact that the lead character (played by Frank
Sinatra) was a jazz musician, and it opened up possibilities that weren't often found
in Hollywood features. Bernstein used jazz as the basis of his score for the film, and
the result was a groundbreaking soundtrack that became the first of Bernstein's film
music to get a commercial release -- it also received an Oscar nomination, the first
of many for the composer.
His score for the Preminger film made a noise among musicians and the somewhat more
adventurous portion of the audience for popular music, but that same year, Bernstein
was assigned to a film with far wider, more mainstream, appeal: Cecil B. DeMille's
The Ten Commandments. A religious epic that pulled whole families into theaters
and found a major audience in every corner of the country and almost every social
stratum, the movie was a monumental hit. Bernstein's big orchestral score achieved
great popularity and the composer's name was suddenly known and recognized among
casual filmgoers in the same manner as his much older contemporaries Max Steiner and
Franz Waxman.
In 1958, Bernstein moved into a new and booming field of music composition --
television -- signing with Revue Productions, the television arm of Universal
Pictures. For the next few years, he turned up as the composer of the main title music
of series such as the detective thriller Johnny Staccato (which was a Top Five
hit in England) and Riverboat, among other shows. He also cut a pair of light
pop-jazz albums, one for Decca and the other for Capitol, in 1956 and 1960,
respectively.
The next major milestone in Bernstein's career came in 1960 when he was engaged to
score John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven. A Western adapted from Akira
Kurosawa's medieval Japanese epic The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent
Seven proved phenomenally popular, not only in the year of its release but
perennially so. It had enough action and richness of characterization that audiences
loved to come back to it year after year on television. It was with the score of
The Magnificent Seven that Bernstein got to put his early love of folk music
into play. In a manner not far removed from Aaron Copland (or, for that matter, film
composer Alfred Newman), he utilized the melodic characteristics of folk and Western
music in a sweeping orchestral canvas that gave the action on the screen the veneer of
folk-legend and the urgency of a great symphony in performance.
In fact, the main title theme proved so rousing that it quickly took on a life of its
own. Starting in the early '60s, The Magnificent Seven theme was licensed by
the makers of Marlboro cigarettes for use in a series of Western-themed commercials
(replacing a much more non-descript working man image previously used in their
television ads) that ran for the remainder of the decade and right up until the end of
legal cigarette advertising on television. In the end, it may have become the most
widely heard piece of movie music in history, allowing for the hundreds of thousands
of airings of dozens of commercials for the cigarettes, all of which used at least a
fragment of Bernstein's music.
Ironically, the company that released the movie never capitalized on the music's
popularity, and until 1999, there was no original soundtrack album for The
Magnificent Seven. At the time of the film's release, Bernstein wasn't well-known
for his Western theme music. That soon changed, but not in time for United Artists
Records to do much about it. Additionally, United Artists Records was a new operation,
only a couple of years old, and had not done particularly well with the Western
soundtracks it had released up to that point, some of it very good and attached to
even higher profile productions than The Magnificent Seven. By the time the
music's popularity was achieved and recognized a year or so after the release of the
movie, the assumption was that it was too late to capitalize on it by belatedly
issuing an album, especially since one hadn't been prepared from the original film
recordings.
After The Magnificent Seven, Bernstein's career was made, although he took
great pains to see to it that he got other projects besides more Westerns. Bernstein's
work during the '60s ranged from delicate, sensitive dramas like To Kill a
Mockingbird, to such rousing adventure yarns as The Great Escape. The
latter project was not surprising since it was an action-adventure film by the same
director and featuring three of the same stars as The Magnificent Seven and
resembled his score to the earlier Sturges movie and this time there was an album. His
music for The Sons of Katie Elder featured a title theme very similar to his
forgotten main title theme from the series Riverboat, but also a background
accompaniment to an elegiac reading about the title character by John Wayne, and
included a song by Johnny Cash. And his work as music director on Thoroughly Modern
Millie, a musical and spoof starring Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore, won
Bernstein his only Oscar.
Having come up during the tail end of the studio system, Bernstein had come to know
many of his older musical colleagues, both personally and through their work, and such
was his success that he was able to do something on their behalf at the beginning of
the '70s. He formed his own record label, Filmusic Collection, and used it to release
a series of self-financed recordings of scores that weren't otherwise available,
including Miklos Rozsa's music for The Thief of Baghdad, Bernard Herrmann's
unused score for Torn Curtain, and a more complete version of his own To
Kill a Mockingbird score than had ever been available. The '70s also saw a decline
in the kind of big-budget film within which Bernstein's music seemed to work best. He
did some television work, including the title music for the series The
Rookies.
In 1977, he was thrust into composing for a wholly new idiom of filmmaking when he was
asked by director John Landis to score the comedy Animal House. Bernstein had
written the music for every kind of movie, from Westerns to science fiction, but had
never scored a comedy. He hesitated, but Landis said that he wanted Bernstein to do
exactly what he always did in scoring and, in fact, wanted the kind of big-theme,
big-sound scoring that he was known for. As it turned out, the mix of his dignified
music underscoring the film's physical comedy lent a deeper veneer of humor to the
movie, making it seem even more satirical. Animal House was a huge success and
opened up a whole new class and variety of film to Bernstein's talents. Over the next
few years, he wrote the music for such comedies as Airplane, Stripes,
Ghostbusters, and Three Amigos!
At the same time, his status as the dean of living soundtrack composers opened up
serious dramas and the works of major filmmakers to him in ways that they hadn't been
since the '60s; there weren't too many serious, big-budget movies being made, but any
producer or director who wanted a score that matched the opulence of what they saw on
the screen had to look to Elmer Bernstein. He was chosen by Martin Scorsese to score
his remake of the 1960 thriller Cape Fear, for which he did a rescoring of
Bernard Herrmann's original music; he also wrote new music for Scorsese's The Age
of Innocence. Bernstein also wrote the music to such high-profile films as Jim
Sheridan's The Field and Stephen Frears' The Grifters.
At the outset of the 21st century, Elmer Bernstein remained very busy as a composer,
conductor and arranger, and he continued to devote his energy to the restoration of
old film scores, making new commercial recordings of his own early works and those of
other composers. He was also busy as a conductor and arranger on various commercial
recordings that required his skills at coaxing a lush yet exciting sound from an
orchestra. His final film score, Far From Heaven, earned him an Academy Award
nomination in 2003. Bernstein died in his sleep on August 18th, 2004 at the age of 82
(shortly after the death of another legendary composer, Jerry Goldsmith), at his home
in Los Angeles. He is survived by his wife Eve, four children and five
grandchildren.
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With the exuberance and excitement of a man far younger
than 80, Elmer Bernstein was highly regarded as one of the most talented composers and
joyful individuals in the Hollywood recording industry into the 2000's. His name, both
in the industry and with his listeners, is synonymous with creativity, versatility and
longevity. The year 2001 marked his 50th anniversary as a feature film composer, with
music written for over 200 major film and television scores. He was the only composer
working at the turn of the century to span the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Digital
Ages of film music. A pianist at heart, he practiced his craft as a performer for
over sixty years, and as a composer for fifty, gracing virtually all creative media
with his work. People around the globe hear his legendary themes often without
recognizing their origin, and yet his contribution to his field is significantly
recognized by his peers and fans. Even past the year 2000, Bernstein continued to
collect melodies in his head and on the piano in his modest studio, awaiting yet
another film to adorn.
