Alan Silvestri

American composer Alan Silvestri was born March 26, 1950. His career took of in 1972, and 1984 saw his first collaboration with famed director Robert Zemeckis, on the film, Romancing the Stone. The two have worked together continuiously to this day, with Silvestri creating the scores for the trilogy, Back to the Future (1985, 1989, 1990), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Death Becomes Her (1992), Forrest Gump (1994), Contact (1997), Cast Away (2000), The Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007), and A Christmas Carol (2009). Silvestri experiments in almost all film genres: comedy, action, romance, sci-fi, horror, drama, fantasy, western, thriller, and adventure, notably successful in all of them. The composer instinctively detects a story’s dominating emotion and puts it to music, which then fits in perfectly within the film’s visual plane. He wrote the memorable score to Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy Returns (2001), orchestrated for large symphonic ensemble and choir. In 2011, Silvestri proved to be a master of Hollywood’s music traditions one more time, in the film Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). Silvestri has received two Academy Award nominations – for Forrest Gump and The Polar Express, and two Grammy award nominations, again for The Polar Express, and for Cast Away.