Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Jerome Moross
Today marks the birthday anniversary of the American composer Jerome Moross, famous for sixteen classic film scores he wrote between 1948 and 1969, but also the creator of a handful of concert works, including this 1966 "Variations on a Waltz." Moross was born in Brooklyn, began playing the piano and composing at an early age, and graduated from the New York University School of Music at 18. For a biographical dictionary published shortly before his death in 1983, Moross wrote: "In my teens I was interested in sounds per se, as so many composers are today. By my late twenties I found myself interested in communicating with my audience… I feel that a composer should write what he feels, but in such a way that his audience experiences his emotions anew… In addition, the composer must reflect his landscape and mine is the landscape of America. I don't do it consciously; it is simply the only way I can write." Speaking of landscapes, his best known film score is for the 1958 western The Big Country, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Moross said he composed the main title after recalling a walk he took in the flat lands around Albuquerque, New Mexico, shortly before he moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s.