Archive
Remembering Werner Janssen, 1899-1990
Composer and conductor Werner Janssen died ten years ago today, on September 19, 1990, in Stony Brook, New York, following a brief illness, at the age of 91,
A distinguished symphonic conductor as well as a Hollywood film composer, Janssen enjoyed an unusually varied career, earning six Academy Award nominations for his film music while also championing contemporary concert music in the United States and Europe.
Janssen was born in New York City on June 1, 1899, the son of German immigrants. He studied at Dartmouth College and the New England Conservatory, and later pursued conducting studies in Europe. After winning the Rome Prize in 1930 he studied orchestration in Rome, and during the early 1930s established an international reputation as a conductor. In 1934 he became the first American-born conductor to lead the New York Philharmonic, and subsequently served as conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1939.
Janssen entered Hollywood relatively late. His first major film score was Lewis Milestone’s The General Died at Dawn (1936), starring Gary Cooper. The film’s Chinese setting gave Janssen an opportunity to incorporate Asian-influenced colors into an otherwise large-scale symphonic score, while its combination of romance, political intrigue and action brought out the dramatic instincts he had developed in the concert hall. The score immediately earned him an Academy Award nomination. Read more…
Jack Nitzsche, 1937-2000
Composer Jack Nitzsche died on August 25, 2000, in hospital on Los Angeles, of cardiac arrest brought on by a recurring bronchial infection. He was 63.
Bernard Alfred Nitzsche was born in Chicago, Illinois, in April 1937, the son of German immigrants, and raised on farm in Michigan. He moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s with aspirations of becoming a jazz saxophonist, but soon found his calling in arranging and studio work. He initially worked for Sonny Bono, but later found his niche working as an arranger for producer Phil Spector. He played a pivotal role in shaping Spector’s the “Wall of Sound,” and was an important contributor to legendary recordings by pop and rock artists including The Ronettes, The Righteous Brothers, Jackie De Shannon (‘Needles and Pins’), and Ike and Tina Turner (‘River Deep Mountain High’).
Later, in the 1960s and ’70s, he collaborated with a wide array of artists, including The Rolling Stones – contributing keyboards and orchestration on several albums, especially songs such as ‘Paint It, Black’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ – and Neil Young, with whom he had a long and occasionally volatile creative partnership.
Nitzsche’s film work was equally distinguished. His first important score was for the 1970 thriller Performance starring Mick Jagger, and he provided ‘uncredited contributions’ to the soundtrack for The Exorcist in 1973. He received his first Oscar nomination for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, and he won an Oscar for the song “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982, which he co-wrote with Buffy Sainte-Marie and Will Jennings.
His other important scores include Cruising (1980), Starman (1984), The Razor’s Edge (1984), The Jewel of the Nile (1985), 9½ Weeks (1986), Stand By Me (1986), Revenge (1990), Mermaids (1990), and Blue Sky (1994). His last major score was the for the Sean Penn-director drama The Crossing Guard in 1995; he suffered a stroke in 1998 which ended his scoring career. Read more…
Remembering David Rose, 1910-1990
Composer, arranger, conductor and orchestra leader David Rose died ten years ago today in Burbank, California, on August 23, 1990, at the age of 80, from heart failure.
One of Hollywood’s busiest musical craftsmen, Rose scored 36 films and wrote themes and background music for 24 television series, while also enjoying major success as a recording artist. His best-known compositions included “Holiday for Strings” and the chart-topping instrumental “The Stripper.”
David Daniel Rose was born in London on June 15, 1910, and grew up in Chicago. He began playing piano professionally as a teenager and by the early 1930s was leading the house orchestra at radio station WGN. Moving to California in 1940, he became increasingly active in radio and subsequently joined MGM as a musical director. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army and worked on the musical Winged Victory, where he met comedian Red Skelton.
Rose’s first major popular composition was “Holiday for Strings,” recorded in the early 1940s and soon established as one of the most familiar pieces of American light orchestral music. His Hollywood career developed alongside his recording work, and in 1944 he received an Academy Award nomination for the Bob Hope comedy The Princess and the Pirate. The following year, “So in Love,” written with lyricist Leo Robin for Wonder Man, brought him a second Oscar nomination. Read more…
George Duning, 1908-2000
Composer, arranger and conductor George Duning died in San Diego, California, on February 27, 2000, just two days after his 92nd birthday.
One of the most prolific composers of Hollywood’s studio era, Duning spent 15 years at Columbia Pictures and wrote music for more than 100 films, receiving five Academy Award nominations during a career that later extended successfully into television.
Duning was born in Richmond, Indiana, on February 25, 1908, into a musical family; his father was a singer and conductor and his mother taught piano and organ. He studied theory at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and composition with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, while also developing a strong background in jazz. After college he worked as a trumpeter and arranger with dance bands before becoming musical director of Kay Kyser’s enormously popular radio program Kollege of Musical Knowledge. During World War II he served in the US Navy as a conductor and arranger for the Armed Forces Radio Service.
After the war Duning joined Columbia Pictures as an arranger and orchestrator. His first substantial original film score was Robert Rossen’s noir Johnny O’Clock (1947), and he quickly became one of the studio’s principal composers. His first Oscar nomination came for Jolson Sings Again (1949), followed by another for the intimate drama No Sad Songs for Me (1950).
Duning’s reputation grew considerably during the 1950s. Among his major scores were Salome (1953), Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), From Here to Eternity (1953), My Sister Eileen (1955), Picnic (1955), The Eddy Duchin Story (1956), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), Cowboy (1958), Bell, Book and Candle (1958) and Houseboat (1958). From Here to Eternity brought him his third Academy Award nomination, while The Eddy Duchin Story earned his fifth.
Masaru Sato, 1928-1999
Composer Masaru Sato died in Tokyo on December 5, 1999, at the age of 71, after collapsing at a celebration held in his honor.
One of the most prolific composers in Japanese cinema, Sato wrote more than 300 film scores during a career spanning almost five decades. He is best remembered internationally for his ten-year collaboration with Akira Kurosawa, including Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, High and Low and Red Beard, as well as for several entries in the Godzilla series.
Sato was born in Rumoi, Hokkaido, on May 29, 1928, the youngest of six brothers in a music-loving family. He studied at the National Music Academy in Tokyo and became particularly inspired by fellow Hokkaido composers Akira Ifukube and Fumio Hayasaka. After seeing Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Sato sought out Hayasaka personally and became his pupil and assistant, eventually helping orchestrate Hayasaka’s monumental score for Seven Samurai (1954).
Sato’s first major independent assignment was Godzilla Raids Again (1955), the sequel to Toho’s original Godzilla. That same year Hayasaka died suddenly while working on Kurosawa’s I Live in Fear, and Sato was asked to complete the score. Kurosawa was sufficiently impressed that Sato became his regular composer for the following decade. Read more…
Frank De Vol, 1911-1999
Composer, arranger, conductor and actor Frank De Vol died in Lafayette, California, on October 27, 1999, at the age of 88, from congestive heart failure.
One of Hollywood’s most versatile musical craftsmen, De Vol wrote more than 50 film scores while also enjoying major careers in radio, recordings and television. He received five Academy Award nominations and five Emmy nominations, and composed some of the most familiar television themes of the 1960s and 1970s.
Frank Denny De Vol was born in Moundsville, West Virginia, on September 20, 1911, and grew up in Canton, Ohio, where his father conducted the orchestra at a local vaudeville theatre. He played violin and piano professionally while still a teenager and later taught himself saxophone. By the late 1930s he was arranging for Horace Heidt and subsequently worked with guitarist Alvino Rey before settling in California, where he became a successful radio musical director.
During the 1940s and early 1950s De Vol became one of the busiest arrangers in popular music, working with singers including Dinah Shore, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and Vic Damone. His experience writing quickly and effectively for orchestras proved ideal preparation for Hollywood, and in 1954 director Robert Aldrich hired him to score the low-budget thriller World for Ransom. It began one of the most important professional relationships of De Vol’s career. Read more…
Remembering Irving Berlin, 1888-1989
Composer and lyricist Irving Berlin died ten years ago today at his home in Manhattan on September 22, 1989, at the age of 101.
One of the most important songwriters in American history, Berlin’s career stretched from Tin Pan Alley and vaudeville through Broadway and the golden age of the Hollywood musical. He wrote more than 1,200 songs, including “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Always,” “Blue Skies,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “God Bless America” and “White Christmas,” and his music became an essential part of the American popular songbook.
Berlin was born Israel Beilin in the Russian Empire on May 11, 1888, into a Jewish family that emigrated to the United States when he was a child. Growing up in poverty on New York’s Lower East Side, he left school early and worked as a singing waiter and song plugger before beginning to write songs himself. His breakthrough came with “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911, an international sensation that established him as one of America’s leading popular composers. Remarkably, Berlin never became a conventionally trained musician and could read music only with difficulty, generally composing at the piano and relying on musical assistants to transcribe and arrange his ideas.
Cinema became increasingly important to Berlin as talking pictures transformed Hollywood during the late 1920s. His songs appeared in some of the earliest musicals, including The Cocoanuts (1929), based on the Marx Brothers’ Broadway show, Puttin’ on the Ritz (1930), and Reaching for the Moon (1930). Unlike conventional film composers, Berlin rarely wrote dramatic underscore; instead he created complete song scores in which the numbers themselves drove the entertainment and often became hits independently of the films. Read more…
Remembering Johnny Green, 1908-1989
Composer, arranger, conductor and songwriter Johnny Green died ten years ago today, on May 15, 1989, at his home in Beverly Hills, at the age of 80. Green, who had suffered a stroke two years earlier, died from pulmonary edema.
One of the dominant musical figures of Hollywood’s golden age, he served for a decade as music director at MGM, received numerous Academy Award nominations and won five Oscars, four for his work on major film musicals and another as producer of a musical short.
John Waldo Green was born in New York City on October 10, 1908. A musical prodigy, he entered Harvard at 15 and graduated with a degree in economics, briefly working on Wall Street before abandoning finance for music. During the late 1920s and 1930s he became a successful songwriter, arranger, pianist and bandleader. His greatest song, “Body and Soul,” written in 1930, became one of the most enduring standards in jazz, while other successes included “Out of Nowhere” and “I Cover the Waterfront.”
Green’s involvement with films began at Paramount’s Astoria studios in New York, but his Hollywood career took off after he joined MGM during the 1940s. He worked as conductor, arranger and composer before becoming the studio’s music director in 1949, a position he held through the 1950s. In that capacity Green supervised and conducted the music for many of MGM’s most lavish productions, working closely with orchestrators such as Conrad Salinger and helping establish the exceptionally rich orchestral sound associated with the studio’s post-war musicals. Read more…
Ernest Gold, 1921-1999
Composer and conductor Ernest Gold died in Santa Monica, California, on March 17, 1999, at the age of 77, following a stroke.
An Austrian-born composer who became one of Hollywood’s leading musical voices during the 1950s and 1960s, Gold wrote scores for more than 100 film and television productions. He received four Academy Award nominations, winning for Otto Preminger’s Exodus, and enjoyed an especially fruitful collaboration with director Stanley Kramer.
Gold was born Ernst Sigmund Goldner in Vienna on July 13, 1921, into a musical family and began composing while still a child. Following the Nazi annexation of Austria, his family emigrated to the United States in 1938, settling in New York. Gold initially wrote popular songs while continuing his musical studies, and eventually moved to Hollywood, where he began working on low-budget features while also orchestrating and conducting for other composers.
After a decade of smaller assignments, Gold’s career accelerated in the late 1950s. He worked with Stanley Kramer on The Defiant Ones (1958) and then composed On the Beach (1959), Kramer’s bleak drama about the aftermath of nuclear war. Gold ingeniously incorporated the Australian song “Waltzing Matilda” throughout the score, transforming the familiar melody from something nostalgic and comforting into an increasingly tragic reminder of a world facing extinction. The score earned him his first Academy Award nomination and won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score.
Gold’s greatest success came the following year with Otto Preminger’s epic Exodus (1960), starring Paul Newman. Its expansive main theme, combining sweeping romanticism with musical gestures intended to evoke the film’s Israeli setting, became one of the most popular film themes of its era. The soundtrack was an enormous commercial success, the theme was recorded by numerous artists, and Gold won the Academy Award for Best Dramatic or Comedy Score as well as two Grammy Awards. Exodus remains by far his best-known work and established him internationally as a major film composer. Read more…
Remembering Lionel Newman, 1916-1989
Composer, conductor, arranger and music executive Lionel Newman died in Los Angeles ten years ago today, on February 3, 1989, at the age of 73, following a heart attack.
A member of Hollywood’s extraordinary Newman musical dynasty, he spent more than four decades at 20th Century Fox, eventually becoming senior vice president of music. Newman received 11 Academy Award nominations and won for his adaptation of Hello, Dolly! in 1970.
Newman was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on January 4, 1916, the youngest of several musically gifted brothers, including composers Alfred and Emil Newman. He began working professionally while still a teenager, conducted for producer Earl Carroll and spent several years accompanying Mae West before following Alfred to Hollywood. In 1943 he joined 20th Century Fox as a rehearsal pianist and gradually progressed through the studio’s music department as conductor, composer, arranger and musical supervisor.
As an original composer, Newman worked on films including Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), Road House (1948), Love Me Tender (1956), The Proud Ones (1956), April Love (1957) and North to Alaska (1960). His song “Again,” written with Dorcas Cochran for Road House, became a popular standard, while Love Me Tender, Elvis Presley’s screen debut, demonstrated Newman’s ability to work comfortably within the changing musical world of 1950s Hollywood. Read more…
John Addison, 1920-1998
Composer John Addison died on December 7, 1998, at his home in Bennington, Vermont, after a short illness. He was 78.
John Mervyn Addison was born in Chobham, Surrey, England, in March 1920, and studied composition at the Royal College of Music. His education was interrupted by service in World War II, where he served with distinction in the British Army, seeing action in Normandy and the Netherlands, and participating in Operation Market Garden. The experience would later inform one of his best-known works: the rousing score to A Bridge Too Far (1977), a film about the Allied operation that Addison survived.
Addison’s breakthrough in film came in 1950 with the British thriller Seven Days to Noon, and over the course of the subsequent decade he wrote scores for popular British films such as The Man Between (1953), The Cockleshell Heroes (1955), Reach for the Sky (1956), Three Men in a Boat (1956), Lucky Jim (1957), A Taste of Honey (1961), and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962).
It was Addison’s sparkling, Oscar-winning score for Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones in 1963 that brought him international recognition. The music’s vivacious period stylings, full of energy and wit, became a defining element of the film’s success. Following his Oscar win Addison split his time between the UK and Hollywood, and in the years thereafter he composed scores for films such as Smashing Time (1967), The Honey Pot (1967), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Sleuth (1972, his second Oscar nomination), Swashbuckler (1976), and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), earning both critical acclaim and popular success. Notably, Addison also composed the replacement score for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Torn Curtain in 1966, which is now remembered as the film which ended Hitchcock’s relationship with Bernard Herrmann. Read more…
Paul Misraki, 1908-1998
Composer and songwriter Paul Misraki died in Paris on October 29, 1998, at the age of 90.
One of the most prolific figures in French popular music and cinema, Misraki enjoyed a career spanning more than six decades, writing hundreds of songs and scores for well over 100 films. Although best remembered in France for a succession of enormously popular songs, film-music enthusiasts know him for works including And God Created Woman, Les Cousins, Le Doulos and Jean-Luc Godard’s science-fiction classic Alphaville.
Paul Misrachi was born in Constantinople, then part of the Ottoman Empire, on January 28, 1908, into a Jewish family of Italian ancestry. He spent part of his childhood in Bucharest before the family settled in Paris, where he received a classical musical education and developed an enthusiasm for jazz and popular song. His professional breakthrough came when he joined Ray Ventura’s celebrated orchestra, Les Collégiens, initially as a pianist and arranger and soon as one of its principal songwriters.
