Alfred Newman was perhaps the foremost composer and music director in motion-picture history. Between 1930 and 1970, Newman scored more than 200 film soundtracks, many of them Hollywood classics. With 45 Oscar nominations and nine Academy Awards, he was the undisputed king of Hollywood film music.
Newman was born in 1901 in New Haven, Connecticut, the oldest of ten children, to Luba and Michael Newman, a poor produce seller. He showed an early passion for the piano, and was hailed as a child prodigy by age eight. Rising from vaudeville to Broadway (where he worked with renowned composers such as George GERSHWIN and Cole PORTER) he was, by age 18, known as the youngest conductor in the United States.
In 1930, following the advent of talking films, he joined Irving BERLIN in Hollywood for a three-month stint that stretched to 40 years. His work on film mogul Samuel Goldwyn’s production Whoopee won him an eight-year tenure as United Artists’s music director. In 1931, he arranged and conducted Charlie Chaplin’s music for Chaplin’s great silent film City Lights, but his major achievements came with a 1940 appointment as 20th Century Fox’s music director. Newman’s fanfare music for the Fox opening credit is still in use decades later.
Over the following 20 years, Newman composed, conducted, or supervised more than 200 film scores, eight of which won Academy Awards: Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938), which used Irving Berlin’s classic songs; Tin Pan Alley (1940); The Song of Bernadette (1943); Mother Wore Tights (1947); With a Song in My Heart (1952); Call Me Madam (1953); Love Ls a Many-Splendored Thing (1955); and RODGERS and HAMMERSTEIN’S The King and I (1956). In late 1959, Newman left Fox to work freelance, producing perhaps his most famous film score, How the West Was Won (1963), and another Oscar winner, the film of the musical, Camelot (1967).
Breaking with the tendency of earlier film composers to mimic specific action in individual scenes, Newman’s film scores captured overall moods. He developed specially tailored leitmotivs or themes to accompany the onscreen appearance of particular characters. His music was forceful without being abrupt, and accessible to average filmgoers without being hackneyed. It was also recyclable. “All film composers engage in self-borrowing to some degree but Newman is unique in using prominent themes from fairly well-known movies only a few years apart,” said the film journal Cineaste.
Newman worked with countless show business legends, including Al JOLSON, Ethel Merman, Judy GARLAND, and Fred Astaire. He would not tolerate interference in his work, and is credited with banishing Charlie Chaplin and meddling film directors from the sound stage. Regarded by some as a despot at the podium, his respect for talented musicians, his perfectionism, and his ability to stay on the good side of studio executives assured him decades of success.
Newman remained active till the end: his score for the film Airport appeared shortly after his death in 1970. Alfred Newman was patriarch of a Hollywood dynasty on a par with the Hustons. Several relatives—his brother Lionel, his sons Thomas and David, and his nephew Randy—successfully followed in his footsteps to bring the family a total of 70 Oscar nominations.
Brett Allan King
SEE ALSO:
FILM MUSIC; FILM MUSICALS.
FURTHER READING
Darby, William. American Film Music: Major Composers, Techniques, Trends 1915–1989 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1990);
Faulkner, Robert R. Music on Demand: Composers and Careers in the Hollywood Film Industry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Alfred Newman Conducts (His Great Film Music); Alfred Newman Conducts Themes!; Captain from Castile.