20th/21st Century Classical

Some of the best classical music of the last century is, not surprisingly, film scores.

In the 1800s, composers we admire, like Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, composed music to accompany moving images, like the ballets "Swan Lake" and "Scheherazade". A century before, Handel composed the evergreen "Music for the Royal Fireworks" to accompany just such a display of pyrotechnic images. And of course modern opera can trace its roots back at least as far as Monteverdi's "L'Orfeo", from 410 years ago.

Good film music, like all famous classical music, contains either an emotional connection, or a wildly catchy hook. Typically it can paint a very specific, easy-to-relate-to, image evocative of a time or place. For my purposes I'm only selecting one work by composer, and strictly classical - so no jazzy scores like Lalo Schifrin's "Bullitt" or Alex North's "A Streetcar Named Desire". So whether you've seen the movie or not, here are ten film scores I think will persist into the centuries to come:

10. "Gone with the Wind" – Max Steiner

Tara's Theme is pure manipulation. Catchy, schmaltzy, manipulation.

09. "The Godfather" – Nino Rota 

This famous tune evokes the same feel as the descending notes in the Habenera from Carmen.

08. "Inception" – Hans Zimmer 

Zimmer's output is vast, and generally mediocre. This piece so perfectly represents the early 21st century, though, I think it will be the one to survive - often imitated, etc.

07. "The Pink Panther" – Henry Mancini 

Personally I prefer "Breakfast at Tiffany's"... but that has a lot to do with "Moon River". "The Pink Panther Theme" is arguably the catchiest cinema hook yet, and will be a hallmark of the sound of the sophisticated side of the 1960s.

06. "The Magnificent Seven" – Elmer Bernstein 

It's so high-energy, so widely-copied. This piece has the most typical feeling for an orchestral suite. It's optimistic, American, Western - at home somewhere between a trite composition like Grofe's "Grand Canyon Suite" and a masterful work of emotional resonance, like Copland's "Rodeo".

05. "Beauty and the Beast" – Alan Menken 

From the vast archives of Disney film music, and Alan Menken in particular, this work sticks out. The frequent problem of Disney film scores is a certain doofy, kid-friendliness (consider "Under the Sea" or "Friend Like Me"). "Beauty and the Beast" would have fit in nicely with the ballet scores of an earlier era.

04. "Lawrence of Arabia" – Maurice Jarre 

If Steiner, above, is the schmaltzy version of what a film score can do with strings, "Lawrence of Arabia" is the properly romantic. It is inherently romantic, foreign (no native instruments or arrangements here), and tragic - as befits a fading, and problematic view of the world that Lawrence inhabited.

03. "North by Northwest" – Bernard Herrmann 

"Psycho" will be Herrmann's "Ninth Symphony", but "North by Northwest" will be his "Fifth Symphony", just as recognizable, if not quite the magnum opus. (I guess that leaves "Vertigo" to be "Eroica"?) It's so obviously post-Stravinsky, a modernism that's daring, dynamic, unsettling, and most importantly suspenseful.

02. "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" – Ennio Morricone 

If Copland and Bernstein capture the excitement of the West, Morricone shows us the existential loneliness of a desert landscape, and a circling buzzard up in the sky. It's opening, the eponymous main title, is universally known, and "The Ecstasy of Gold" has become nearly as famed due to it's marvelous emotional vividness. 

01. "Star Wars" – John Williams

Of course Williams' "Star Wars" is the top spot. It's already in our collective psyches as a suite we've heard it so many times. The triumphal sound which opens the score, followed by the menace of the march, a romance for a bridge, and a final, and distinct, triumphant end in "The Throne Room". Critically the incidental themes capture the vast emptiness and alien nature of outer space, a sonic relfection of a species who was for the first time, beginning to explore other worlds.