Alfred Newman (1901-1970) ranked, across the greater part of his professional life, among Hollywood’s most commanding and widely admired figures in both composition and musical direction. No other artist has approached his totals of forty-four Oscar nominations and nine Academy Awards, figures that still stand as unbroken benchmarks. Born the eldest of ten children to a struggling produce merchant in New Haven, Connecticut, he displayed an intense musical bent almost from the start and had already earned local renown as a piano prodigy by the time he turned eight. Virtuoso Jan Ignace Paderewski heard him play, arranged a New York recital, and appeared ready to launch a concert career until family finances compelled the young musician to support his household instead.
He advanced steadily from vaudeville stages into the orchestra pits of Broadway houses, eventually securing recognition as a conductor and arranger whose skill was acknowledged by leading songwriters of the era, among them Irving Berlin. When the sound era drew Berlin to Hollywood, the songwriter secured a place for Newman as well. Samuel Goldwyn and United Artists promptly engaged him, positioning the newcomer as one of the film capital’s two preeminent musical authorities alongside Max Steiner; before long he also took on assignments at 20th Century-Fox.
Throughout the 1930s he supplied scores for many of the decade’s most distinguished productions, among them Street Scene, Dodsworth, Stella Dallas, Dead End, The Prisoner of Zenda, Gunga Din, and Young Mr. Lincoln. Studio heads frequently sought his counsel on troubled scoring projects even when he was not himself attached to a given picture. After becoming Fox’s music director in 1940, he composed for How Green Was My Valley, Heaven Can Wait, Song of Bernadette, The Razor’s Edge, Captain from Castille, The Robe, and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, while in his administrative role he entrusted David Raksin with Laura—an assignment that yielded an enduring landmark of film music—and assigned Jane Eyre, Hangover Square, and The Day the Earth Stood Still to Bernard Herrmann.
Newman departed Fox in 1959 to work independently and, in 1961, conducted the Oscar-nominated score for Flower Drum Song. The following year he created what is perhaps his best-known work, the score for How the West Was Won, collaborating with lyricist Ken Darby. Despite the honors he accumulated, Newman is still regarded principally as an arranger and conductor rather than a composer. He possessed a singular gift for absorbing folk or folk-like melodies—evident in How Green Was My Valley and How the West Was Won—and reshaping them into orchestral and choral statements of striking force; he could likewise develop a strong original theme into music that lingered in memory, as he did in The Razor’s Edge and The Robe. His own writing, however, never matched the daring or exploratory character found in the finest scores of Bernard Herrmann or Miklos Rozsa; it remained firmly tonal, immediately intelligible, and undemanding of audiences.
That very approachability, joined to his diplomatic temperament, accounted for much of his influence. His scores were inviting yet never commonplace, inventive within the conventions of film music without becoming disruptive. In contrast to the mercurial and often uneasy Herrmann or the distant Rozsa, Newman’s congenial manner endeared him to studio leadership, ensuring that his musical judgments carried decisive weight throughout Hollywood for nearly three decades. He died in 1970; his last score, for George Seaton’s blockbuster Airport, received the final nomination among his forty-four Academy Award nods.
