Composers

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, a prolific British composer, arranger and pianist whose film scores were nominated three times for Academy Awards, has died in New York City. He was 76. Bennett died Dec. 24 after a brief illness, his publisher Novello & Co said in a statement. [For the Record, 2:50 p.m. PST, Dec. 30: A previous version of this post cited the title of the film "Far From the Madding Crowd" as "Far From the Maddening Crowd. " ] In 1967, Bennett was nominated for his first Oscar for the score of " Far From the Madding Crowd.

"The Real Reason for Marilyn Monroe's Divorce from Joe DiMaggio" read the headline on a 1955 Confidential magazine article that exposed a bumbling ambush involving the famous ballplayer and Frank Sinatra. The unlikely duo allegedly had tried to catch the actress with "another man" at an apartment in West Hollywood. Except the headline wasn't exactly true. The sex symbol and DiMaggio had been divorced for more than a week when - acting on a tip from a private investigator - a group of men broke down the door of an apartment on Nov. 5, 1954, only to be greeted by a middle-aged woman screaming in her bed. DiMaggio and Sinatra were reportedly spotted scurrying away from the scene.

Scoring a film as emotionally wrought as "The Impossible" is no easy task. Just ask Fernando Velazquez, the composer behind the film who previously worked with director Juan Antonio Bayona on his first feature "The Orphanage. " Not only did the composer have to contend with a real-life tragedy that killed hundreds of thousands of people, but he was given the opportunity to receive input on his music from Maria Belon, the real woman upon whose story the film is based. Belon visited Abbey Road studios when Velazquez and his musicians were recording the most important cues of the film and shared her story with them.

Charles Rosen, a pianist who collaborated with some the 20th century's greatest composers and whose award-winning book "The Classical Style" was widely read around the world, died on Sunday in New York. He was 85 and had been battling cancer.   During his career, Rosen balanced concert performances with writing. His erudite journalism included many essays for the New York Review of Books. He won the National Book Award in 1972 for "The Classical Style," his intellectual history of music by Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart.  Read the full Times obituary on Charles Rosen His other books include "Music and Sentiment"; "Sonata Forms"; "Romanticism and Realism," written with Henri Zerner; and "Freedom and the Arts," which was published in May. Rosen had a close professional relationship with Elliott Carter, the contemporary composer who died in November.

Something important is said in "Murderous Little World. " But what? This is Canadian composer Linda Bouchard's music theater collaboration with several of her country's exceptional artists. She has based her work on seven poems from Anne Carson's "Men in the Off Hours. " The 68-minute work, which premiered in Vancouver last month and reached REDCAT on Monday night, includes enigmatic video by Yan Breuleux and Frédéric St-Hilaire. It features a versatile three-man ensemble of brass and accordion - Bellows and Brass - that pretty much blew me away.

In the more than three years since Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted his last concert as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he has not managed to write very much music. Even so, Salonen's recognition as a composer has grown. One of his farewells to L.A. was the premiere of his Violin Concerto, which went on to win a prestigious Grawemeyer Award. His only major new work has been "Nyx. " It had its premiere in Paris last year as the culmination of a Radio France Salonen festival.

In the strait-laced Eisenhower 1950s, Dave Brubeck seemed, on one hand, deeply conventional. He didn't drink, smoke or take drugs. He favored expressions like "baloney!" and "you bet" over ruder alternatives. He had a prodigious work ethic that had been ground into him by his cowboy father on the family's California cattle ranch. But rebellion was in Brubeck's soul. Schooled in piano by his musically gifted mother, he became a jazzman -- outwardly square but quintessentially cool -- whose genius at marrying spontaneity and unorthodox rhythms with classical forms became an enduring legacy.

Composer Danny Elfman was deep into completing his work on David O. Russell's "Silver Linings Playbook" when the director called an audible. Perhaps, the musician remembers Russell telling him, there should be no original music. Elfman said he tried to stay calm. "Maybe we should sit on that thought for a bit," Elfman said he told Russell. If Elfman was frustrated, forgive him, as his time in 2012 was rather limited. "Silver Linings Playbook" is one of six full-length films released this year featuring an Elfman score, and one of three, including "Hitchcock" and "Promised Land," to be in theaters during awards season.

Every sound in Witold Lutoslawski's exquisitely made music seems there for a purpose, although what that purpose is can be hard to say. One thing in the Polish composer's scores generally leads to another, but why can be another conundrum. The music represents a world meant, for whatever reason, to be as it is. The Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group's glorious Green Umbrella concert Tuesday night in Walt Disney Concert Hall was Lutoslawski themed. The two Lutoslawski pieces played included the luminous late song cycle "Chantefleurs et Chantefables," which the L.A. Phil was first to record in 1994, the year the composer died and four years after it was written.

A film's music is often considered a character itself, and this season the roles composers have to play aren't getting any easier. Talking about love between the emotionally unstable is one thing, but how, for instance, does that sound? Or when a character speaks to God, should God answer back with silence or an orchestra? And what of a period piece that isn't a period piece, or a piece that's six periods at once? Here we offer a look at just a handful of 2012's notable film scores. Mychael Danna It was early September, and Mychael Danna was nearing the end of his eight months of work on "Life of Pi," the composer's third collaboration with director Ang Lee. The 80-piece orchestra assembled at the 20th Century Fox lot was on a break, and Danna, in a rare quiet moment in the studio's harp room, was asked to reflect on his initial conversations with Lee about the film.