Maurice Jarre

FILM COMPOSERS DON'T write melodies so much as emotions; their music is the heartbeat that gives movie images instant and lasting resonance. Jarre, who died in Los Angeles on March 29 at 84, put this knowledge to use in his first famous scores: the heroic theme that lent a galloping grandeur to David Lean's 1962 Middle Eastern western, Lawrence of Arabia, and the chorus of balalaikas in Lean's 1965 Doctor Zhivago that promised ecstatic reunion after the grimmest separation. In a half-century of movie work, Jarre wrote the music for more than 150 features, but it's his underscoring of Lean's films...

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