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American composer (1900 1970)

Alfred Newman (March 17, 1900 – February 17, 1970) was an American composer, arranger, and conductor of film music. From his start as a music prodigy, he came to be regarded as a respected figure in the history of film music. He won nine Academy Awards and was nominated 45 times, contributing to the extended Newman family being the most Academy Award nominated family, with a collective 92 nominations in various music categories. In a career spanning more than four decades, Newman composed the scores for over 200 motion pictures. Some of his most famous scores include Wuthering Heights, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Mark of Zorro, How Green Was My Valley, The Song of Bernadette, Captain from Castile, All About Eve, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, Anastasia, The Diary of Anne Frank, How The West Was Won, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and his final score, Airport, all of which were nominated for or won Academy Awards. He is perhaps best known for composing the fanfare which accompanies the studio logo at the beginning of 20th Century Fox's productions. Prior to commencing his employment with 20th Century Fox, Newman composed the fanfares which are most often associated with Samuel Goldwyn productions and David O. Selznick productions. Newman was also highly regarded as a conductor, and arranged and conducted many scores by other composers, including George Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, and Irving Berlin. He also conducted the music for many film adaptations of Broadway musicals (having worked on Broadway for ten years before coming to Hollywood), as well as many original Hollywood musicals. He was among the first musicians to compose and conduct original music during Hollywood's Golden Age of movies, later becoming a respected and powerful music director in the history of Hollywood. Newman and two of his fellow composers, Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin, were considered the "three godfathers of film music".

Newman was born on March 17, 1900, in New Haven, Connecticut, the eldest of ten children to Russian Jewish parents who emigrated shortly before his birth. By the age of eight he had become known locally as a piano prodigy. To save Newman commuting cost, Stojowski convinced a ticket inspector to let young Newman sometimes travel free. Stojowski offered him a scholarship, after which Newman won a silver medal and a gold medal in a competition.

By the time Newman was 12, however, his parents' meager income was not enough to support his large family, which led to him searching for ways to earn an income from music to help his family. During the shows, he typically accompanied singers as pianist. Grace La Rue, star of one of the shows, was taken by Newman's talent and signed him on as her regular accompanist. She said he "possessed most unusual moral qualities and characteristics":
blockquote|He is a beautiful looking boy, modest, gentle, unassuming, and wholly unspoiled. I am not interested in him merely because he renders the great masters marvelously and even composes wonderfully, but rather because he has such a rare and interesting nature. His father is a poor Russian fruit dealer and Alfred is the oldest of eight children. The mother is a very beautiful woman, and both parents show good blood and breeding despite their humble position and lack of means. The family has made every possible sacrifice in order to educate this boy in music, and he has a most deep seated sense of noblesse oblige. His whole desire for success seems based upon his anxiety to make his parents happy and to repay them for what they have done for him. Newman said he was always happiest as a conductor: "I studied music composition and counterpoint because I wanted to be a good conductor."

Soon after Newman arrived in Hollywood in 1930 and finished directing the score for Reaching for the Moon, producer Samuel Goldwyn offered him a contract to continue on as a movie composer. His first complete film score was for Goldwyn's Street Scene in 1931. The score mirrored the busy and frantic sounds of everyday life in New York's Lower East Side in the 1930s. He later used that music theme in other films, such as How to Marry a Millionaire in 1953, which opens with him conducting an orchestra. The theme is also used in Gentleman's Agreement, I Wake Up Screaming, The Dark Corner, Cry of the City, Kiss of Death, and Where the Sidewalk Ends. In 1931 Charlie Chaplin hired him to orchestrate his film City Lights, and used Newman again for Modern Times in 1936. Hollywood reporter Sidney Skolsky observed them working together as Newman conducted the 65 piece orchestra. Newman became Goldwyn's favorite composer, while his style evolved with each new film he scored. In 1937, Newman organized a private recording of Schoenberg’s four string quartets by the Kolisch Quartet at the United Artists. He received his first Academy Award for Alexander's Ragtime Band in 1938. In 1939, he wrote the music for Goldwyn's Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. His score was unique in the way it included different musical themes and created different motifs for the key actors, which helped frame the action. The theme for Cathy, for instance, consisted of a glowing pastoral with strings, while Heathcliff's theme, in contrast, produced a darker, more serious image. Among Newman's specialties were films with a religious theme, although he himself was not known to be religious. and in subsequent years, The Song of Bernadette (1943), The Robe (1953), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). In 1933, while he was still under contract at United Artists, Newman was commissioned by Darryl F. Zanuck of Twentieth Century Pictures to compose a fanfare to accompany the production logo appearing at the start of the studio's films. Twentieth Century Pictures subsequently merged with Fox Film Corporation in 1935 to form 20th Century Fox; the fanfare and logo were retained, and have continued in use to the present day as one of the most widely recognised film studio logos.

