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Music lovers mourn the loss of media composer master

hand-made-music.co.uk have learnt of the sad loss of film music composer, Sir Malcom Arnold. In response, hand-made-music.co.uk composer, Stratis Sofianos commented that "he wrote some of the most memorable themes in film music history and some of the most significant film scores, and he will be sadly missed".

Below is an exerpt of an article from The Times...

Arnold said he composed film scores, such as that for The Bridge on the River Kwai, above, so that he could conduct the music himself.

Sir Malcolm Arnold - October 21, 1921 - September 23, 2006

Prolific and troubled composer who won an Oscar for the Colonel Bogey march in Bridge on the River Kwai

MOST of the professional life of Malcolm Arnold was spent far away from the British musical establishment. His personality, until he approached old age, was as massive as his frame. In his youth he looked like a trumpet player, which indeed he was with the London Philharmonic in the Forties before he devoted himself to composition and conducting.

But he was also schizophrenic. Extreme boisterousness could be punctuated by moods of deep depression, which brought on mental collapses and unsuccessful suicide attempts, his outward robustness concealling a certain fragility of both body and mind. At a time when musical opinion was against him, he rejected the notion that the symphony was dead. "No more dead than the novel," he once said. By the time symphony writing became popular once more, Arnold had already composed nine.

A lot of his gloom was caused, especially during his middle life, by the scorn with which his music was treated in many quarters. He was convinced that Sir William Glock, when Controller of Music at the BBC, pursued a vendetta against him. Certainly Arnold's compositions, melodious, often jokey and lightweight, were little to Glock's taste and far too mainstream for a battalion of eager young Third Programme producers busily championing Stockhausen and Boulez. The reaction of a number of music critics only deepened the gloom; the term "Malcolm Arnoldish" was considered by them deeply pejorative.

Read more about Sir Malcolm Arnold article.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2373141,00.html