Prolific, award-winning musician and composer Michael Kamen created the moving original score for HBO’s miniseries, "Band Of Brothers." Kamen had worked with executive producer Tom Hanks and co-executive producer Tony To on HBO’s Emmy ® -winning miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon." When To asked the two-time Oscar ® nominee if he would like to compose the score for "Band Of Brothers," Kamen jumped at the chance, saying it was a project with great personal meaning for him.

"My 85-year-old father had a twin brother who was killed in Germany three days before the end of the war," he states. "I've always lived with this, knowing what his loss meant to my family, and what tragic loss and suffering everyone endured during the War. So when Tom and Tony asked me to write music for this miniseries, I wanted to do it from a personal point of view, to write beautiful music for the individual soldiers' stories, not music for the bombs and the battles and the bullets."

"I wrote this as a requiem for an uncle I never met," he continues. "My personal quest on this project was to distill the beauty and heroism of the soldiers and their stories out of the war's devastation."

Kamen read the Stephen E. Ambrose book upon which the miniseries is based, and then composed a theme to a three-minute trailer Hanks sent him, which became the main theme for the miniseries. Kamen also gave musical themes to soldiers and situations that recur in several episodes. When Kamen's father and brother first heard the score, both were "just overwhelmed, and understood immediately that this was a personal piece, speaking through the music to the sense of loss from the war."

On Aug. 29 in Los Angeles, before 2,500 people at the Hollywood Bowl, Kamen will conduct the Young Musicians Foundation Orchestra as they perform music from the opening sequence of "Band Of Brothers," and a compilation of themes from parts three to ten, followed by a screening consisting of a montage from the first part, followed by Part 2: "Day of Days," in its entirety (which focuses on the events of D-Day), followed by a montage from the remaining parts of the series.

"It's so satisfying to work on a project of real significance for an entire generation of people who may not know anything about World War II, or anything about its soldiers except from other war movies," says Kamen. "'Band Of Brothers' is not a war movie. It’s about human beings. It’s about ordinary men doing extraordinary things, and that was uppermost in my mind when I wrote the music for it."

Michael Kamen was educated at the Julliard School in New York City, and appeared as a student with his band, the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, on Leonard Bernstein’s "Young People’s Concerts" with the New York Philharmonic. It was Bernstein who introduced him to symphonic arrangement and composing. Kamen’s early work centered on ballets, but in 1976 he expanded into Hollywood, and into pop and rock arranging three years later when he worked with Pink Floyd on the album "The Wall."

In the course of his career, Kamen has worked with such musical talents as Bryan Adams, Aerosmith, The Chieftains, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Metallica, Luciano Pavarotti and David Sanborn, and scored over 75 films, including all of the "Lethal Weapon" and "Die Hard" films, as well as "Highlander," "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," "Don Juan DeMarco," "Mr. Holland’s Opus" and "X-Men." He has been nominated for nine Grammy Awards and won four, and has one Emmy ® nomination. Kamen’s two Oscar ® nominations were for the songs "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman" and "Everything I Do (I Do It for You)," both performed by Bryan Adams. In 1996, Kamen and Richard Dreyfuss founded the Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation, dedicated to giving musical instruments to needy students, donating over $5 million worth of instruments to date. His first symphony, "The New Moon in the Old Moon’s Arms," premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., January 2000. Kamen’s original score for "Band Of Brothers" is featured on Sony Classical’s original soundtrack recording, available as of Aug. 28, 2001.

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