A sad weekend for music: news of the death of American composer Milton Babbitt, Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price, and this morning also of the death of film composer John Barry.
![](http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/music-matters/files/2011/01/john_barry.jpg)
Barry is perhaps best known for scoring eleven films in the Bond franchise, as well as the Oscar-winning soundtracks to, amongst other films, Born Free and Dances With Wolves.
Everyone has their own favourite Bond-Barry soundtrack: for me, it’s Mooraker from 1979. MGM’s answer to Star Wars, which had premiered two years previously, and an attempt to take Bond into space, the music is a rich tapestry of sound which capture the grandeur of space, as well as the slow-moving rotation of megalomaniac Hugo Drax’s epic space-station.
(In 1998, Barry also wrote the music for Play It By Heart, an altogether different, non-Bond movie, which to my ears seems to use ccast-offs from the Moonraker music, as though there were bits lying around on the floor which Barry re-used; I love that soundtrack as well.)
A sad weekend for music: here’s to all of them.