Jerome Moross

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Jerome Moross (August 1, 1913 – July 27, 1983) was an American-born composer for the stage, and a composer, conductor and orchestrator for motion pictures.

He was born in New York City in 1913. He became a talented piano player and composed music for the theater. In the 1940s he began to work in Hollywood, where he would compose music for 16 films from 1948 to 1969.

His best known film score is that for the 1958 movie The Big Country, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Original Music Score. According to Moross, he composed the main title after recalling a walk he took in the flat lands around Albuquerque shortly before he moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s.

Among his other works include the music for the films The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960), The Cardinal (1963), and Rachel, Rachel (1968). He also composed the main theme to the 3rd-8th seasons of the TV series Wagon Train and was a conductor on many other films.

Moross's concert works include a symphony, a sonata for two pianos and string quartet.

Moross died in 1983 of congestive heart failure following a stroke.

Part of his theme from The Big Country (as performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra) was sampled, somewhat bizarrely, by MC Tunes versus 808 State in a top 10 UK chart hit, The Only Rhyme That Bites, in 1990. A decade later, girl-group Atomic Kitten used the same sample on their Top 20 hit I Want Your Love in 2000.

[edit] Work on Broadway

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