Dimitri Tiomkin (High Noon) High Noon
Dimitri Tiomkin composed the score for High Noon and co-wrote the ballad "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'" with lyricist Ned Washington. He won two Academy Awards for the film -- Best Original Score and Best Song. A Russian-born composer trained at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, Tiomkin became the definitive voice of the American Western -- a genre he understood through an unlikely connection between the Russian steppe and the American prairie. (wikipedia)
He heard the steppe in the prairie
Tiomkin was born in what is now Ukraine in 1894. He studied under Felix Blumenfeld and Alexander Glazunov at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory before emigrating to the United States in 1925. When people asked how a Russian understood the poetry of the American West, he had a ready answer:
"A steppe is a steppe is a steppe. The problems of the cowboy and the Cossack are very similar. They share a love of nature and a love of animals." -- Dimitri Tiomkin, Wikipedia (autobiography)
The connection was not a joke. Tiomkin's Western scores -- High Noon, Rio Bravo, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Alamo -- share a melodic plainness that owes as much to Russian folk tradition as to American country music. He understood open spaces.
He built the entire score around a single ballad
Most Westerns in 1952 used lush orchestral scores. Tiomkin did the opposite. He wrote "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'" as the film's musical spine and then derived the entire score from that ballad's melody. Tex Ritter performed the vocal version over the opening credits, and the melody returns in instrumental variations throughout the film -- rising with Kane's determination, thinning as his support disappears.
Tiomkin eliminated violins from the orchestration and added a subtle harmonica, producing what critics described as a "rustic, deglamorized sound" that matched the film's anti-heroic mood. The accompanying instruments were sparse: guitar, accordion, and the Hammond Novachord -- one of the first electronic synthesizers -- which produced an unusual percussion effect. (wikipedia, americanmusicpreservation)
The song may have saved the film
High Noon received a poor reception at its initial press preview. Tiomkin, who believed in the material, bought the rights to the song and released it as a single with singer Frankie Laine. The record became a hit. The song's popularity led the studio to delay the film's release by four months to capitalize on the momentum. Film historian Arthur R. Jarvis Jr. wrote that the score "has been credited with saving the movie." (wikipedia)
The ballad's lyrics function as Kane's interior monologue -- the emotional confession the taciturn marshal would never speak aloud. "I do not know what fate awaits me / I only know I must be brave" is the film's thesis compressed into a couplet.
His Oscar speech broke Hollywood's pretense about originality
At the 1955 Academy Awards, accepting for The High and the Mighty, Tiomkin thanked Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov. The audience laughed, but the gesture was serious -- he was the first film composer to publicly acknowledge classical influences, puncturing the fiction that Hollywood scores were created ex nihilo. (wikipedia)
He described his own abilities without false modesty:
"I am no Prokofiev, I am no Tchaikovsky. But what I write is good for what I write for." -- Dimitri Tiomkin, Wikipedia (autobiography)
Between 1948 and 1958 -- his "golden decade" -- Tiomkin composed 57 film scores. He received 22 Academy Award nominations and won four Oscars. The AFI ranked his High Noon score tenth on their list of 100 greatest film scores.