Artist: James Bernard
Genre(s):
Electronic
Discography:
Atmospherics
Year: 1994
Tracks: 9
Working with The Hammer Film Company's low-budget, gothic vampire, and monster movies during the 1950s to the 1970s, James Bernard's music set up the modality for many horrid moments in photographic film.
Bernard was innate in India and brought up in England. His enthrallment for the forte-piano and opera started at an other age. He was educated in Britain at Wellington College where he met his idol, composer Benjamin Brittan, whom was impressed with the 17-year-old's compositions. The iI unbroken in bear upon during Bernard's long time at the Royal Air Force, with Brittan encouraging Bernard to report at the Royal College of Music.
Bernard assisted Brittan on the opera Billy Bud and then wrote music for a serial publication of plays, which light-emitting diode him to meet conductor John Hollingsworth. At the time, Hollingsworth was musical managing director for Hammer Films and brought Bernard into the horror picture business. During his career Bernard composed the heaps for greco-Roman revulsion films like The Curse of Frankenstein (1975), Horror of Dracula, (1958) and The Devil Rides Out (1968). Ironically, the one Academy Award he did get was for best motion picture narration, which he shared with Paul Dehn for Septenary Days to Noon.
During Bernhard's most half-century long vocation he scored more than than 20 films for Hammer Films. In 1994 he participated in a documentary on the picture house, Pulp and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror. Three long time afterwards, in his other seventies, he was asked to compose music for the restored version of Nosferatu, presented at the London Film Festival. In 1998 Bernhard composed his last score, for a film documental on Universal Studios horror films of the '30s and '40s. Leaving behind a permanent imprint in film scotch, Bernhard passed aside at a hospital in London on July 12, 2001.
