Elmer Bernstein Soundtracks & Film Scores

Elmer Bernstein was an American composer and conductor whose career spanned more than fifty years and helped shape the sound of the Hollywood score across several eras. Born in New York City, he trained as a pianist and studied composition before entering film work in the early 1950s. (He was not related to Leonard Bernstein.)

His early breakthrough came with the jazz-inflected score for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which brought a modern idiom into mainstream cinema. He went on to compose some of the most enduring themes in American film, including the rugged main title of The Magnificent Seven (1960), the epic The Ten Commandments (1956), The Great Escape (1963), and the tender, understated score for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967).

Bernstein remained prolific and versatile into later decades, contributing memorable comedy scores such as Airplane! (1980) and Ghostbusters (1984), and returning to dramatic work with films like The Age of Innocence (1993) and Far from Heaven (2002), for which he received his final Oscar nomination. A longtime advocate for the craft of film music, he is remembered as one of the art form's most distinctive and enduring voices.