Who composed the score for Scorsese's 'The Aviator'?

Howard Shore composed the score for Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator.

Shore’s music supports the film’s portrait of Howard Hughes, the aviation pioneer and film producer played by Leonardo DiCaprio. The score moves between sweeping orchestral passages and period-flavored jazz colors, reflecting Hughes’s ambition, glamour, technological obsession, and psychological decline.

The Aviator was released in 2004 and dramatizes several decades of Hughes’s life, including his work on Hell’s Angels, his record-setting flights, the development of the H-1 Racer, and the controversial H-4 Hercules, popularly known as the Spruce Goose. Cate Blanchett plays Katharine Hepburn, while Kate Beckinsale portrays Ava Gardner.

Shore’s score won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score. The soundtrack also incorporates pre-existing classical music, including Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6. That mixture can cause confusion: those works appear in the film, but Shore is credited as the composer of the original score.