But that's not all that Rosenman wrote, Burlingame said.
"He could also write the old-fashioned traditional melodic stuff," he said. " 'East of Eden,' for example, contains as much traditional melodic music as it does the more complex, dissonant music that Rosenman was accustomed to writing in his concert hall material."
The son of a grocery store owner, Rosenman was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 7, 1924. While growing up, he originally thought of becoming a painter before turning his attention to the piano.
After serving in the Army Air Forces in the Pacific during World War II, he moved to California and studied with composers Arnold Schoenberg and Roger Sessions.
In 1952, he received a fellowship to study with Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood in Massachusetts.
By the early 1950s, Burlingame said, Rosenman was widely regarded as one of America's most promising young composers.
He was writing chamber music and teaching piano in New York when he met James Dean, who was then acting on stage and television.
"We met at a party," Rosenman recalled in a 1997 interview with the Record, a newspaper in Bergen County, N.J.. "He heard me play the piano, and about a month later, my doorbell rings about 11 o'clock at night.
"I open the door, and here's a guy I don't remember all dressed in leather, motorcycle stuff. I said, 'What can I do for you?' And he said, 'I'd like to study piano with you.' "
Rosenman and Dean became good friends and wound up sharing an apartment; it was Dean who brought Rosenman to the attention of Kazan.
Rosenman later said his Hollywood career had a disastrous effect on his concert career.
"The year I did my first film, I had five major performances in New York," he said in the 1997 interview. "The minute I did my first film, I didn't have a performance [there] for 20 years."
Once he went to Hollywood, he said, musical colleagues thought he had "sold out."
"I couldn't get performances of my works," he said. "They would never say, 'I don't like them.' They wouldn't look at them."
Over the years, however, Rosenman continued to write concert works, including a violin concerto that received its premiere at Carnegie Hall in 1997.
"He was very proud of the fact that he spent as much time on his concert music as he did his film music," Burlingame said.
In addition to Judie, his fourth wife, Rosenman is survived by a son, Jonathan; two daughters, Danielle Falk and Gabrielle Davis; and four grandchildren.
Plans for a memorial service were pending.
Instead of flowers, the family suggests that contributions be made to the Assn. for Frontotemporal Dementias or the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital.
dennis.mclellan@latimes.com