In 1940 Newman began a 20 year career as music director with 20th Century Fox Studios, composing over 200 film scores, nine of which won Academy Awards. He wore many hats at the studio depending on the need, acting as composer, arranger, music director and conductor for various films. He was noted for developing what came to be known as the Newman System, a means of synchronizing the performance and recording of a musical score with the film, a system which is still in use today. Newman's scores were developed around the overall mood of each film. He also tailored specific themes to accompany different characters as they appeared on screen, thereby enhancing each actor's role. The effects of this style of music created a forceful but less jarring score which connected the entire story, thereby keeping the film's theme more easily understood by viewers. while the theme representing Bernadette used strings to support her character's warmth and tenderness. Newman's score for Wilson (1944), a biopic about president Woodrow Wilson, required he devote an unusual amount of time to research. The film was intended to be a tribute to Wilson by producer Darryl F. Zanuck. Newman spent considerable time learning personal details about Wilson and his family, such as the songs they sang and played on their piano at home, the music they liked to dance and listen to, the songs they played during political rallies or political functions during his career. As a result, the film contained some forty realistic American themed numbers intertwined throughout the film which gave it a strong sense of timeliness. In the 1940s Newman scored a number of films related to World War II. Among those were A Yank in the R. A. F. (1941), To the Shores of Tripoli (1942) and Twelve O'Clock High (1949), which one historian says is Newman's best dramatic opening theme for a movie. Newman also composed or music directed the score to some of Frank Capra's Why We Fight series of films, including Prelude to War (1942) and War Comes to America (1945). He created the music for The All Star Bond Rally (1945), a documentary short film featuring Hollywood stars promoting the sales of War Bonds. The previous year he scored another documentary, The Fighting Lady (1944). He often studied period music and assimilated it into his scores. For films such as How Green Was My Valley (1941), for example, he incorporated Welsh hymns. For How The West Was Won (1962), he took folk tunes and transformed them into orchestral/choral works of tremendous power. And for The Grapes of Wrath (1940), he brought in the folk tune favorite "Red River Valley" throughout the score. Generally, however, he would create his own original melody and turn it into something haunting and memorable, as he did for The Robe (1953). The march was adapted by the University of Southern California (USC) as the official theme song for their sports teams, the USC Trojans. Newman also orchestrated and conducted the music for a biopic about the life of American composer John Philip Sousa, Stars and Stripes Forever (1952), a film which includes numerous marches for which Sousa is best known. The dramatic score for The Snake Pit, a 1948 film set in a lunatic asylum, was accentuated by Newman's careful use of effects to intensify the discomfort and fear portrayed by the actors, primarily its star Olivia de Havilland.

In 1952, With a Song in My Heart gave Newman his fifth Academy Award. It was presented to him by Walt Disney. The Robe (1953), a New Testament epic, was another of Newman's scores with a religious theme, with orchestration creating spaciousness, grandeur and simplicity. The first film in Cinemascope, it featured 4 channel stereo sound, which allowed Newman to experiment in developing the various moods. The score was one of fellow composer Franz Waxman's favorites, and he incorporated some of its themes into his own score for the film's sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators In 1959 Newman composed the score for The Diary of Anne Frank. Although based on the true life tragic story of a young girl during World War II, Newman's score focuses on her optimistic personality, which as her diary attests, she continued to believe that people were good at heart. In contrast to Newman's use of uplifting violins and a hopeful old European sound for the girl, the score for the Nazis was an "oppressive march in half time" to create a fearsome effect.

Newman died on February 17, 1970, at the age of 69, a month shy of his 70th birthday, at his home in Hollywood, from complications of emphysema.

In 1999, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in his honor.