MOVIE MUSIC UK

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.

His other scores – which combined intellectual rigor with emotional immediacy, and often incorporated elements of jazz, folk, and avant-garde techniques – were similarly lauded. He received Academy Award nominations for both A Streetcar Named Desire and Spartacus, as well as Death of a Salesman (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), The Rose Tattoo (1955),
The Rainmaker (1956), Cleopatra (1963), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), Shanks (1974), Bite the Bullet (1975), Dragonslayer (1981), and Under the Volcano (1984). His song “Unchained Melody” from the 1955 film Unchained, which he co-wrote with Hy Zaret, also earned an Oscar nomination, and became a global pop hit when it was covered by Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers in 1965.

Perhaps one of North’s most famous unrealized contributions was his original score for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was ultimately replaced by pre-existing classical music. Though unused, the score was later recorded by his friend, composer Jerry Goldsmith, for Varèse Sarabande Records in 1993, and it was recognized as a striking, forward-thinking composition in its own right.

Despite numerous nominations, North never won a competitive Academy Award, a fact often cited as a glaring oversight in Oscar history. In 1986, he became the first film composer to receive an Honorary Oscar, acknowledging his indelible impact on the art of film music.

In addition to his film work, North composed concert music, ballets, and television scores, and was a founding member of the Composers and Lyricists Guild of America, advocating for artists’ rights throughout his career.