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.

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.