North, Alex
NORTH, Alex
Composer. Nationality: American. Born: Chester, Pennsylvania, 10 December 1910. Education: Attended Curtis Institute; Juilliard School, New York; studied with Ernst Toch, Copland, and Revueltas. Family: Married Annemarie (North); two sons and one daughter. Career: 1933–34—enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory; 1935–40—composed for ballet; began composing for documentaries; 1951—first score for fiction film, A Streetcar Named Desire; also composer for TV, including the series The Man and the City, 1971–72, and the mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man, 1976, and The Word, 1978. Award: Special Academy Award, 1986. Died: Of cancer in California, 8 September 1991.
Films as Composer:
- 1937
Heart of Spain (doc); People of the Cumberland (Meyers and Hill—doc)
- 1945
A Better Tomorrow (Hackenschmeid—doc)
- 1951
A Streetcar Named Desire (Kazan); The Thirteenth Letter (Preminger); Death of a Salesman (Benedek)
- 1952
Viva Zapata! (Kazan); Les Miserables (Milestone); Pony Soldier (Newman)
- 1953
The Member of the Wedding (Zinnemann)
- 1954
Go, Man, Go (Howe); Desirée (Koster); The American Road (Stoney—doc)
- 1955
The Racers (Such Men Are Dangerous) (Hathaway); Unchained (Bartlett); The Rose Tattoo (Daniel Mann); Man with the Gun (The Trouble Shooter) (Wilson)
- 1956
I'll Cry Tomorrow (Daniel Mann); The Bad Seed (LeRoy); The Rainmaker (Anthony); Four Girls in Town (Sher); The King and Four Queens (Walsh)
- 1957
The Bachelor Party (Delbert Mann)
- 1958
The Long Hot Summer (Ritt); Stage Struck (Lumet); Hot Spell (Daniel Mann); South Seas Adventure (Thompson and others)
- 1959
The Sound and the Fury (Ritt); The Wonderful Country (Parrish)
- 1960
Spartacus (Kubrick)
- 1961
The Children's Hour (Wyler); Sanctuary (Ritt); The Misfits (Huston)
- 1962
All Fall Down (Frankenheimer)
- 1963
Cleopatra (Mankiewicz)
- 1964
The Outrage (Ritt)
- 1965
Cheyenne Autumn (Ford); The Agony and the Ecstasy (Reed)
- 1966
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Nichols)
- 1967
Africa (doc)
- 1968
The Devil's Brigade (McLaglen); The Shoes of the Fisherman (Anderson)
- 1969
A Dream of Kings (Daniel Mann); Hard Contract (Pogostin)
- 1971
Willard (Daniel Mann)
- 1972
Pocket Money (Rosenberg)
- 1973
Once Upon a Scoundrel (Schaefer)
- 1974
Shanks (Castle); Lost in the Stars (Daniel Mann)
- 1975
Bite the Bullet (Brooks); Journey into Fear (Daniel Mann)
- 1976
The Passover Plot (Campus)
- 1978
Somebody Killed Her Husband (Johnson)
- 1979
Wise Blood (Huston)
- 1980
Carny (Kaylor)
- 1981
Dragonslayer (Robbins)
- 1982
Sister, Sister (Berry)
- 1984
Under the Volcano (Huston)
- 1985
Prizzi's Honor (Huston)
- 1987
The Dead (The Dubliners) (Huston); Good Morning Vietnam (Levinson); John Huston and the Dubliners (Sievernich)
- 1988
The Penitent (Osmond)
- 1990
Ghost (Zucker) (song)
- 1991
Le Dernier Papillon
Publications
By NORTH: articles—
Variety (New York), 12 October 1960.
Cinema (Los Angeles), Fall 1969.
In Knowing the Score, by Irwin Bazelon, New York, 1975.
Soundtrack! (Hollywood), March 1985.
On NORTH: articles—
Spolar, Betsey, and Merrilyn Hammond, in Theatre Arts (New York), August 1953.
Cinestudio (Madrid), June 1972.
Films in Review (New York), October 1972.
Thomas, Tony, in Music for the Movies, South Brunswick, New Jersey, 1973.
Ecran (Paris), September 1975.
Palmer, Christopher, in Film Music Notebook (Calabasas, California), vol. 3, no. 1, 1977.
Pro Musica Sana (New York), Summer 1982.
Soundtrack! (Hollywood), December 1982.
Soundtrack! (Hollywood), March 1983.
Films in Review (New York), June-July 1986.
Palmer, Christopher, in The Composer in Hollywood, London 1990.
