The collection contains scores for forty-six feature films, as well as two television documentaries, a television movie, and a promotional film for the Ford Motor Company. It also includes the score North composed for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was unused.

North was born Isadore Soifer on December 4, 1910, in Chester, PA; attended the Curtis Institute, Juilliard School, and Moscow Conservatory; became music director of the German Theater Group and the Latvian State Theater, and the only American member of the Union of Soviet Composers; returned to the US in 1935; studied with Ernst Toch and Aaron Copland in NY, and composed ballet scores for Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, and Agnes de Mille; composed for the NY stage, including scores for Life and Death of an American (1939), Of V We Sing (1942), and Death of a Salesman (1949); wrote music for some 50 documentary shorts between 1937-50; in 1939 went to Mexico as music director for the Anna Sokolow dance troupe and studied with Silvestre Revueltas; served as a captain in the US Army in World War II; his Revue for Clarinet and Orchestra was performed by Benny Goodman and the NY Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein in 1946; began scoring feature films in the early 1950s, becoming a leading Hollywood composer; his musical language encompasses dissonance and lyricism, and ranges from chamber to symphonic proportions; he was nominated for 15 Academy Awards but did not win one until 1986, when the Motion Picture Academy presented him with an honorary life-achievement award; he died on September 8, 1991 in Los Angeles.

33.2 Linear Feet (83 flat boxes.)

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