Composer Knows the Score : Movies: The Oscar-winning Maurice Jarre has another hit on his hands with ‘Ghost.’

With more than 100 major scores behind him, 66-year-old film composer Maurice Jarre enters the fifth decade of his career with little sign of tiring. This year, not only has he scored four new movies, but last month the sound-track album to one, “Ghost,” crept into the Top 10 of the pop charts.

“It’s very funny. We have to compete with heavy metal,” said Jarre, with a laugh, during a break in recording sessions for the new Paul Hogan comedy “Almost An Angel” at Columbia Studios in Culver City. “I think the success of the ‘Ghost’ sound track was a combination of a lot of things. The Righteous Brothers have done a fabulous rendition of their song ‘Unchained Melody’ and also there’s the success of this romantic comedy itself.”

Jarre’s most recently released sound track, for the supernatural thriller “Jacob’s Ladder,” also combines an old American song--Al Jolson’s “Sonny Boy”--with original music, to eerie, supernatural effect. The score’s mix of electronics, strange instruments and musical styles is vintage Jarre.

“From the beginning, I have always liked to mix ethnic instruments in my music,” he said. “Not necessarily to emphasize the ethnicity of the film. For example, I don’t use an oud because it is an Arab film or the bongos because it is Mexican. But I hear very interesting things in ethnic music, numerous points of sound. In ‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ we had an interesting sound with a Japanese instrument called the shakuhachi . When you use that strange sound, it gives it a sort of nightmarish quality.”

Jarre credits Southern California for supplying him not only with the latest technology in synthesizers, but a multicultured variety of musicians.

“Los Angeles is just the place,” he said. “You can find anything here. For ‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ we had this marvelous sarangi player from India who just happened to be touring here. When these French snobs say, ‘Maurice, how can you survive in Los Angeles? It is such a cultural desert.’ I say, ‘Oh really? How many times did you go to a concert last month?’ And they say, ‘Well, I was very busy.’ I say, ‘I was very busy, too, but I went to hear an orchestra from Cologne, one from Canada, an ensemble of Chinese instruments and dance from Thailand.’ But there is cultural snobbery everywhere.”

Originally a composition student of Arthur Honegger at the Paris Conservatoire, Jarre started his career as a percussionist and composer, often collaborating on background and incidental music for the stage with composer-conductor Pierre Boulez. His earliest sound tracks from the early 1950s include films by Georges Franju and Alain Resnais.

But it was in 1962 that he became an international celebrity with his Oscar-winning score to British director David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia.” His other two collaborations with Lean, “Doctor Zhivago” (1965) and “Passage to India”(1984), also earned him Oscars.

Jarre, who has lived in Los Angeles for 26 years, has worked on films from eight different countries, including the People’s Republic of China. In addition to masterfully written and conducted orchestral scores, his pioneering use of electronic music makes him a significant innovator in his field--from the use of ondes martinot in “Lawrence of Arabia” to his finely-honed ensemble of synthesizer wizards in movies like “After Dark, My Sweet” and “Jacob’s Ladder.”