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Alfred Newman

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For other uses, see Alfred Newman (disambiguation).
Alfred Newman
Years active1930-1970
SpouseMartha Montgomery (1947-1970)

Alfred Newman (March 17, 1900[1]– February 17, 1970) was a major American composer of music for films.

He received 45 Academy Award nominations, making him the second most nominated composer-arranger in the history of the Academy Awards, behind John Williams (Newman's scores for The Hurricane and The Prisoner of Zenda were also nominated at a time when composers were not eligible to be nominated in the score category). He won the Oscar 9 times; in 1940 he was nominated for 4 different films. Between 1938 and 1957, he was nominated twenty years in a row.

Early life

The eldest of ten children, Newman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. A musical prodigy, he began studying piano at the age of five, with Sigismund Stojowski. He was able to supplement his poor family's income by playing in theaters and restaurants. He traveled the vaudeville circuit with performer Grace LaRue, billed as "The Marvelous Boy Pianist". He also studied composition with Rubin Goldmark. By the age of twenty he was in New York, beginning a ten-year career on Broadway as the conductor of musicals by composers such as George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Jerome Kern. Then, in 1930, he accompanied Irving Berlin to Hollywood.[2] In Los Angeles, he had private lessons from Arnold Schoenberg.

Movie career

After completing his work on Berlin's project, a movie called Reaching for the Moon, Newman found work with Samuel Goldwyn and United Artists, writing his first full movie score for Goldwyn's 1931 production, Street Scene. The title song he wrote for this movie became a theme to which he returned on several occasions, including the opening of the 1953 movie How to Marry a Millionaire, in which Newman is seen conducting the studio orchestra. The theme also appears in films I Wake Up Screaming, Cry of the City, and Where The Sidewalk Ends.

In 1940, Newman began a 20-year career as music director for 20th Century-Fox Studios. He composed the familiar fanfare which accompanies the studio logo at the beginning of Fox's productions. In 1953, Newman wrote the "Cinemascope extension" for his fanfare. At Fox, he also developed what came to be known as the Newman System, a means of synchronising the performance and recording of a musical score with the film. The system is still in use today. Newman's final musical score under his Fox contract was The Best of Everything (1959).

After leaving Fox in 1960, Newman freelanced for the remainder of his career, writing the scores for such films as MGM's How the West Was Won and The Greatest Story Ever Told, among others.

After reportedly paying to have his score for Captain from Castile recorded with the Fox orchestra, Newman conducted a series of albums for Capitol Records, including a recording of George Gershwin's Variations on "I Got Rhythm". He was active until the end of his life, scoring Universal Pictures' Airport shortly before his death.

After his death, George Korngold produced an RCA Victor album honoring Newman, Captain from Castile, with the National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Charles Gerhardt. The discrete quadraphonic recording was later reissued by RCA on CD with compatible Dolby surround sound.

Newman family

He married Martha Louis née Montgomery (1920-2005), a former actress and Goldwyn Girl, and they had five children.

He was the head of a family of major Hollywood film composers:

Partial filmography

Between 1930 and 1970, Alfred Newman wrote music for over 200 films of every imaginable type, including a score for the newsreel made from the World War II footage of the Battle of Midway. In addition, he acted as musical director of dozens of other movies. Among his major film scores (and adaptations of other composers' scores) are:

Notes

  1. ^ His birth year is commonly mistakenly given as 1901.
  2. ^ [1]
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