Biography
-
Born
7 September 1924
-
Born In
Brooklyn, New York, New York, United States
-
Died
4 March 2008 (aged 83)
Leonard Rosenman (September 7, 1924 – March 4, 2008) was an Oscar and Emmy award-winning American film, television and concert composer.
Leonard Rosenman was born in Brooklyn, New York. After service in the Pacific with the Army Air Forces in World War II, he earned a bachelor's degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions and Luigi Dallapiccola. Amongst Rosenman's earliest film work was the scores for James Dean movies East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). He went on to compose for Fantastic Voyage (1966), the first, animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings (1978), Cross Creek (1983) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). He wrote incidental music for such television series as The Defenders, The Twilight Zone, Gibbsville and Marcus Welby, M.D. He also wrote the theme and almost all of the incidental music used for the entire run of the 1960s World War II television series Combat!. In the 1970s he composed Bass Concerto Chamber Music 4 for bassist Buell Neidlinger and four string quartets with a second bass.
In 1995 Nonesuch Records issued an album of music from both "East of Eden" and "Rebel Without A Cause" by the London Sinfonietta conducted by John Adams.
In his 70s Rosenman was diagnosed with Frontotemporal dementia, a degenerative brain condition with symptoms similar to Alzheimer's disease.
He died March 4, 2008, of a heart attack at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California.
Artist descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
