Alex North

All Music Guide:

American composer Alex North hardly needed films to enhance his reputation. A graduate of Juilliard and the pupil of such musical heavyweights as Ernst Toch and Aaron Copland, North was responsible for the incidental music in several major Broadway productions of the 1940s, notably Death of a Salesman. He also composed for the ballet, for symphony orchestra, and even for Benny Goodman. North's earliest film work consisted of the scores for documentary films, an activity he engaged in from 1937 through the early 1950s. His first feature-film score was for 20th Century-Fox's The 13th Letter; he followed this with a steady parade of scores for such memorable pictures as Viva Zapata (1952), The Rose Tattoo (1955), The Bad Seed (1956), Spartacus (1960), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1967), Under the Volcano (1984) and Prizzi's Honor (1985). His most popular composition, "Unchained Melody" (for the 1955 prison picture Unchanged), received a whole new lease on life in 1990 thanks to the runaway hit film Ghost. Yet despite so impressive a resume, Alex North never received an Oscar in any of his 15 nominations. Finally, in 1986, the Academy threw him that guilt-absolving bone, the "Lifetime Achievement Award." Perhaps Alex North's most ambitious film score was the one nobody heard -- he was engaged by Stanley Kubrick to write the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey, only to have Kubrick rudely pull the rug from under him by substituting such classical pieces as "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and "The Blue Danube Waltz." With teeth clenched, Alex North wrote a terse article describing his frustration for Jerome Agel's 1969 compendium The Making of Kubrick's 2001.

Wikipedia:

Alex North (December 4, 1910 – September 8, 1991) was an American composer who wrote one of the first jazz-based film scores for A Streetcar Named Desire. His music for Viva Zapata! was also considered to be amongst the earliest Hollywood film scores to employ modernist elements.

Early life[edit]

North was born Isadore Soifer in Chester, Pennsylvania to Russian Jewish parents.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Career[edit]

North was an original composer probably even by the classical music standards of the day. However, he managed to integrate his modernism into typical film music leitmotif structure, rich with themes. One of these became the famous song, "Unchained Melody". Nominated for fifteen Oscars but unsuccessful each time, North is one of only two film composers to receive the Lifetime Achievement Academy Award, the other being Ennio Morricone. North's frequent collaborator as orchestrator was the avant-garde composer Henry Brant. He won the 1968 Golden Globe award for his music to The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968).

His best-known film scores include The Rainmaker (1956), Spartacus (1960), The Misfits (1961),'The Children's Hour (1961), Cleopatra (1963), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Devil's Brigade (1968), and Dragonslayer (1981). His music for "The Wonderful Country" makes use of Mexican and American motifs.

His commissioned score for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is notorious for having been discarded by director Stanley Kubrick. Although North later incorporated motifs from the rejected score for The Shoes of the Fisherman, Shanks (1974), and Dragonslayer, the score itself remained unheard until composer Jerry Goldsmith rerecorded it for Varèse Sarabande in 1993. In 2007, Intrada Records released the 1968 recording sessions on CD from North's personal archives.

North was also commissioned to write a jazz score for Nero Wolfe, a 1959 CBS-TV series based on Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe characters, starring William Shatner as Archie Goodwin and Kurt Kasznar as Nero Wolfe. A pilot and two or three episodes were filmed, but the designated time slot was, in the end, given to another series. North's unheard score for Nero Wolfe and six recorded tracks on digital audio tape are in the UCLA Music Library Special Collections.

Though North is best known for his work in Hollywood, he spent years in New York writing music for the stage; he composed the score, by turns plaintive and jarring, for the original Broadway production of Death of a Salesman. It was in New York that he met Elia Kazan (director of Salesman), who brought him to Hollywood in the '50s. North was one of several composers who brought the influence of contemporary concert music into film, in part marked by an increased use of dissonance and complex rhythms. But there is also a lyrical quality to much of his work which may be connected to the influence of Aaron Copland, with whom he studied.

His classical works include a Rhapsody for Piano, Trumpet obbligato and Orchestra. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for his score for the 1976 television miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man. North is also known for his opening to the CBS television anthology series Playhouse 90 and the 1965 ABC television miniseries FDR.Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist}} template (see the help page).

Awards[edit]

The American Film Institute ranked North's score for A Streetcar Named Desire #19 on their list of the greatest film scores. His scores for the following films were also nominated for the list:

Academy Awards for Original Score:

Golden Globe Awards for Original Score:

ASCAP Award for Original Score:

Grammy Awards for Original Score: