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Ken Thorne is a conductor/composer/arranger who is known principally for his film-related work. Born in East Dereham, England in 1924, took up the piano at an early age and entered music as a pianist in various dance bands during the '40s, primarily playing in clubs and dance halls. He also wrote his first film music during this period, for the 1948 short feature The Clouded Crystal, although he was a neophyte in the field, and it would be another 13 years before he received another credit in this area. At the start of the '50s, Thorne became interested in composition on a more serious level, and began studying on a formal level. He began turning up in movie credits again at the start of the '60s, and first crossed paths with director Richard Lester on the latter's debut feature film, It's Trad, Dad (1961).
Thorne's breakthrough came about four years later, as a result of the ill feeling that had arisen between Lester and Beatles producer George Martin during the making of A Hard Day's Night (1964). The two had clashed, in terms of musical sensibilities, during the production of that movie, and rather than use Martin for the incidental music for the follow-up film, Help!, Lester chose Thorne to compose that portion of the score. His resulting music for the movie -- which mostly consisted of re-arrangements and adaptations of tunes by the Beatles and Richard Wagner, heard in portions of the movie in which new Beatles songs weren't featured -- also ended up getting unexpected exposure in America. Whereas in England, the only Help! soundtrack had been the Beatles LP featuring the half-dozen new songs from the movie, in the United States, Capitol Records chose to space out those Beatles songs between large portions of Thorne's music on the American soundtrack album. Thorne next turned up on the soundtrack to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), Richard Lester's adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's hit stage farce -- and this time, the result was an Academy Award for Thorne as music director of the film.
Since then, Thorne has worked on major feature films on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to composing numerous film and television soundtracks, Thorne is also a highly regarded arranger and orchestrator -- if Richard Lester regarded him as his composer-of-choice across the '60s, '70s, and '80s, for a time in the '70s John Barry seemed to use Thorne as his orchestrator and arranger on various scores. Thorne's credits include Inspector Clouseau (1967), starring Alan Arkin; They Might Be Giants (1971) (as orchestrator of Barrys music), with George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward; the western Hannie Caulder, starring Raquel Welch and Robert Culp; and the Richard Lester-directed features Superman II and Superman III, for which his job was to re-orchestrate and re-shape John Williams theme material from the first Superman movie in the cycle. Thorne was also responsible for composing the incidental music on the Monkees feature film Head (1968). As a conductor, Thorne also occasionally released pop-instrumental and easy listening recordings, offering more traditional dance tunes, principally during the '60s, when the marketplace for such records was booming.
Wikipedia:
Kenneth Thorne (born 26 January 1925) is a British television and film score composer.
Early life
Thorne was born in East Dereham, a town in the English county of Norfolk. Thorne began his musical career as a pianist with the big bands of England during the 1940s, playing at night clubs and the dance halls. At age 27, Thorne decided to seriously study composition with private tutors at Cambridge and later studied the organ for five years in London.
Film scoring
Thorne began composing scores for films in 1948. Thorne was considered Richard Lester's composer of choice since their first work together on Help!.
When Henry Mancini was scoring Blake Edwards' The Party with Peter Sellers, Thorne composed the soundtrack to Inspector Clouseau. He was hired for Richard Lester's films Superman II and III with instructions to reuse the music by John Williams and recompose them for the sequels, also adding some original work. He also did the music score for The Monkees movie Head. Since the 1980s, Ken Thorne has mainly focused his work for TV.