| Along with writing musicals, ballets and concert works, Moross worked in Hollywood,
first as an orchestrator for innumerable films in the late 1930s adn 1940s, and then
beginning in 1948, as a composer. Of his seventeen film scores, THE BIG COUNTRY
(1958) is best known and now recognized as a 'Western' classic.
The score won an Academy Award nomination. His 'Western' style was shaped largely by his first experience in the Great Plains and far west which occurred in November 1936 when he travelled by bus from Chicago to Hollywood. In a 1979 interview with John Caps he describes it as similar to a religious experience. In a 1973 letter to Christopher Palmer he said, "...as we hit the Plains I got so excited that I stopped off in Albuquerque (which at the time was a small town of about 35,000 people) and the next day I got to the edge of town and walked out onto the flat land with a marvellous feeling of being alone in the vastness with the mountains cutting off the horizon. When it came to writing the Main Title of the film, [The Big Country], I wrote the string figure and the opening theme almost automatically."
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