Composer David Raksin Dies at 92

David Raksin Dead at 92

Legendary composer of Laura, The Bad & the Beautiful enjoyed worldwide respect



David Raksin, the composer of Laura, The Bad and the Beautiful and dozens of
other classic film scores, died of heart failure at 8:55 a.m. Monday, August 9,
at his home in Van Nuys, Calif. He was 92 and had been in failing health for
the past several weeks.

One of the most respected of all American film composers – both for his music
and his celebrated wit – Raksin began his long and distinguished movie career
in 1935, when he came to Hollywood to assist Charlie Chaplin with the music of
Modern Times. He composed music for more than 100 films, including Laura
(1944), one of the most-recorded songs in history with more than 400 different
versions.

He was born in Philadelphia Aug. 4, 1912, and began his musical studies as a
pianist. He was later instructed in woodwinds by his father, a conductor and
performer in concert bands and for silent movies who also played in the
renowned Philadelphia Orchestra.

The younger Raksin led his own dance band at age 12, later expanding it for
broadcasting on the local CBS radio station, WCAU. He taught himself
orchestration while a student at Philadelphia's prestigious Central High
School, and then put himself through the University of Pennsylvania by playing
in society bands and radio orchestras. There he won several prizes while also
arranging and conducting the first programs of written and improvised jazz at
football games.

Upon graduation from Penn he went to New York City, where he played and sang
with various bands and arranged for radio and recording orchestras. The pianist
in one of the latter, Oscar Levant, alerted his friend George Gershwin to an
upcoming broadcast of Raksin's arrangement of "I Got Rhythm."

Gershwin's enthusiasm led him to recommend the young musician to the famous
Harms/Chappell team that arranged the music of nearly every Broadway show of
that time. It was in 1935, while he was in Boston for the out-of-town tryout of
a musical, that he received an invitation to work with Chaplin in Hollywood.
Raksin took Chaplin's whistled and hummed tunes and adapted them into a fully
orchestrated score for Modern Times.

The following year he served as assistant to conductor Leopold Stokowski, who
premiered Raksin's concert piece, Montage, with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Raksin returned to Hollywood and remained there, composing music for movies,
and later radio and television. His many other film scores included The Secret
Life of Walter Mitty (1947), Force of Evil (1948), The Bad and the Beautiful
(1952), Carrie (1952), Pat and Mike (1952), Suddenly (1954), Apache (1954), The
Redeemer (1957), Al Capone (1959), Too Late Blues (1961), Two Weeks in Another
Town (1962) and Will Penny (1968).

He received Academy Award nominations for his music for Forever Amber (1947)
and Separate Tables (1958). He also scored several classic UPA cartoons in the
1950s, including The Unicorn in the Garden, Madeline and Giddyap.

Among the composer's dozens of television programs were the themes and scores
for Ben Casey and Life With Father as well as various episodes, specials and
made-for-television movies. Among the latter was The Day After (1983), the
controversial ABC movie about a nuclear explosion in the Midwest.

He also composed and conducted music for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
documentary, The Olympics: A History of the Golden Games. He even appeared as
an actor in the pilot of the 1975 CBS series Beacon Hill.

For radio he wrote, narrated and conducted interviews for a three-year series
of 64 hour-long programs, The Subject is Film Music, in the 1970s.

Raksin's stage works included three musicals: If The Shoe Fits, Feather in Your
Hat and The Wind in the Willows; several ballets and incidental music for
plays, including Volpone, Noah, The Prodigal and Mother Courage. At the request
of Igor Stravinsky, Raksin made the original instrumentation of Stravinsky's
Circus Polka, as choreographed by George Balanchine for the Ringling
Bros.-Barnum and Bailey Circus.

He often conducted his own music with orchestras around the world, including
appearances at the Hollywood Bowl and New York's Lincoln Center. For Los
Angeles' long-running series of Monday Evening Concerts, he conducted the
premieres of several contemporary works.

Raksin was the first member of his profession to receive a commission from the
Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation of the Library of Congress. He conducted
his oratorio, Oedipus Memneitai (Oedipus Remembers), in 1986 at the Coolidge
Auditorium in Washington, D.C.

Raksin was also the first film composer invited by the Library of Congress to
establish a collection of his manuscripts at its Music Division. The Library of
Congress book Wonderful Inventions, published in 1985, included three articles
devoted to his career in films, including his own account of his work with
Chaplin on Modern Times.

He wrote a number of articles for various publications, often recounting
various aspects of his career and the people he knew, including Chaplin,
Stokowski, Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg. He wrote a survey of Modest
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition for CD-ROM medium and had recently
completed his autobiography, If I Say So Myself.

Raksin served as president of the Composers & Lyricist Guild of America between
1962 and 1970, and as president of the Film Music Society during the 1990s. He
was a longtime member of the board of directors of the performing-rights
society ASCAP.

He also had a long career in academia, teaching film composition at USC from
1956 to 2003; from 1968 to 1989 he also taught "Urban Ecology" in USC's School
of Public Administration. From 1970 to 1992 he lectured at UCLA, and he also
served as a visiting professor at U.C. Santa Barbara.

Over the years he was honored with career achievement awards by the American
Society of Music Arrangers and Composers, the Society for the Preservation of
Film Music and ASCAP.

He is survived by a son, Alex, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer for
the Los Angeles Times; a daughter, Tina; and three grandchildren. Services will
be private. A public memorial is pending