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Remembering Alex North, 1910-1991
Composer Alex North died ten years ago today, on September 8, 1991, at his home in Los Angeles, California, after a short illness. He was 80.
North was born Isadore Soifer in December 1910, in Chester, Pennsylvania, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. His father died during surgery for appendicitis in 1915, leaving the family in severe with financial hardships. In the late 1920s, Isadore’s older brother Jacob began writing articles for radical labor publications, and to shield his family from right wing political persecution, Jacob adopted the pseudonym “Joseph North”. Soon the family followed his lead, and Isadore Soifer became Alex North.
In the Second World War, North served as a captain in the U.S. Army Special Services division, where he was responsible for “self-entertainment” programs in mental hospitals. He also composed music for more than twenty-six documentary films for the Office of War Information, which kick-started his love for film music.
After the war North studied at the Curtis Institute, the Juilliard School in New York, and in Moscow with noted Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. A lifelong advocate for serious music in American life, he began his career composing for theater and modern dance, working with such figures as John Steinbeck and choreographer Anna Sokolow.
North’s Hollywood breakthrough came in 1951 with director Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, where his use of dissonance, blues motifs, and psychological underscoring created a new musical language for film. North’s score for director Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), with its sweeping orchestral palette and stirring themes, remains a landmark of epic film scoring. Read more…
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