Hans Zimmer was born in Germany, Frankfurt am Main, on September the 12th, 1957. He started his career as a composer in Europe, where he worked with electronic instruments. For some time he played keyboards with the band ‘Buggles’, then with the Italian group ‘Krisma’.
In terms of composing, Zimmer's career has been a typical one of writing jingles for commercials, fighting his way up through the ranks, working frequently on electronic scores and collaborating with composer Stanley Myers on movies such as ‘Moonlighting’ and ‘My Beautiful Launderette’.
In 1986, Zimmer worked on the score for ‘The Last Emperor’, in collaboration with David Byrne and Ryuichi Sakamoto, which won the Academy Award for the best score in 1988.
His success with the music for movies such as ‘The Lion King’, ‘Rain Man’ and ‘Thelma and Louise’ and the long list of first class scores for movies over the past 10 years brought Zimmer a firm position in the Hollywood movie scene.
See Hans Zimmer talks about the composing process for Pirats of the Caribbean. Part 1
Part 2
As Hans Zimmer has been working on a variety of different movie types, he demonstrated a wide variety of styles. He is particularly skillful at merging various styles into a fusion of pop, classical and world music. He creates a simple thematic material and then further polishes it into a highly effective piece of movie music embodying the film’s mood in such way that movie and music complement each other perfectly. Following his success with ‘Gladiator’, Zimmer, has also scored ‘Hannibal’, ‘The Mission Impossible’ and ‘Pearl Harbor’.
Zimmer is also known for his adaptability and inclination for collaboration with other authors and his style is hard to be characterized with a single example. ‘True Romance’ soundtrack carries only a limited amount of original music. Here Zimmer has created a carefree lilting tune with pizzicato and xylophone string sounds, which might suggest Afro-Caribbean steel bands, but there is also a dotted rhythm suggesting Christmas celebrations.
The very theme and the soft percussive sound are rather suggestions than a prominent motive in the movie. For some very violent scenes, he introduced some atmospheric electronic music combining synthesizers with some simple repetitive themes, which suggests Vangelis’ influence.
Another example is ‘Hannibal’ with a standard horror soundtrack featuring various sampled shocks and effects. However, at the same time he merges a wide variety of classical styles from baroque, plainsong and classical to the great adagios of Mahler and Wagner and Ligeti.
One of recent memorable Zimmer's scores is for "Black Hawk Down" and the soundtrack is very imposing indeed. The story for this movie is set in Somalia and is based on a real event. The soundtrack itself is enriched with lot of atmospheric ethnic music which represents the local land, blended with some hard rock tunes, representing US soldiers, with a helicopter sound effect included as well at some points.
Although some of Zimmer's scores might have lacked in uniqueness, others like the one for ‘The Last samurai’ stand out firmly from the crowd.
Hans Zimmer has been very active lately, working on many blockbusters such as ‘King Arthur’, ‘Thunderbirds’ and ‘The Pirates of the Caribbean’.
See Zimmer in the recordingprocess of `The Pirats of the Caribbean`
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