Alfred Newman

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.

Although many sources show a birth year of 1901, musicologist and composer Fred Steiner revealed that Alfred was actually born in 1900.

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 he 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.

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 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."

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.

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.