Herman Stein

Herman Stein's obituary photo in The New York Times is something monster lovers would themselves be willing to die for, the elderly film composer wearing some kind of lab coat and cradling the head of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Stein grins broadly in the shot, so perhaps he was not thinking about good old "Blacky Lagoony" when he made the following comment concerning a retrospective of monster films he worked on in the '50s and '60s: "There are pictures here you've never heard of, because you're lucky." Formerly one of the staff composers at Universal Studios, a onetime haven for every famous monster in filmland, Stein was prouder of his serious classical compositions than anything he came up with during his film career. Thus, he would have surely enjoyed a student's gaffe in a composition class: Stein's trumpet riff, serving as the Creature from the Black Lagoon's official theme, was mistaken for an Igor Stravinsky brass fanfare. Stein's best-known strain was composed for the television series entitled Lost in Space, part of the legacy of attractive oboe settings in television scores that also include the more recent Six Feet Under. Stein -- whose surname was sometimes utilized by actual mad doctors in cheesy sequels, Frank N. Stein for example -- also wrote all or sections of the scores to This Island Earth, The Mole People, Tarantula, and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Stein collaborated with the main cast of characters involved in pumping out horror and science fiction cheapies during the '50s and '60s, among them Jack Arnold, Roger Corman, and William Castle. The latter's 1966 cinematic suggestion Let's Kill Uncle represents Stein's final credit. His name may not show up at all as some sets of credits roll, the production procedure involving a few different composers toiling anonymously on the same film, and then the studio music supervisor getting the on-screen credit. Working anonymously alongside such talented company as Henry Mancini shouldn't have been much of a problem for Stein, a technically adept enough instrumentalist on his own to have been considered a child prodigy. He performed his first piano concerts in Philadelphia at the age of six. He spent at least a part of his teenage years doing what most adolescents would be better off doing, absorbing the art of orchestration from the library's collection of scores. Stein's first professional work of note seems to have been some arranging for big bands, including Count Basie and Fred Waring. By the end of the '40s he headed to the West Coast, engaging in composition lessons with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a noted modern classical composer. Universal hired Stein in 1951 and he continued scoring there through the end of the decade. Television dominated his schedule in the '60s prior to his eventual retirement. Ongoing public interest in the types of films he worked on borders on the rabid, ensuring a hopefully permanent public archive of Stein's monster music in its original context. Themes from these films have also been released on their own and in compilation sets such as the Coral label's self-explanatory Themes from Horror Movies, heavy on the Stein. The composer's concert piece Sour Suite, performed by the Westwood Wind Quintet, is available on CD thanks to the Crystal imprint. Stein died of congestive heart failure. ~ Eugene Chadbourne