Leonard Rosenman, the composer who brought modernist compositional approaches to mainstream film music, died on Tuesday, March 4, of a heart attack at the age of 83.

Rosenman belonged to a group of young composers who changed the sound of Hollywood film music in the 1950s. Just like Alex North, another composer who was brought from New York to Hollywood to work with director Elia Kazan, Rosenman avoided the neo-romantic idiom that dominated movies completely courtesy of the big studios and their famous composers, Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Dimitri Tiomkin, Hugo Friedhofer, and Franz Waxman.

When Leonard Rosenman wrote his serial score for The Cobweb in 1955, just a few years after Alex North wrote the first major jazz score, A Streetcar Named Desire, it didn’t have a huge impact on the sound of film music, not in the way John Williams Star Wars literally changed mainstream film scoring in 1977. Film scores in general continued to be rooted in traditional harmony using conventional techniques. But Rosenman’s music played an important role in changing the way film music was approached by the studios. Everything didn’t have to sound like Mahler or Ravel. It could sound contemporary, it could be rooted in current musical movements.

What followed was an era where film composers had more room to experiment, and this was the beginning of the postmodernist approach to film music that still dominates mainstream films.

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