What's the score?

My passion and love for the films lead me to another great thing which I have suddenly developed a deep love and hunger for. I am talking about Film Scores.

The thing is a lot of people don't realize the amount of work that the various people involved in a film contribute to the film. They just see the directors and actors/actresses names and give them all the credit for a good film (or if its a shite film they get all the blame) people fail to realize a lot of credit is due to the cinematographer (camera man in layman terms) the editors, the script writers and the music composers (the point of this blog).

I have always been interested in film scores, but only through the proverbial sidelines. In fact the only three names I ever knew were Ennio Morricone, John Williams and James Horner; and even still I knew of their works on only a couple of films:

Ennio Morricone for The Good, The Bad & Ugly. John Williams for Jaws and Star Wars series. James Horner for Aliens.But over the past few months I have immersed myself more deeply into the splendiferous world of film scores and whenever I come across a classic gem like Masaru Sato's work on Yojimbo (directed by Akira Kurosawa) I am tempted to slap myself silly for not involving into the world sooner.

The thing I love about film scores is that when you are watching a film, it appeals to a person on mostly a subconscious level and enhances the film's energy and mood (well, when done properly).

A film score has the power to It be grand and epic (Joe Hisaishi's work in Princess Mononoke) or tragic and sad (James Horner on Braveheart), which is something a lot of music genres cant achieve. It’s really sort of sad that not more people are not into scores because they are truly amazing and riveting pieces of music.

Here are lists of names I think you should check out...along with all the names that I have already mentioned:

Joe LoDuca (Brotherhood of Wolf & Evil Dead 1,2 &3)
Wendy Carlos (The Shining & A Clockwork Orange)
Jerry Goldsmith (a must)
Mark Mancina (Bad Boys & Training Day)
Danny Elfman (Batman & Big Fish)
Tan Dun (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon & Hero)
Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings 1,2&3)
Dave Grusin (Goonies & The Firm)
Thomas Newman (American Beauty & Road to Perdition)

There are countless others great music composers that are in the world of film scoring but I cannot name them all and even though the names mentioned might seem like a short list, their works are far from that.If you have any obscure film scorers I would appreciate it if you shared names with me...or if you have anything on the subject matter please feel free to tell.

P.S I would love to see Sam Hardaker & Henry Binns (Zero 7) do a score for a film once...I'm sure it'll be great.