Collection context
Summary
- Creators:
- North, Alex
- Abstract:
- 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.
- Extent:
- 33.2 Linear Feet (83 flat boxes.)
- Language:
- Materials are in English.
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], Alex North Motion Picture Music (Collection PASC-M.0017). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
Background
- Scope and content:
-
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. Complete scores (indicated in the container list simply by the film title) are handwritten in pencil, with notes and annotations. Scores for individual instruments (indicated by the word "parts") are a combination of handwritten, printed, and photocopied pages, and tend to have fewer notes and annotations.
- Biographical / historical:
-
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.
- Acquisition information:
- Alex North; gift; 1976.
- Processing information:
-
Processed by UCLA Library Special Collections staff. Finding aid edited by Doug Johnson, December 2022.
Collections are processed to a variety of levels depending on the work necessary to make them usable, their perceived user interest and research value, availability of staff and resources, and competing priorities. Library Special Collections provides a standard level of preservation and access for all collections and, when time and resources permit, conducts more intensive processing. These materials have been arranged and described according to national and local standards and best practices.
We are committed to providing ethical, inclusive, and anti-racist description of the materials we steward, and to remediating existing description of our materials that contains language that may be offensive or cause harm. We invite you to submit feedback about how our collections are described, and how they could be described more accurately, by filling out the form located on our website: Report Potentially Offensive Description in Library Special Collections.
- Physical location:
- Stored off-site. All requests to access special collections material must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
- Rules or conventions:
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Indexed terms
Access and use
- Restrictions:
-
Open for research. All requests to access special collections materials must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
- Terms of access:
-
Property rights to the physical objects belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. All other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.
- Preferred citation:
-
[Identification of item], Alex North Motion Picture Music (Collection PASC-M.0017). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
- Location of this collection:
-
A1713 Charles E. Young Research LibraryBox 951575Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575, US
- Contact:
- (310) 825-4988