Obituary in Variety (New York), 16 September 1991.
Obituary in Séquences (Haute-Ville), November 1991.
Obituary in Soundtrack, December 1991.
Obituary in Sight & Sound (London), February 1992.
Film Dope (Nottingham), July 1992.
Kendall, L., "The Re-making of Alex North's 2001: An Interview with Robert Townson," in Film Score Monthly (Los Angeles), August-September 1993.
Grant, B., "The Art of Film Music: Special Emphasis on Hugo Friedhofer, Alex North, David Raskin, Leonard Rosenman," in Choice, January 1995.
Johnson, Victoria E., "The Art of Film Music: Special Emphasis on Hugo Friedhofer, Alex North, David Raskin, Leonard Rosenman," in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1995.
Kalinak, Kathryn, "The Art of Film Music: Special Emphasis on Hugo Friedhofer, Alex North, David Raskin and Leonard Rosenman," in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, March 1996.
* * *
In 1986, Alex North became the first composer to be voted an honorary Academy Award. The honor was overdue; he had never won despite 15 nominations between 1951 and 1984.
North came to films with a background in documentary and ballet music under the sponsorship of Elia Kazan. Kazan had a difficult time convincing Warner Bros.' music department to accept New Yorker North as composer for A Streetcar Named Desire, but Kazan persisted and the resulting score caused a reconceptualization of the role of music in films. The symphonic film score—rich, lushly orchestrated—had been a staple of the medium since the 1930s. In Streetcar, North wrote music that was heavily influenced by jazz and the blues yet preserved the structure of the classical film score. Cat-house blues piano and mournful trumpet wails functioned to evoke character, be it Stanley Kowalski's coarseness or Blanche DuBois's fragility. And it fit.
North's score for Viva Zapata! enabled him to use musical experience gained during a two-year stay in Mexico. It also gave him further opportunities to display a flair for unorthodox orchestration, but with a purpose: a sequence depicting peasants clicking stones together as a gesture of solidarity for the captured Zapata rises in volume, and as the scene progresses North adds an underlay of bongos, timbales, flutes, guitars, and plucked strings. The orchestra has added its rhythmic voice to the protest of the peasants' primitive percussion, extending in music the dramatic essence of the sequence.
Scoring against conventional expectations in Mike Nichols's volatile adaptation of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, North toyed with and abandoned jazz and twelve-tone approaches to the project and produced a quasi-Baroque score: a tranquil guitar theme played against muted violin chords and harp pizzicati. As North said: "I wanted to get to the soul of these people and suggest they were really meant for each other. Frenetic music would have tipped the scales too much in one direction. You have to let the scenes play themselves."
Although North preferred intimate and personal subjects, his mammoth scores for Kubrick's Spartacus and Mankiewicz's Cleopatra are among his most celebrated works. On both he was afforded a luxury rarely given the film composer: a year to work preparing each project, collaborating in both cases at every stage of the production with musically sensitive directors. For Spartacus, North attempted to "capture the feeling of pre-Christian Rome using contemporary musical techniques." To this end, he researched music of the period and unearthed unorthodox instruments such as the dulcimer and the ondioline in a quest for exotic tone color. Inspired by Prokofiev's score for Alexander Nevsky, North utilized a large brass section to evoke the barbaric quality of the times. He withheld the violins' appearance until the film's love story blossomed, at that point proving himself more than equal to the lyrical effloressence of the "traditional" film scores of the past. It is a tragedy that in their only subsequent collaboration, Kubrick decided to jettison the 40 minutes of original music North wrote for 2001: A Space Odyssey; the director fell in love with his classical "temporary" track and decided to retain it.
In the 1980s, Dragonslayer's gothic, stentorian strains and Carny's expressionist grotesquerie displayed North's flair for the fantastic and the surreal. Under the Volcano marked his third teaming with John Huston and was a return to the Mexican inspiration of his youth. North's mischievous streak was showcased in his witty orchestral adaptation of Italian arias that wryly comment on the black comedy of Huston's Prizzi's Honor.
In all, North's achievement was to realize what he saw as the function of film scoring: "to extend the characters on screen by writing music that penetrates the soul of the individual." He was an innovator and experimenter who never lost sight of his considerable lyric gifts.
