MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer Mark Snow died on July 4, 2025, at his home in Connecticut after a short illness. He was 78.

Martin Fulterman was born in August 1946, in Brooklyn, New York. He studied piano as a child, and he later attended New York’s High School of Music and Art and the Juilliard School of Music, where his roommate was fellow composer Michael Kamen. They co-founded the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, and released several well-regarded albums.

Fulterman adopted the professional pseudonym ‘Mark Snow’ after he moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. He began his film and TV career writing music for the ABC drama series The Rookies starring his then-brother-in-law, actor Georg Stanford Brown, and quickly established himself as one of the most in-demand composers working on American television, writing for massively popular shows such as Starsky & Hutch, The Love Boat, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, Cagney & Lacey, and T. J. Hooker.

However, it was his association with the 1993 sci-fi series The X-Files starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson that brought Snow to international fame. In addition to writing its iconic whistled main theme, Snow scored more than 200 episodes of the show across 11 seasons, as well as scoring its two spin-off theatrical movies in 1998 and 2008. The single of the instrumental main title theme was an unexpected chart hit in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and he received five Emmy nominations for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series between 1997 and 2002 for different X-Files episodes.

Snow also received Emmy nominations for scoring the TV series Ghost Whisperer (2005-2010), writing the theme for Nowhere Man (1996), and for scoring the TV movies Something About Amelia (1984), An American Story (1993), Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994), Children of the Dust (1995), and Helter Skelter (2004).

His other major credits include TV shows such as Millennium, Smallville and Blue Bloods, and movies such as Ernest Saves Christmas (1988), Born to be Wild (1995), Crazy in Alabama (1999), and Marvel’s The New Mutants (2020), which would turn out to be his final score. During the 2000s Snow also enjoyed a brief period working in France for acclaimed filmmaker Alain Resnais, earning a César nomination for his score for Private Fears in Public Places in 2007.

In addition to his Emmy nominations, Snow received ASCAP’s Golden Note Award in 2005 “in recognition of his unprecedented success as one of the most versatile and popular composers in television and film” and a Career Achievement Award from the TV Academy’s music peer group in 2014.

Snow is survived by his wife, Glynnis, his children and grandchildren.