Film Music Composer Leonard Rosenman's Last Will and Piece

Leonard Rosenman, a two-time Oscar-winning composer who was credited with helping to modernize film music in the 1950s and '60s, died Tuesday of a heart attack at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 83.

Rosenman composed the scores for about four dozen films including the James Dean classics "East of Eden" and "Rebel Without a Cause," as well as such science-fiction films as "Fantastic Voyage" and "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" and period pieces including "A Man Called Horse."

He won back-to-back Oscars in 1975 and 1976 for adapting the classical music of "Barry Lyndon" and the Woody Guthrie songs of "Bound for Glory." He also received Oscar nominations for the original music of the mid-1980s films "Cross Creek" and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" and a Golden Globe nomination for his music for the 1978 animated version of "The Lord of the Rings."

He brought a more contemporary approach to music by introducing 20th-century compositional techniques such as serialism, atonality and microtonality to his field. We also heard that he used to celebrate a succesful piece by bellowing "Score!"

[Variety]