Tiomkin

Tiomkin

About Tiomkin

Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin (Russian: Дмитрий Зиновьевич Тёмкин, Dmitrij Zinov'evič Tëmkin, sometimes translated as Dmitri Tiomkin) (May 10, 1894 – November 11, 1979) was a three-time Academy Award winning film score composer and conductor. Along with Max Steiner, Miklós Rózsa and Franz Waxman, Tiomkin was one of the most productive and decorated film music writers of Hollywood. Tiomkin was born in Kremenchug, Ukraine and educated at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in Russia, where he studied piano with Felix Blumenfeld and harmony and counterpoint with Glazunov. In 1920, while working for the Petrograd Military District Political Administration (PUR), he was one of the lead organizers of two revolutionary mass spectacles, the "Mystery of Liberated Labor," a pseudo-religious mystery play for the May Day festivities, and "The Storming of the Winter Palace" for the celebrations of the third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. He later moved to Berlin, where his father was practising as a doctor, and had some lessons from Busoni. He emigrated in 1925 to the United States and became an American citizen in 1937. Although influenced by Eastern European music traditions, he was able to score typical American movies like Frank Capra's famous Lost Horizon (1937) or It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and also Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), both with James Stewart. He also worked on Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), which also won him a "Best Song" Oscar for "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'(The Ballad of High Noon)". In 1954, he won the Academy Award for best song of the John Wayne film The High and the Mighty. Many classic scores followed, many of which were also in Western movies, like The High and the Mighty (1954), Giant (1956), Friendly Persuasion (1956), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), Rio Bravo (1959), The Alamo (1960), The Guns of Navarone (1961), Town Without Pity (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and many more. Besides cinema he was also active in writing for the small screen, writing some memorable television theme-songs, as for Rawhide (1959) and Gunslinger. He was also hired to write the theme for TV's The Wild Wild West (1965), but the producers rejected his themes and hired Richard Markowitz. Dimitri Tiomkin died in London, England in 1979 and was interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

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