Legendary Soundtracks: Alan Silvestri – Forrest Gump – Film Symphony

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Alan Silvestri’s colorful musical compositions infused emotion and energy into dozens of successful feature films. Following his journeyman years composing music for a number of television series in the late-1970s, Silvestri began his movie career proper with “Romancing the Stone” (1984), the first in a series of ongoing collaborations with director-producer Robert Zemeckis. The prolific composer collaborated with the director on all of his subsequent projects, including the blockbusters “Back to the Future” (1985) and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), and he also worked with other directors on movies like “The Abyss” (1989) and “The Bodyguard” (1992). Silvestri kept bringing resonance to other Zemeckis projects, such a trio of memorable Tom Hanks works – “Forrest Gump” (1994), “Cast Away” (2000) and “The Polar Express” (2004), the latter of which earned him a Grammy Award.

The opening musical theme for the 1994 movie Forrest Gump is sometimes called the Feather Theme. One of the movie’s four main musical themes, each of which was created to evoke a powerful feeling. In addition to Silvestri’s score, the soundtrack for the movie includes songs from Elvis Presley, Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aretha Franklin, Three Dog Night, The Mamas & the Papas, The Doobie Brothers, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Seger, and Buffalo Springfield. One of the best-selling albums in the US, the soundtrack appeared at number two on the Billboard album list and sold twelve million copies. Alan Silvestri won a Golden Globe award and an Academy Award nomination for his work on the movie Forrest Gump.