During the 1930s Misraki became one of France’s most successful popular composers. His songs included “Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise,” “Qu’est-ce qu’on attend pour être heureux?” and “Ça vaut mieux que d’attraper la scarlatine,” witty and immediately memorable pieces that became closely associated with Ventura and the carefree musical culture of pre-war France. He also began composing for films, an activity which eventually became a major part of his career. Read more…
Remembering Ronald Stein, 1930-1988
Composer Ronald Stein died in Los Angeles ten years ago today, on August 15, 1988, at the age of 58, from pancreatic cancer.
One of the defining musical voices of American low-budget genre cinema, Stein wrote music for more than 140 films during a career stretching from the mid-1950s into the 1970s. He was especially associated with American International Pictures and producer-director Roger Corman, bringing invention and musical seriousness to films including It Conquered the World, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Premature Burial and The Haunted Palace.
Louis Ronald Stein was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 12, 1930. His mother, Cecilia, had played piano for silent films and gave him his earliest musical training, encouraging both his musicianship and his fascination with cinema. He studied at Washington University in St. Louis, where he wrote for theatrical productions and worked with the Municipal Opera, before continuing his studies at Yale. His education was interrupted by military service, during which he composed and conducted shows for the U.S. Army Special Services.
After leaving the Army, Stein moved to Hollywood determined to become a film composer, despite receiving discouraging advice from established studio musicians. His opportunity came through Roger Corman, who hired him to score the western Apache Woman in 1955. Stein’s ability to compose and conduct quickly on tiny budgets led to a five-year contract with American International Pictures and an extraordinary period of productivity. Read more…
Edwin Astley, 1922-1998
Composer, arranger and conductor Edwin “Ted” Astley died in Goring, Oxfordshire, England, on May 19, 1998, at the age of 76, following several years of declining health.
One of the defining musical voices of British adventure television during the 1950s and 1960s, Astley created memorable themes and incidental scores for Danger Man, The Saint, The Baron, Department S and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), while also writing for cinema and documentary television.
Edwin Thomas Astley was born in Warrington, Cheshire, on April 12, 1922. He left school at 14 and initially worked for a gas-oven manufacturer, but music quickly became his profession. During World War II he joined the Royal Army Service Corps band, playing clarinet and saxophone and arranging military and dance-band music. After the war he led the Ted Astley Orchestra before moving to London, where he became an arranger for singers including Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton.
Astley began composing for film and television in the mid-1950s. His early television work included The Adventures of Robin Hood, for which he supplied incidental music and a memorable brass fanfare, followed by The Buccaneers and International Detective. His film assignments included the science-fiction monster film The Giant Behemoth (1959), Peter Sellers’s comedy The Mouse That Roared (1959), The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960) and Hammer’s The Phantom of the Opera (1962), for which he composed both the dramatic score and original operatic material. Read more…
Albert Glasser, 1916-1998
Composer, conductor and arranger Albert Glasser died in Los Angeles on May 4, 1998, at the age of 82, following a heart attack.
One of the most prolific composers in American low-budget cinema, Glasser wrote music for well over 100 films and became particularly associated with the science-fiction and horror pictures of the 1950s. His scores for The Amazing Colossal Man, The Cyclops, Beginning of the End, Earth vs. the Spider and Attack of the Puppet People helped define the sound of an entire era of B-movie filmmaking.
Albert Glasser was born in Chicago on January 25, 1916, the son of Latvian immigrants. He took up the flute as a youngster and developed an enthusiasm for orchestral music, especially Wagner and Richard Strauss. At 18 he received a scholarship to study composition and orchestration at the University of Southern California, and in 1935 joined Warner Bros. as a music copyist. There he encountered the work of Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Hugo Friedhofer at close range, an invaluable practical education in the techniques of Hollywood scoring.
After further work as an orchestrator and arranger, Glasser received his first credited feature assignment with the Poverty Row horror film The Monster Maker in 1944. He subsequently wrote for westerns, crime pictures and adventure films, including several Cisco Kid features. His music for those films was later adapted for the popular television series, while he also composed extensively for radio programs including Hopalong Cassidy, Tarzan and Clyde Beatty. Read more…
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