Murray Cutter (15 March 1902, Nice, France – 19 April 1983, Burbank, California) was a versatile Hollywood orchestrator, working mainly for film composer Max Steiner, with over 150 credits spanning the mid-1930s to early 1960s.
Cutter was unusual among orchestrators who tended to specialize, in that he was adept in all genres: musicals (New Moon, Kismet, The Desert Song); romantic drama (Waterloo Bridge, A Summer Place); adventure (Northwest Passage, The Caine Mutiny); family/comedy (National Velvet, Sugarfoot); suspense (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Key Largo); epics (Helen of Troy); and westerns (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Johnny Belinda and The Searchers).
An early assignment were the vocal arrangements for the 1937 film version of Rosalie, which ten years before had been orchestrated for Broadway by Steiner.
Cutter told Oz historian Aljean Harmetz for "Over the Rainbow" he made it sound as pretty as he could with many strings and a touch of woodwind.
Joining ASCAP in 1946, Cutter occasionally wrote original music for the screen but rarely received a credit.