Biography
Composer Frank Lewin anchored Hollywood’s dramatic scoring scene throughout the 1960s, most prominently through his contributions to the CBS series The Defenders and The Nurses. Born on March 27, 1925, in Breslau, Germany, he was fourteen when his family fled Nazi persecution and relocated to Cuba; by 1940 the household had moved again, this time to New York City. There he pursued composition studies with Felix Devo at the Baldwin Conservatory, later working with Jack Frederick Kilpatrick and Hans David at Southern Methodist University, with Roy Harris in Logan, Utah, and finally completing his Bachelor of Music degree at the Yale University School of Music in 1951 under Richard Donovan and Paul Hindemith. His first television assignments included episodes of the short-lived 1956 series I Spy (distinct from the later program starring Bill Cosby), yet broader recognition arrived with the 1958 musical comedy It’s Cultural. The following year producer Herbert Brodkin enlisted him for the police drama Brenner. During this period Lewin also served as sound editor on such features as The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery and Splendor in the Grass, developing original techniques tailored to theatrical Surround Sound presentation; in 1960 he finished his Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra. Although Leonard Rosenman had composed the main title theme for Brodkin’s legal series The Defenders, Lewin supplied the underscore from 1963 to 1965, imparting unprecedented musical depth and thematic cohesion to the weekly episodes. Simultaneously he contributed to Brodkin’s medical drama The Nurses, most notably introducing electronic music to prime-time audiences in the episode “Gismo on the EEG.” After scoring Michael Roemer’s 1969 cult favorite The Plot Against Harry—a film that remained unseen for two decades—Lewin rejoined the Yale faculty, teaching composition for film from 1971 until 1992 and offering the course Music in Modern Media at the Columbia University School of Arts between 1975 and 1989. Yale staged his opera Burning Bright in 1993, a work drawn from the John Steinbeck novel of the same name. Lewin succumbed to congestive heart failure at his Princeton, New Jersey, residence on January 18, 2008.
Albums