For no apparent reason, we've been perusing the list of winners of the Best Original Score Oscar since the prize was inaugurated in the 1930's. It makes for interesting reading. Until 1938, it was the heads of the studio music departments who won rather than the often uncredited composers. The first named composer to in was Erich Korngold. In all though, and despite the great exodus from Europe to Hollywood in the 1940's, only 11 acknowledged classical composers (by our reckoning) have won the Academy Award. The most recent was Tan Dun back in 2000 for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Of course, one can make the point that a classical composer can be hard to define. A lot of them do a lot of things. But we would venture to say that we all know what we mean when we say classical. Which leads to the question, where are they? Or rather, where is Hollywood? When you have a Magnus Lindberg or a Philip Glass or a William Bolcom or a Jennifer Higdon around, why aren't the movies using, and acclaiming them? Where is today's equivalent of the great Hitchcock/Hermann partnership, or a natural successor to Spielberg/Williams?
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