  
Leonard Rosenman
The Sound of Combat
Robert Blees says that Combat! had "tremendous sound effects editing. And
the music was unusual. Leonard Rosenman had already been signed from the pilot, then he
got a scholarship in Rome while this was going on. I talked to him once before he left. I
said 'Here's what's going on, it's a war series, you know that. It's just going to be a
lot more honest than the pilot. We're going to have exteriors and some interiors under
tension.' We couldn't send the film to him to score, because he was in Rome. So he wrote
eight to ten hours of cues — some cues would be thirty seconds of dum-de-dum stuff.
And then he'd write a minute cue, and a two-minute cue, and a three-minute cue and a soft
cue, and all these kinds of basic cues, and his editors had to adapt this stuff to each
episode, music that had already been written. Nothing was scored for our series. And it
turned out very well."
Leonard Rosenman gave descriptive titles to his various compositions. Some of the hit
tunes were "Tortured Crawling," "More Tortured Crawling,"
"Confused #1," "Man Drowns," "Soldiers Searching," and
"Saunders' Theme." In the book TV's Biggest Hits, by Jon Burlingame,
Leonard Rosenman compares the style of his Combat! compositions to avant-garde
composer Gyorgy Ligeti (brought to prominence for his music to Stanley Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey).
Rosenman created music for many great film soundtracks, including East of Eden,
Rebel Without a Cause, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and some less illustrious
music, including the 1978 Lord of the Rings and RoboCop 2.
Leonard Rosenman music books at SheetMusicPlus.com:
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