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Michael Kamen (April 15, 1948 â€" November 18, 2003) was an American composer (especially of film scores), orchestral arranger, orchestral conductor, song writer, and session musician.

Background

Kamen was born in New York City, USA and studied at the New York High School of Music & Art in New York, then at Juilliard's School for Music Dance and Drama in New York. While studying the oboe, he formed a rock classical fusion band called New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, which was on the first of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic.

Early work

Kamen's early work centered on ballets, thirteen in all, then expanding into Hollywood by writing the score for The Next Man in 1976, then into pop and rock arranging, collaborating with Pink Floyd on their album, The Wall. One of his songs Sing Lady Sing, was renamed Them Changes and parlayed into a hit by Buddy Miles.

Career in popular music

Kamen became a highly-sought arranger in the realms of pop and rock music. In fact in Great Britain he was among an illustrious and small group of arrangers whose names constantly appeared on popular releases by major artists. His contemporaries in this field included Academy Award winner Anne Dudley, Richard Niles, and Nick Ingman. His successes include his work with Pink Floyd[1], David Gilmour[1], Roger Waters[1] (he is one of the few people to have been invited to work with both former Pink Floyd members, after their acrimonious split), Queen, Eric Clapton, Roger Daltrey, Aerosmith, Tom Petty, David Bowie, Eurythmics, Queensrÿche, Rush, Metallica, Herbie Hancock, The Cranberries, Bryan Adams, Sting and Kate Bush. For Bush, Kamen delivered an orchestral backing for "Moments of Pleasure" from her The Red Shoes album, substantially building upon a simple piano theme Ms. Bush had composed. He achieved dramatic impact by varying the textures of the delivered line (by layering the instruments for harmonic effect, modulating the key, subtle "riffing" of the played notes, and other displays of the arranger's art form). In this instance, and many others, he conducted the orchestra personally for the recording. In 1984 Kamen had similarly heightened the impact of a pop recording for the Eurythmics "Here Comes the Rain Again", that score relying as much on his compositional skills as his arranging talents. Five years later, he did the music For Queen and Country.

In 1990 Kamen joined many other guests for Roger Waters' massive performance of The Wall in Berlin.

In 2002 he was part of the Concert for George as string conductor.

Other works

Kamen wrote eleven ballets, a saxophone concerto, and provided scores for the films such as For Queen and Country, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Highlander, X-Men, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Licence to Kill, the Lethal Weapon & Die Hard series, Mr. Holland's Opus, Splitting Heirs, and many others. To this day the overture from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is used by Morgan Creek Productions as their identifying theme, while New Line's corresponding theme is the opening segment of a track from Highlander. He also composed scores for both the From the Earth to the Moon and Band of Brothers series on HBO. He was nominated for two Academy Awards and won three Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, two Ivor Novello Awards, an Annie and an Emmy. In television, his best known work was on the 1985 BBC Television serial Edge of Darkness, on which he collaborated with Eric Clapton to write the score. The pair were awarded with a British Academy Television Award for Best Original Television Music for their work. In 1994, Kamen conducted an orchestration of The Who's music for a concert series called Celebration: The Music of Pete Townshend and The Who which was subsequently released on DVD. He also worked with heavy metal band Metallica, on a two day concert that was held in Berkeley, California, with the San Francisco Symphony. The S&M album went multi-platinum in 2001.

Partnership with Bryan Adams and Robert Lange

Kamen formed a partnership with songwriting duo Bryan Adams and Robert John "Mutt" Lange in the 1990s and the three of them wrote 5 songs together:

• (Everything I Do) I Do It for You (from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves)
• All for Love (from The Three Musketeers)
• Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? (from Don Juan DeMarco)
• Star (from Jack)
• I'll Always Be Right There (written for 101 Dalmatians)

The success of these songs included three number one hits in the US, two Oscar nominations, a Grammy, 2 Ivor Novello's and significant record sales.

Later years

His involvement with Mr. Holland's Opus, a film about a frustrated composer who finds fulfillment as a high school music teacher, led Kamen to create The Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation in 1996. The foundation supports music education through the donation of new and refurbished musical instruments to underserved school and community music programs and individual students in the United States. In 2005 the foundation created an emergency fund for schools and students affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Though diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1997, Mr. Kamen died from a heart attack in 2003. His last recorded work appeared on Bryan Adams's album Room Service where he played the oboe and wrote the orchestration to "I Was Only Dreamin". Kamen had also completed the charts for accompaniment to two songs on Kate Bush's album Aerial, which was released in November 2005. Some of Bush's fans, pleased by Kamen's scoring of "Moments of Pleasure" from Bush's 1993 album The Red Shoes, expressed gratitude when it became known that the work had been finished.

In 2004, when Annie Lennox accepted the Academy Award for Best Original Song (her composition "Into the West" from The Return of the King), she dedicated her achievement to the memory of her dear friend Michael Kamen.

Michael Kamen was survived by his wife, Sandra Keenan-Kamen, and by his daughters, Sasha and Zoe.

References

Michael Kamen's official website

External links

• Official site
• Michael Kamen at the Internet Movie Database
• Film Composer Tributes - Michael Kamen
• Official site of Mr. Holland's Opus Foundation founded by Michael Kamen
• Photo
• Michael Kamen at Soundtrackguide.net