By JUDITH CLURMAN

Music enhances great cinematography. Consider Bernard Hermann's score for the chase scene in the Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest, which helped make this film a masterpiece. John Williams's scores for the Harry Potter series are part of what makes those movies magical.

Marvin Hamlisch (Photo by Shel Secunda)

This month's Choral Union concert at Alice Tully Hall focuses on movie composers in a program titled Cinema Serenades. I contacted composers who have written for the movies and asked them to write an accessible, short choral work. David Shire, Marvin Hamlisch, Laura Karpman, Marc Shaiman, and Howard Shore—composers whose careers cumulatively span more than 50 years—agreed to undertake the assignment. All have garnered major awards, and you will find a trove of information about their film scores online. The result is three new pieces, two arrangements—and an extra surprise by some Juilliard students.

Organizing the program was certainly an education in itself. Composers often categorize themselves as popular songwriters or serious classicists, and when I first telephoned people, they were somewhat stunned that I wanted them to write or arrange for Juilliard. My feeling is that great music is great music in all genres. While I am trained in the classical idiom, composers are trained in many different ways. John Williams (who studied composition at Juilliard and also received an honorary doctorate  in 2004) began as a pianist working with Rosina Lhévinne. David Shire was also trained as a pianist. Marvin Hamlisch studied in Juilliard's Pre-College Division but was a theater man all the way. Howard Shore began as music director of Saturday Night Live, and started writing film music in 1978 to branch out. So, you never know who is destined to write the next movie score. For instance, listen to Juilliard faculty member John Corigliano's terrific score for The Red Violin, which earned him an Academy Award in 2000.

David Shire

The April concert begins with short work by another Academy Award-winner, David Shire. A couple of years back, the Choral Union collaborated with Shire when we premiered the Shire/Harnick Everlasting Light on a holiday concert with the New York Philharmonic. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., he was influenced by his father, a society dance bandleader. He studied both classical and popular piano, and majored in English and music at Yale University. After further studies at Brandeis University, he entered the world of the theater and has earned many Tony nominations.

Shire has arranged his rousing song Take Flight for large chorus, two pianos, and percussion. The lyrics are by Richard Maltby Jr., Shire's longtime professional partner, whom he met while they were both undergraduates at Yale. The piece was written for a new musical that bears the same name. Maltby, who is currently directing the new musical Ring of Fire, describes the piece as a metaphor for human striving. It is "not just [about] inventing an airplane, but … the basic human impulse to exceed its limits and leave the ground. … It is kind of a mystical thing—you get an idea and you follow it and you have no idea where it will go; it hits snags, you redefine it and then it takes off. It is the miracle of our brains—it is a miracle of humankind."

Laura Karpman

Marvin Hamlisch says he always wanted to write for Broadway, but in his mid-20s, "nobody was pounding on my door saying here's an idea for a Broadway show." But film producer Sam Speigel heard Hamlisch play at a party and gave him his first opportunity to write a film score, for The Swimmer. A flourishing career in Hollywood kept Hamlisch busy until his return to New York to pen A Chorus Line. Visiting Marvin Hamlisch is like going to an American popular-music history museum. Tonys, Emmys, Academy Awards, and photographs appear everywhere in his apartment.

I asked what excites him about writing choral music. "A lot of people don't know that one of my first jobs in show business was as the assistant to the vocal arranger on a live TV show called The Bell Telephone Hour," he said. "I love the color of a choir, and over the years, I have used them in my work. … The other exciting thing about this project is that normally I write music first, and then the lyricist takes over. But in this case, finding an appropriate text was a challenge." Hamlisch chose the poem Music by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the piece, Let me go where'er I will, is scored for piano, flute, and vibes. It is vintage Hamlisch—tender and intimate, with a wonderful understanding of setting words—and will be sung by a small group of members from the chorus.

Howard Shore

Howard Shore and I met in the late 70s, when I recorded a vocal soundtrack for Saturday Night Live. He loves both composition and recording, so working in films was a great way to combine the two. A household name these days, having written the score for Lord of the Rings, Shore studied counterpoint and harmony as a child and sang in choruses. He attended the Berklee School of Music in Boston, studying five instruments—and as a result, orchestrates his own film scores. For our project, I suggested using a text by Robert Penn Warren (born in 1905, the year of Juilliard's founding), and he chose The Garden. In Shore's words, "The Garden relates so beautifully to this anniversary because it describes a passage of time—the fall leading to the winter and the reawakening of the garden in the spring. It is about how time relates to nature."

Emmy Award–winning composer Laura Karpman's multifaceted career includes film, videogames, concert, and theater music. She has collaborated with Steven Spielberg and is currently the composer for the new television show In Justice. Karpman also loves to sing, in choruses and jazz ensembles. She studied voice along with composition (with William Bolcom) at the University of Michigan before coming to Juilliard, where she earned her D.M.A. in 1985. She studied with Milton Babbitt and says, "This experience infiltrates every note I compose, whether it be for network TV or the concert hall."

Marc Shaiman

Her work Heebie Jeebies was inspired by the scat singing of many great popular artists, as well as folk songs by Stephen Foster. "In Heebie Jeebies, I wanted to establish the language of scat singing as poetry," she explains. "There are fleeting references to songs but the text is drawn from the inspiration of the singers who performed these songs … Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, and Louis Armstrong, " She says she had a great time writing this for her alma mater, and "even though the piece sounds improvisatory, it holds together as a concert work." Heebie Jeebies is scored for two pianos and small chorus.

Marc Shaiman has written for the theater and screen and is probably best known for his Tony Award-winning musical Hairspray. His Academy Award-nominated scores include those for Sleepless in Seattle, The American President, The First Wives Club, Patch Adams, and South Park: Bigger Longer, and Uncut. I have always enjoyed the score to the Rob Reiner/Aaron Sorkin film The American President and believed that, with a fine text, the theme song of that movie could become a new national anthem. Shaiman agreed—and the result is A Seed of Grain, scored for chorus, organ, and percussion. His collaborators for our Juilliard project are lyricist Ramsey McLean (his co-collabator for the Oscar-nominated song "A Wink and a Smile" from Sleepless In Seattle) and film orchestrator Jeff Atmajian, who has created this arrangement.

Cinema Serenades Juilliard Choral Union Brooklyn Youth Chorus Alice Tully Hall Thursday, April 6, 8 p.m. Free tickets available on March 23 in the Juilliard Box Office.

We couldn't have a program without the music of Mr. Star Wars and Harry Potter himself, John Williams. Previous commitments prevented Williams from composing a piece for us, but I arranged for permission for Gregory Anderson and Elizabeth Roe, two piano students in the master's degree program, to create a work based on his music. Titled Star Wars Fantasy: Four Impressions for Two Pianos, the work recreates, according to Anderson and Roe, "the virtuosic Romantic tradition of transcriptions, à la Liszt or Thalberg."

Carl Orff's Carmina Burana will be featured in the second half of the concert. This epic composition has been used in many movies and has inspired the music for many other works calling for a large chorus in a dramatic scene. In this performance, we will use the composer's version for two pianos and percussion, chorus, soloists, and children's chorus.

I wish to thank everyone involved in this concert, including my Choral Union; the composers; the lyricists and arrangers; and the wonderful Juilliard instrumentalists and vocal soloists who will be joining us for the program.

Judith Clurman, director of choral activities, leads the Juilliard Choral Union and has been a faculty member since 1989.