# The film music of Alex North



## Guest

I've always admired this composer because his music, though it has his original 'thumb-print', is always varied: here's the opening of his magnificent score for "Cleopatra". Modality is part of this sound world and also influenced by "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis". North has the ability to sound dissonant while leading up to a lush and beautiful consonant main theme in this case, reflecting the love story central to the film:






Who can ever forget the entry of Cleopatra into Rome and the sensual music of North; but it does have an ominous under-current. No wonder 20th Century Fox went broke with this film; look at all those extras and the set. Joseph Mankiewicz was nearly driven mad by disruptions: this sequence is completely over the top. You can't fault the script; it was very poetic, even though Burton over-acted dreadfully.






Those ominous drums in the opening titles of "*Cleopatra*"....where have I heard those before? I adore this score for "*Spartacus*", thinking it better than the film itself: and it goes somewhere, not just reiterating the main theme, sweeping you up immediately into the drama. I actually think this is North's finest film score:






This is a very, very good score; "*A Streetcar Named Desire*". We are unsettled immediately and swept into a seedy, sultry ambience. North never just creates 'theme music'; his scores reflect the thematic concerns of his films and this one has you feeling on edge, thrown off your balance. This score was amongst the first to incorporate jazz:






Alex North composed for some 'edgy' films in the post-war period, but he also scored epics like "The Agony and the Ecstasy". And he composed for John Ford; "*Cheyenne Autumn*". You can hear the fraught, angular nature of the score reflecting the complex and tragic themes of the film but these contrast with sequences of much tenderness. In some respects this score is similar to "*Spartacus*" but it does have an essentially "American" idiom, given its subject matter. "Cheyenne Autumn" was one of Ford's last films and wasn't particularly successful as it became bogged down; I think his usual character-driven narrative just didn't work with people he didn't know well and on a huge canvas. But there is much to enjoy from Alex North:






John Williams discusses Alex North here:


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## Triplets

Wasn’t he the composer that Kubrick hired to write a score for 2001, and then Kubrick wound up using the “placeholder “ music instead?


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## pianozach

Triplets said:


> Wasn't he the composer that Kubrick hired to write a score for 2001, and then Kubrick wound up using the "placeholder " music instead?


Yep. The score was completed by *North*, but *Kubrick* chose to abandon *North*'s music in favor of the now-familiar classical pieces he had earlier chosen as "guide pieces" for the soundtrack. North did not know of the abandonment of the score until after he saw the film's premiere screening.

North, unaware that *Kubrick* had decided not to use the score in his film, was "devastated" at the 1968 New York City premiere screening of 2001 not to hear his work, and later offered this account of his experience: _"Well, what can I say? It was a great, frustrating experience, and despite the mixed reaction to the music, I think the Victorian approach with mid-European overtones was just not in keeping with the brilliant concept of Clarke and Kubrick."_

The original three-track score masters had been kept at Anvil Studios in England as late as 1980, but were later erased when the Anvil facility closed. All that remained of the original tracks were mono fold down tapes kept by North's family.

Frankly, I think using the "guide tracks" was a brilliant stroke of genius, but it certainly could have been handled differently.

Later, *Jerry Goldsmith* recorded North's score.

Here's some of *North*'s music written for 2001:


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## Guest

I disliked the film intensely so the fate of the music didn't interest me.


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## geralmar

In the mid 1970s North was a guest speaker at the University of Michigan. The evening engagement was in the massive 3,500 seats Hill Auditorium. Scenes from two or three of the movies he scored were projected on a screen and he discussed his composition process. None of the movies were current and all were ancient b&w-- the only movie I remember was Death of a Salesman (1951). At most there were two dozen in the audience. Regardless, his lecture was enthusiastic and detailed. He was obviously proud of his work and seemed grateful for the public recognition, small as it was and far from Hollywood.


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## Xenophiliu

Aside from the epics he scored, I have really only seen (and thus, heard):

Dragonslayer (1981)
Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)


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## arpeggio

One of my favorite film composers.


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