"There's something unpredictable about a 5/4 time signature in music and I thought that using that in combination with a sort of stabbing, taunting flute motif would set up the exciting but not-quite-serious tone they wanted to open their new TV spy series, Mission: Impossible. And it turned out to be the first thing critics noticed about the show."
Composer Lalo Schifrin was talking there about the first splash he made as a screen scorer circa American TV broadcasting, September 1966. A sixty-year career followed amassing one success after another right up until this past week, June 2025, when he passed away of complications from pneumonia at the age of 93.
In producing that classic TV theme, he was already drawing on two precedents: one was Henry Mancini's innovation of scoring a television crime show with jazz-oriented background music in 1958's Peter Gunn – the other was the ongoing modal melodramatic tonality that John Barry and others had been applying to the quasi-series of James Bond thriller films since 1962. Schifrin was inspired from there and as much through the best-selling soundtrack record album of the Mission: Impossible music as by its weekly exposure on TV, Schifrin became a household name.
Lalo (or 'Boris' in keeping with his grandfather's Russian heritage) was born in Buenos Ares in 1932 and raised there. It might seem that he was destined for a musical career for his father Luis had been concertmaster of the Buenos Ares Philharmonic, but son Lalo's interests were wide and the South American scene for modern music wasn't yet established. And yet, at age 15 he noticed the jazz of Chet Baker and Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. But he wasn't just becoming a jazz/pop guy. His ambition, like his subsequent training, was multifarious. "The choices in music", he began to say, "are infinite." Having that variety of options became an important obsession with Schifrin. Of course, his symphonic father despaired of the jazz path his son seemed to be taking, playing piano in local clubs and bars. For a while, Lalo dodged the whole family music debate by studying law at Luis's suggestion for a couple of years. "I considered music a hobby at that point. But I just couldn't see myself as a lawyer." And all the while, he kept up those music studies in South America: piano with Andreas Karalis; composition with Juan-Carlos Paz. Through them, he was showing such promise that an application to the Paris Conservatory was successful. Papa Luis now had to concede: there would be two musicians in the family. Among his composing professors in Paris would be the 20th century great, Olivier Messiaen.
On graduation, Lalo returned to Buenos Ares in 1956, formed a local jazz combo, and started free-lance writing/arranging for regional ensembles, then for established acts like the Xavier Cugat, and soon was heard by the big boys just at the time that Dizzy Gillespie was looking for a touring pianist for his band. In fact, it was his writing more than his piano playing that Dizzy was excited about: he started programming lots of Schifrin band charts in his own appearances. It was all that Dizzy attention, especially in a season when jazz music was mixing with classical roots, with avant garde dissonance and pop melody (the very kind of eclecticism that Lalo Schifrin represented) that got him noticed first in New York clubs and, soon, in California studios where the burgeoning 1960s movie industry was looking for new sounds, new sensations, and someone with cinematic savvy.
In keeping with those TV action dramas where his music first made itself known, Schifrin's first big screen assignments were likewise two-fisted, brass blaring and beat-driven rockers with more chase sequences than dialogue – subsequent hits like Bullitt (1968) and five 'Dirty Harry' movies – and yet at the same time and without fanfare he was also earning Academy Award nominations for a whole range of far more subtle scores for the broadest possible spectrum of movie stories and settings: his simple, thoughtful rural ballad for two guitars in Cool Hand Luke, the sound of disturbed chamber music as background to the D.H. Lawrence sex triangle in The Fox, then his Serial scoring using aleatory electronic techniques to illustrate the insect world (!) in The Hellstrom Chronicle. One remembers the Latin energy and charisma in his score to Che! And the Chinese scales used in Enter the Dragon, the Hebraic intervals in Voyage of the Damned as in the TV mini-series A.D. about early Christians and ancient Rome, the scary string writing for The Amityville Horror, the charismatic funk in Boulevard Nights, the compelling minor-key carousel tune in Rollercoaster, not to mention the comical pizzicato strings mimicking the tricky footwork during a swordfight on the icy surface of a frozen lake in The Four Musketeers. This is versatility, supported by his formal training but driven by his early jazzy impatience.
All the while, he kept his hand in guest-conducting orchestras around the world and in recording his own concert music – two guitar concertos, a violin concerto, two piano concertos, a successful stage cantata "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" adapted from a TV documentary, a song cycle based on Aztec poems, and the so-called "Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts". It all shows his penchant for keeping his choices "infinite".
Of course, his Paris teachers were not so happy about his pluralist tendencies or his Hollywood fame. It was said that when professor Messiaen heard about Lalo's film scoring career, he stopping talking to him forever. Obviously, for Lalo Schifrin the dichotomy between music types and genres wasn't an issue -- was, in fact, a delight, an incentive to him. And as one of the last living representatives of that generation of film composers born in the 1930s, it is both a sadness and an honor to remember him here. "Mission Impossible: My Life in Music" is Schifrin's published 2008 autobiography, a book whose spirited prose and eclectic enthusiasms often recall the composer's own experience with and preference for unpredictable time signatures.
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