Jerry
Goldsmith

Jerry Goldmith’s musical education was initiated early in his life, beginning with classical piano lessons at the age of 6 and moving into composition and music theory by the age of 14. Inspired in particular by the Miklós Rózsa’s score for the Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound, Goldsmith began to explore film composition, studying with Rózsa himself for a time at the University of Southern California. Eventually he moved into television working for CBS and contributing music e.g. Perry Mason and The Twilight Zone, as well as several other series.

After leaving CBS, a 1962 Oscar nomination for the biopic Freud, his film commissions began to proliferate in earnest; by the start of the next decade he had dozens of scores under his belt, including contributions to Seven Days in May (1964), Seconds (1966), Planet of the Apes (1968), and Patton (1970). By the mid-1970s, he had become one of Hollywood’s top film music composers and his output became almost entirely devoted to that field - his peak being reached with his sinister soundtrack to The Omen (1976), for which he earned an Oscar.

Quite a few of Goldsmith’s soundtracks from the 70s onward were composed for science fict…Read More