Alan Silvestri was born on 26 March, 1950 in New York. At a very early age he began playing piano and decided to pursue a career in music.
For 2 years he studied at Boston's Berklee College of Music, after which he moved to Las Vegas where he toured with Wayne Cochran and the C.C Riders band and met Alan Bradford Quincy Jones’ associate. There happened to be a studio that needed music scored for a project, but since Alan Bradford didn’t have any experience in scoring, he asked Silvestri to take the job. Alan took the chance and made his first score for the movie ‘The Doberman Gang’
He continued his career by first working for the TV series ‘CHIPS’ and low-budget movies, but soon made his move to larger Hollywood films by working with director Robert Zemeckis and his movie ‘Romancing the Stone’ and the very successful ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy. Silvestri created a set of themes and motives for ‘Back to the Future’, which he used throughout the serial, with the 3rd movie being a musical tribute of a kind to the Western genre.
See Alan Silvestri talk about scoring Tomb Rider II. In this video he also talks about the scoring process in general
Silvestri continued his collaboration with Zemeckis for the years to come, but has also scored a lot for other directors as well. It was probably his great work for Back to the Future 3, which influenced Sam Raimi to choose Silvestri for his movie project ‘The Quick and the Dead’, which pays a huge tribute to Sergio Leone’s movies.
As many other contemporary movie composers, he uses soundscapes from his previous works to create a new one, which becomes recognizable as the composer’s trademark. During his music career, he composed for the full range of movie genres, from science fiction, through family movies and animation to thrillers.
He scored brilliantly an animation feature ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’, in a style established by Disney composers, Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley.
He also worked on the James Cameron’s sensational hit ‘The Abyss’ and wrote a fantastic score for this movie. Then he did ‘Predator 2’, the lovely comedy ‘Father of the Bride’ and the ‘Death Becomes Her.’
Silvestri scores Lilo and and Stitch
However, the highlight of Silvestri’s career was his Academy Award and Golden Globes nominations for ‘Forrest Gump’. The movie broke all box-office records and confirmed the quality of the Zemecki – Alan collaboration.
Silvestri continued to score large projects, some of which not doing as well as expected, but remaining big names in Hollywood – ‘Blown Away’, ‘Judge Dread’, ‘Eraser’, ‘Volcano’, ‘Mouse Hunt’ and many others.
Latest collaborations between Alan Silvestri and Zimmerman are ‘What Lies Beneath’, Cast Away, ‘The Polar Express’ and ‘Beowulf’. Among his other notable scores are ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’ ‘Tomb Raider 2’, ‘The Wild’, ‘Van Helsing’ and ‘Night at the Museum’.
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