Wojciech Kilar

Wojciech Kilar was a Polish classical and film music composer. His film scores have won many honors including the best score award for the music to The Promised Land in 1975, followed by the Prix Louis Delluc in 1980 for the music to The King and the Mockingbird, and an award at the Cork International Film Festival for the music to From A Far Country (1981) about the life of Pope John Paul II.

One of his greatest successes came with his score to Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula in 1993 which received the ASCAP Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Producers in Los Angeles. In 2003, he won the César Award for Best Film Music written for The Pianist, the soundtrack to which featured his "Moving to the Ghetto Oct. 31, 1940."

Kilar belonged (together with BolesÅ‚aw Szabelski, his student Henryk Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki) to the Polish Avant-garde music movement of the Sixties. In 1977 Kilar was one of the founding members of the Karol Szymanowski Society, based in the mountain town of Zakopane. Kilar chaired the Katowice chapter of the Association of Polish Composers for many years and from 1979—81 was vice chair of this association's national board.

Having received critical success as a classical composer, Kilar scored his first domestic film in 1959, and went on to write music from some of Poland's most acclaimed directors, including Krzysztof KieÅ›lowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Kazimierz Kutz and Andrzej Wajda. He worked on over 100 titles in his home country. In addition to his film work, Kilar continued to write and publish purely classical works, which included a horn sonata, a piece for a wind quintet, several pieces for chamber orchestra and choir, the acclaimed Baltic Canticles, the epic Exodus (famous as the trailer music from Schindler's List), a Concerto for Piano and Orchestra dedicated to Peter Jablonski, and his major work, the September Symphony (2003). Having abandoned Avant-garde music technical means almost entirely, he continued to employ a simplified musical language, in which sizable masses of sound serve as a backdrop for highlighted melodies.