Gérard Schurmann

Composer Gerard Schurmann has been equally active in the fields of concert music and film music. He was also active as a film music conductor and orchestrator; in the latter field, his credits include the film Lawrence of Arabia. Schurmann was born Gerard Schürmann on January 19, 1924, in the Kertosono district in East Java, during the Dutch colonial era in what is now Indonesia. His parents were Dutch landowners. Schurmann showed musical talent early, taking up the piano and even trying as a child to write music for the Javanese gamelan orchestra. Feeling that he had to leave rural Java to get a good musical education, he moved to England as a teen and studied composition with Alan Rawsthorne, piano, and conducting. In England, Schurmann began to spell his name without the umlaut. He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II and began his career as a concert pianist, taking the day job of cultural attaché at the Dutch embassy in London. For a time Schurmann served a conductor of the orchestra of Radio Netherlands in Hilversum, but he returned to England determined to devote full time to composition. He had already scored a film in the Netherlands, But Not in Vain (Niet tevergeefs), in 1948, and in the late 1950s and 1960s, Schurmann was a top-roster film composer in Britain. Several of his films starred leading actors of the day, such as Patrick McGoohan in Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (1963). He also worked as a conductor and orchestrator in the British film industry. His first American film job was as an uncredited orchestrator on Ernest Gold's score to Exodus (1960). Making a U.S. State Department-British Council tour of the U.S. in 1980, Schurmann moved to the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles. He caught the attention of conductor Lorin Maazel, who conducted his works with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra; the former group commissioned Schurmann's Concerto for Orchestra (1996). Among his other orchestral works are Six Studies of Francis Bacon (1968) and Variants (1970); he has also written choral music, chamber music, and a violin concerto (1978) premiered by Ruggiero Ricci, among many other works.
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