The 11 best film scores of all time

Together, music and film can create magic, but which have done it best? Michael Beek asks top film and TV composers to vote

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Memorable movie moments are burned into our consciousness thanks in no small part to music that has been expertly crafted. Its intricate timing creates the rhythm of the action we see and underlines the emotion of everything we feel; it even tells us things that are hidden beneath the surface. But which score has done it best since film music, as we know it, emerged from Hollywood in the early 1930s?

It would be the easiest thing in the world to give you our take, but that just wouldn't cut it.

Who better to decide than those who know exactly what it takes? We asked film and television composers on both sides of the Atlantic to tell us which scores would be in their top five of all time, and we had a fantastic response. The list is long (and spills over onto our website), but here are The Best Film Scores of All Time as chosen by over 60 film and television composers – from much-loved veterans of the artform to some of today’s most brilliant young talents, not to mention ten Oscar winners.

The Top 11

1 Psycho Bernard Herrmann (1960)

The shower scene alone is iconic, the incessant, stabbing violins entirely complicit in Marion Crane’s murder at the hands of (spoiler alert) Norman Bates. Director Alfred Hitchcock didn’t want any music at all for that grizzly bathroom bumping off, but Bernard Herrmann knew just how to play it and wrote some anyway. The entire score, composed for an orchestra of searing, sawing strings, is a lesson is creating tension, not to mention getting under the skin of a film (and its audience).

‘When Marion Crane steals the money at the opening of the film, you are on the edge of your seat for the rest of the picture.’ So says Patrick Doyle, Oscar-nominated composer of Sense and Sensibility and