Hans Zimmer

Hans Zimmer is a modern-day composer that specializes in making music for films. He was born on September 12, 1957 in Frankfurt/Main, Germany and is currently 51 years old. When Zimmer was a teenager, he moved from Frankfurt to London and soon began his career as a musician at a very young age. He began playing both the synthesizer and the keyboard for several "New Wave" bands such as "Buggles", "Krisma", and "Helden". In the next couple of years, he began his career as a movie composer by working with movie music veteran, Stanley Myers. Together they founded the Lillie Yard recording studio and experimented by mix orchestra music with new electronic sounds. Using this new kind of music, they made many successful movies like "Moonlight" and "Insignificance". He later teamed up with David Byrne and Ryuichi Sakamoto to compose the music for the Oscar winning movie "The Last Emperor". After this collaboration, Zimmer began working by himself. Throughout his solo career, he had many accomplishments such as being nominated for and winning many awards.

"...To Die For"

One of Zimmer's compositions from "The Lion King" is "...To Die For" which is played during the scene were one of the characters, Mufasa, dies. This song is very appropriate for this scene in the movie because it first scares you with the anticipation of a stampede attacking Simba, then makes it sound as if someone or something is going to die like when Mufasa died, and finally it is slow as Simba watches his father died. The style of this composition is orchestra music and the instrumentation for it is voices, violins, cymbals, drums, and trumpets. The text in this song is all chanting but it is very piano. The rest of the dynamics of this song are all fortissimo except for the beginning and the end. The tempo is very fast the whole way through the song but it slows down towards the end, while the texture of the composition is very choppy because of the very rapid violin playing. This song has a many different patterns in its rhythm; it is steady at certain parts but then changes to another pattern which is also steady while it lasts. The mood of this song is extremely scary due to the anticipation in the beginning and the intenseness throughout the rest of the song. This song's melody was very erratic and it had a very long range with all of the changing of tunes during it. In my opinion, this song was fantastic. It has so many different parts to it that it was easy to find at least one part of it that I could enjoy. Another reason why I enjoyed this composition was because most of the music I hear in movies is just for the background but this one complimented the movie and made it much better than it would have been without it.

"Under the Stars"

This composition