[Malte Müller]

If he keeps this up, I must re-evaluate my fairly recent re-appraisal of his work.

Maybe Isham should be judged by his own music and not his thoughts about others, Thor. Just before you throw him into the basement or out town in your composer house construct 😉

Film music may be somewhat in between… on the one hand, many get to know and encounter film music through the movies of “their” era, so the music they start with may be the film scores of movies that were popular when they started to develop such an interest. On the other hand, among my favorite film composers are Miklós Rózsa and Bernard Herrmann… they had already stopped composing music (or even living) when I started to collect film scores.

Same for me. But I watched a lot of movies that were old back then already. So I encountered their music in my youth. But we ony had three programs back then. Nowadays young people may not even encounter old movies because they don’t have to and won’t choose them by themself. Some classic film composer – forgot who – once talked about the responsibility to write good film music because that is the only music some people have contact with and are “educated” by. Of course that was quite some decades ago and is not fully valid anymore if it ever was.