—Lee Tsiantis
North, Alex
North, Alex
North, Alex, gloriously gifted American composer and conductor with a predilection for uniquely colored film music; b. Chester, Pa., Dec. 4, 1910; d. Pacific Palisades, Calif., Sept. 8, 1991. His father, a blacksmith, was an early immigrant from Russia. North studied piano and theory at the Curtis Inst. of Music in Philadelphia, and later received a scholarship to study at the Juilliard School of Music in N.Y., where he took courses in composition (1929–32). A decisive change in his life came with his decision to go to Russia as a technology specialist at a time when Russia was eager to engage American technicians. He became fascinated with new Russian music and received a scholarship to attend the Moscow Cons., where he studied composition with Anton Weprik and Victor Bielyi (1933–35). He also was music director of the propaganda group of German Socialists called “Kolonne Links” (Column to the Left!). He mastered the Russian language and acquired a fine reputation in Russia as a true friend of Soviet music. Returning to the U.S., he took additional courses in composition with Copland (1936–38) and Toch (1938–39). In 1939 he conducted 26 concerts in Mexico as music director of the Anna Sokolow Dance Troupe; during his stay in Mexico City, he had some instruction from Silvestre Revueltas. In 1942 North entered the U.S. Army; promoted to captain, he became responsible for entertainment programs in mental hospitals. He worked closely with the psychiatrist Karl Menninger in developing a theatrical genre called “psychodrama,” which later became an accepted mode of psychological therapy. During his Army years, North also worked with the Office of War Information, composing scores for over 25 documentary films. During all these peregrinations he developed a distinct flair for theater music, while continuing to produce estimable works in absolute forms. His concerto, Revue for Clarinet and Orch., was performed by Benny Goodman in N.Y. under the baton of Leonard Bernstein on Nov. 18, 1946. He further expanded his creative talents to write a number of modern ballets. The result of these multifarious excursions into musical forms was the formation of a style peculiarly recognizable as the specific art of North. His concentrated efforts, however, became directed mainly toward the art of film music, a field in which he triumphed. John Huston stated in 1986 that “it is the genius of Alex North to convey an emotion to the audience”; other directors praised North’s cinemusical abilities in similar terms. Among the writers with whom he worked were Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck, and Arthur Miller. But no success is without disheartening frustration. North was commissioned to write the score for 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which he worked enthusiastically. But much to his dismay, the director, Stanley Kubrick, decided to replace it by a pasticcio that included such commonplaces as Strauss’s The Blue Danube Waltz. North refused to be downhearted by this discomfiture and used the discarded material for his 3rdSym. He was nominated 15 times for an Academy Award for best film music, but it was not until 1986 that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences finally awarded him an Oscar for lifetime achievement. Among his outstanding scores are A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Death of a Salesman (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), The Rose Tattoo (1955), The Bad Seed (1956), The Rainmaker (1956), The Sound and the Fury (1959), Spartacus (1960), The Children’s Hour (1961), The Misfits (1961), Cleopatra (1963), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), Shanks (1973), Bite the Bullet (1975), Dragonslayer (1981), Under the Volcano (1984), Prizzi’s Honor (1985), The Penitent (1986), The Dead (1987), and Good Morning, Vietnam (1988). His song Unchained Melody (1955) became a popular hit in its rendition by The Righteous Brothers.
Works
dramatic: ballet:Ballad in a Popular Style, for Anna Sokolow (1933); Case History (1933); War Is Beautiful (1936); Slaughter of the Innocents (N.Y, Nov. 14, 1937); American Lyric, for Martha Graham (N.Y., Dec. 26, 1937); Inquisition (1938); Lupe (1940); Design for 5 (1941); Exile (Mansfield, March 3, 1941); Golden Fleece, for Hanya Holm (Mansfield, March 17, 1941); Clay Ritual (Hartford, Conn., May 20, 1942); Intersection (1947); A Streetcar Named Desire (Montreal, Oct. 9, 1952); Daddy Long Legs Dream Ballet (1955; for Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron in the film Daddy Long Legs); Mal de siècle (Brussels, July 3, 1958). children’s opera and theater:The Hither and Thither of Danny Dither (1941); Little Indian Drum for Narrator and Orch. (N.Y, Oct. 19, 1947). orch.:Rhapsody for Piano and Orch. (N.Y, Nov. 11, 1941); Revue for Clarinet and Orch. (N.Y, Nov. 18, 1946); 3 syms.: No. 1 (1947), No. 2 (1968), and No. 3 (1971; based upon the unused original score for 2001: A Space Odyssey); Holiday Set (Saratoga, N.Y., July 10, 1948). other:Morning Star Cantata for Chorus and Orch. (N.Y, May 18, 1947); Negro Mother Cantata for Chorus and Orch. (N.Y, May 17, 1948); chamber music.
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire