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.Henderson, Sanya. Alex North, Film Composer: A Biography, McFarland (2003) pp. 43-44 Newman and two of his fellow composers, Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin, were considered the "three godfathers of film music"."Nominee Facts - Most Nominations and Awards" , Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; retrieved November 30, 2015.
Early life 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. Although many sources show a birth year of 1901, musicologist and composer Fred Steiner revealed that Alfred was actually born in 1900.Frederick Steiner, The Making of an American Film Composer: A Study of Alfred Newman's Music in the First Decade of the Sound Era (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1981), 21. His father, Michael Newman (born Nemorofsky), was a produce dealer and his mother, Luba (née Koskoff), took care of the family. Her father had been a cantor in Russia, which contributed to her love of music. She sent Newman, her first born, to a local piano teacher to begin lessons when he was five. At one point, in order to take lessons, he walked a ten-mile round trip. With barely enough to live on, his parents once had to sell their dog to make ends meet.
By the age of eight, Newman had become known locally as a piano prodigy. His talent led virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski to arrange a recital for him in New York, where Sigismund Stojowski and Alexander Lambert, at different periods, took him as a pupil. 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. He also studied harmony, counterpoint and composition with Rubin Goldmark and George Wedge.
Early jobs as pianist
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. He then began playing in theaters and restaurants, including the Strand theater and the Harlem Opera House, with a schedule that often had him playing five shows a day. 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.
Newman, at 13, also attracted the attention of author Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who wanted to promote him to those who could further his music ambition. She greatly admired his ability to play Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner and other composers, and with equal skill, in her opinion, as Paderewski. She said he "possessed most unusual moral qualities and characteristics":
He began traveling the vaudeville circuit with La Rue's show when he was 13, where she billed him as "The Marvelous Boy Pianist". While on tours, he was sometimes allowed to conduct the orchestras. This led to him making conducting his career goal, an ambition furthered by William Merrigan Daly, an experienced music director and composer who taught Newman the basics of conducting. By the time he was fifteen, he was regularly conducting performances for matinee shows. Cincinnati Symphony conductor Fritz Reiner was so impressed by Newman, he invited him to be a guest conductor.
Full-time Broadway conductor When he was nineteen, he began conducting full-time in New York City, the beginning of a ten-year career on Broadway as the conductor of musicals by composers such as George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Jerome Kern. He conducted George White's Scandals in 1919, Funny Face in 1927 and Treasure Girl in 1929. Newman said he was always happiest as a conductor: "I studied music composition and counterpoint because I wanted to be a good conductor."
In 1930, songwriter and composer Irving Berlin invited him to Hollywood to conduct his score for the film Reaching for the Moon. Although the musical film was originally planned to include songs written by Berlin, problems developed between him and director Edmund Goulding, which led to most of his songs being taken out. Newman was kept on and received credit for directing the music, which became his Hollywood debut.
Film scoring career 1930s
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.Palmer, Christopher. The Composer in Hollywood, Marion Boyars Publishing (1990) The score mirrored the busy and frantic sounds of everyday life in New York's Lower East Side in the 1930s.Hischak, Thomas. The Encyclopedia of Film Composers, Rowman & Littlefield (2015) pp. 485-486 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."Discovering Chaplin", Discoveringchaplin.com, November 29, 2015 Hollywood reporter Sidney Skolsky observed them working together as Newman conducted the 65-piece orchestra. He described Newman's ability to carefully synchronize the music to scenes, such as the factory sequence, where Chaplin throws the place into confusion. The music was timed to Chaplin's movements.
Newman became Goldwyn's favorite composer, while his style evolved with each new film he scored. He scored numerous adventure stories and romances, historical pageants and swashbuckling epics, as did his contemporary, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Newman also began taking lessons with Arnold Schoenberg, who emigrated to the U.S. from Europe in 1934.Marcus, Kenneth H. Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism, Cambridge Univ. Press (2016) p. 2 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. Also in 1939, he composed the music for Gunga Din, and Beau Geste.
Among Newman's specialties were films with a religious theme, although he himself was not known to be religious. Among the films were The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), starring Charles Laughton, 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.
1940s 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. However, he said that he preferred arranging and conducting over composing because the latter was lonely and demanding work. The demands of work contributed to his heavy smoking throughout his life, eventually leading to his emphysema.Alfred Newman's music style, Movie Music, UK, August 1, 2014
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.Henderson, Lol; Stacey, Lee. Encyclopedia of Music in the 20th Century, (2014) p. 446 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.
The Song of Bernadette (1943) is said to be one of Newman's loveliest scores, recorded over a four-week period with an 80-piece orchestra. Newman used three different motifs to color different issues during the film. Among them was a brass chorale to represent Mother Church, while the theme representing Bernadette used strings to support her character's warmth and tenderness. Newman's interpretation added the sound of the wind and blowing leaves to give the music an ethereal quality that augmented Bernadette's visions.Green, Paul. Jennifer Jones: The Life and Films, McFarland (2011) p. 36
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.