His greatest popular successes were with The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. A memorable soundtrack is one where you associate the music so intimately with the film, that it is what you think of first when the movie is mentioned.

Elmer Bernstein started working in Hollywood when great composers such as Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin, Bernard Hermann, Alfred Newman and Franz Waxman were producing highly evocative film scores. These were the days before popular hits were used to fill out a soundtrack so that the album could be released commercially.

Soundtrack music was probably the closest exposure audiences got to a classical sound. The best European composers working in Hollywood were all classically trained musicians. They took to film composition with a bold enthusiasm, and did not regard such work as second-rate.

Try to imagine a movie such as The Magnificent Seven or The Great Escape without the rousing theme music. And what identifies one type of music as appropriate western music? Listen to Jerome Moross' powerful and stirring main theme for The Big Country. This is music that helped define the western sound.

The composer who successfully challenged the traditional western sound was Ennio Morricone who wrote for those magnificent Sergio Leone westerns. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, A Fist Full of Dollars and their ilk challenged the traditional Hollywood western in so many ways.

Clint Eastwood probably owes as much to Morricone as he does to Leone. These were new, more contemporary westerns with a very different type of soundtrack, which suited the movies so well.

The Onedin Line opening credits would fail to be so stirring and nautical without the lush, romantic sound of the adagio from Aram Khachacturian's Spartacus; and The Dam Busters would be lacking without the heart-swelling patriotic orchestrations of Eric Coates.

The best introduction to film music is to browse through the library's collection of soundtracks. We have film themes, TV themes, radio themes and live show soundtracks. It's an enjoyable way to realize how intimately linked are sound and image, and to trace the history and variety of sounds that the film industry has helped create.