Leonard Rosenman Quotes

I did some research in pop music at the time, I knew nothing about pop music, I had the same kind of concept that I had in EAST OF EDEN except that it was a little less complex. I had motifs for people that little by little came in counterpoint with each other.
Leonard Rosenman

If I wanted to be a film composer, it would have been an outstanding kind of threat. But since I didn’t take film seriously for many, many years, I thought they’d buy me the kind of money to give me the leisure to write my own work. I was totally trained for the concert field and just by luck I had gotten into films. I didn’t care. André Previn said to me at the time, “They are going to throw out your score,” I said, “I bet they won’t, there’s no frame of reference between this and any other score, it’s all atonal.” I didn’t care; I lived in New York at the time. Not that I didn’t try to do the best I can, my name was on it, but at the same time I just didn’t take films very seriously. In the concert field, everything is related to form. In the film field, the form is that of the film. At any rate, they just loved the score, because there was no frame of reference. That became one of the basic scores that influenced an enormous amount of composers in film.
Leonard Rosenman

Ralph Ferraro was a student of mine in Rome when I lived there. He was a percussionist at that time; I taught him all about music. I met him in rather an odd way. It was the first time I was conducting there, I had a little book with Italian, and I didn’t speak Italian at the time. I began to tell him, “Play so-and-so,” I was turning the pages of the book to find the translation that I wanted, and he looked at me and said, “I’m from Connecticut, I’ve been living here for 14 years!”
Leonard Rosenman