Gino Marinuzzi Jr.

Gino Marinuzzi Jr. has enjoyed a half-century as one of Italy's top movie composers and one of the great innovators in electronic and experimental music. The son of Gino Marinuzzi (1882-1945), one of Italy's most renowned conductors (and a composer of some significance as well), he was born in New York in 1920, and studied in Milan. Marinuzzi turned from conducting to composing early in his career, for Italian radio and films, and by the mid-'50s had developed a serious interest in electronic music. He wrote scores for such diverse filmmakers as Jean Renoir and Mario Bava, in addition to helping to devise a key instrument in that field, the Fonosynth 2. In 2004, his score for Bava's 1965-vintage horror/science fiction thriller Planet of the Vampires was released as a freestanding soundtrack for the first time. ~ Bruce Eder