In 1929, after the stock market crash, he moved to Hollywood, where he became best known for his scores for Western films, including Duel in the Sun, Red River, High Noon, The Big Sky, Gunfight at the O.K.

His family was of Jewish descent;[5][6] his father, Zinovy Tiomkin, was a "distinguished pathologist" and associate of professor Paul Ehrlich, and later a notable Zionist leader.

"[8] Tiomkin was educated at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied piano with Felix Blumenfeld, teacher of Vladimir Horowitz, and harmony and counterpoint with Alexander Glazunov, mentor to Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich.

In 1920, while working for the Petrograd Military District Political Administration (PUR), Tiomkin was one of the lead organizers of two revolutionary mass spectacles, the Mystery of Liberated Labor, a pseudo-religious mystery play for the May Day festivities, and The Storming of the Winter Palace for the celebrations of the third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

[5] He composed light classical and popular music, and made his performing debut as a pianist playing Franz Liszt's Piano Concerto No.

They performed together on the Keith/Albee and Orpheum vaudeville circuits, in which they accompanied a ballet troupe run by the Austrian ballerina Albertina Rasch.

While in New York, Tiomkin gave a recital at Carnegie Hall that featured contemporary music by Maurice Ravel, Alexander Scriabin, Francis Poulenc, and Alexandre Tansman.

After the stock market crash in October 1929 reduced work opportunities in New York, Tiomkin and his wife moved to Hollywood,[14] where she was hired to supervise dance numbers in MGM film musicals.

[16] Tiomkin received his first break from Columbia director Frank Capra, who chose him to write and perform the score for Lost Horizon (1937).

(1959), Tiomkin recalls how the assignment by Capra forced him to first confront a director in a matter of music style: [H]e gave me the job without reservation.

"[16]He worked on other Capra films during the following decade, including the comedy You Can't Take It With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), and It's a Wonderful Life (1946).

"[16] Tiomkin bought the rights to the song and released it as a single for the popular music market, with singer Frankie Laine.

Based on the song's popularity, the studio released the film four months later, with the words sung by country western star Tex Ritter.

"[12] Another music expert, Mervyn Cooke, agrees, adding that "the song's spectacular success was partly responsible for changing the course of film-music history".

The song's lyrics briefly tell High Noon's entire story arc, a tale of cowardice and conformity in a small Western town.

He added a subtle harmonica in the background, to give the film a "rustic, deglamorized sound that suits the anti-heroic sentiments" expressed by the story.

[9] The Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture, on page 124, states: "The fifty-year period in the USA between 1914, the start of the First World War and the year of Irving Berlin's first full score, Watch Your Step, and 1964, the premiere of Bock and Harnick's Fiddler on the Roof, is informed by a rich musical legacy from Yiddish folk tunes (for example Mark Warshavsky's "Di milners trem," The miller's tears: and Dimitri Tiomkin's "Do Not Forsake Me."

[21] During the 1955 ceremonies, Tiomkin thanked all of the earlier composers who had influenced him, including Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other names from the European classical tradition.

He scored many films of various genres, including historical dramas such as Cyrano de Bergerac (1950), The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), and Great Catherine (1968); war movies such as The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), The Guns of Navarone (1961), and Town Without Pity (1961); and suspense thrillers such as 36 Hours (1965).

Tiomkin also wrote scores for four of Alfred Hitchcock's suspense dramas: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951), I Confess (1953), and Dial M for Murder (1954).

"[23] He also worked with Howard Hawks on The Big Sky (1952) and Land of the Pharaohs (1955), with John Huston on The Unforgiven (1960), and with Nicholas Ray on 55 Days at Peking (1963).

[24] He also appeared as a contestant on the October 20, 1955, episode of the TV quiz program You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx.

"[9] Upon receiving his Oscar in 1955 for The High and the Mighty, he became the first composer to publicly list and thank the great European masters, including Beethoven, Strauss, and Brahms, among others.

So the cowboy becomes a mirror image of the Cossacks: both are primitives and innocents, etched on and dwarfed by a landscape of soul-stirring immensity and rugged masculine beauty.

Musicologist Dave Epstein, for one, has explained that after reading the script, Tiomkin would then outline the film's major themes and movements.

[27] During his televised 1954 Oscars acceptance speech for "The High and the Mighty", it was noted that Tiomkin thanked classical composers Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, and Debussy rather than his modern-day colleagues.

[27] A 1957 New York Times article stated that Tiomkin had learned to speak Russian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, French, Italian, Yiddish, and English.

[28] In 2014, his theme songs to It's a Wonderful Life and Giant were played during the closing ceremony for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

[23] For the film Red River his biographer Christopher Palmer describes how the music immediately sets the epic and heroic tone for the film: The unison horn-call is indeed an invocation: the gates of history are flung wide and the main theme, high and wide as the huge vault of the sky, rides forth in full choral-orchestral splendour.

In subsequent decades, studios often attempted to create their own hit songs to both sell as a soundtrack and to enhance the movie experience, with a typical example being the film score for Titanic.