David Raksin COMPOSER by D'Lynn Waldron,PhD

David Raksin died August 9th, 2004 at the age of 92, of heart failure, after a brief illness.

A personal note: I first knew David Raksin in a different aspect of both our careers. He was a professor of Urban Ecology in USC's School of Public Administration from 1968 to 1989, and from 1967 for several years I was designing Urban Development programs for HUD & HEW in a Federally funded position with the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. When I saw David again after more than thirty years, it was in the context of his being a composer and professor of movie music. I recognized him immediately, but the man I knew was a David Raskin. "And you always did spell my name wrong." He was a marvelous man and active to the end, still an adjunct professor of music at USC when he died. The photographs above taken in 2003 show that his piercing intelligence was undiminished by the years. He will be greatly missed by his students and friends.

For essays in much greater depth go to:
http://www.filmscoremonthly.com/articles/2004/15_Aug---Film_Score_Friday.asp
http://www.filmmusicsociety.org/news_events/news_events.html

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY OF DAVID RAKSIN:
David Raksin was born into a musical family in Philadelphia and began studying a variety of instruments at a young age. In high school David was involved in many musical activities. At 12, he had his own dance band for which he taught himself arranging and orchestration, and he composed for his own jazz band which played on a weekly radio broadcast.

David Raksin graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and was a student of Arnold Schoenberg.

After graduation, David Raksin went to New York and played for a while in Benny Goodman’s band. Raksin sold an elaborate arrangement of 'I Got Rhythm' for a Broadway production and Oscar Levant brought this to the attention of George Gershwin, who got Raksin a job with a music publishing house.

David Raksin’s first job in Hollywood was composing music for Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times in 1935.

David Raksin then spent some years under Alfred Newman, director of the music at Twentieth Century Fox, working on a variety of mainly horror B movie scores. Raksin was considered too ‘far out’ and independent to be trusted with an A movie.

David Raksin’s big break came in 1944 when the top composers at TCF turned down the psychological detective story Laura, and Raksin then fought with the formidable studio head Darryl Zanuck to have the critical scene left in where the audience understands that the detective has fallen in love with the supposedly deceased Laura.

Zanuck gave Raksin a weekend to make the scene meaningful with music, and by sad but significance coincidence, Raksin learned that weekend that his beloved wife was leaving him- the result was the haunting melody of Laura, which, with Johnny Mercer’s lyrics, is the iconic song of motion pictures.

Raksin says that a movie composer must walk a fine line between too much emotional involvement with the story of the film, which can hurt the creative process, and too little emotional involvement which prevents empathizing with the characters and their situation.

David Raksin has a professional ethic to do his best for every film he composes for, even when he knows that his good score will disappear into oblivion with a bad movie. Like most successful movie composers, Raksin puts the needs of the film above displaying his musicianship.

David Raksin has composed the scores for more than 450 movies and TV shows and is best known for Laura, Forever Amber, and The Bad and the Beautiful. He has also composed works for musical theatre, dance, voice, and chamber groups and his works are played by major symphony orchestras.

David Raksin was president for eight terms of the Composers and Lyricists Guild and is now on it’s Board of Directors, along with being on the board of ASCAP, and the Library of Congress National Film Preservation Board, plus many other activities.

David Raksin became a professor of film scoring at USC in 1956 and was still an adjunct professor teaching and nurturing young composers there when he died at 92. The photos above which I took of him in 2003 show that his piercing intelligence was undiminished by the years.

Apart from his music, David Raksin also taught Urban Ecology from 1968 to 1989 in the USC School of Public Administration.

David Raksin died in his home on August 9th, 29004, at the age of 92, of congestive heart failure after a brief illness.

David Raksin interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian at the Exploratorium's Speaking of Music Series in San Francisco, January 28, 1988.
http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collection=other_minds&collectionid=DRaksinSOM

David Raksin Remembers His Collegaues on American Composers Orchestra site
with essays on Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Alfred Newman, Miklos Rozsa, Franz Waxman, Aaron Copland, Hugo Friedhofer, Bernard Herrmann, and Dmitri Tiomkin
http://www.americancomposers.org/raksin_raksin.htm

David Raksin Interview Live from Lincoln Center: The Chamber Music Society 30th Anniversary Gala 10/14/98 http://www.pbs.org/lflc/backstage/oct14/raksin.htm

THORNTON SCHOOL OF MUSIC, USC, Los Angeles
Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television
http://www.usc.edu/schools/music/about/about.html
http://www.usc.edu/schools/music/faculty/facsmptv.html
http://www.usc.edu/schools/music/index.html
The Thornton School of Music with its excellent faculty is on the same campus as the USC School of Cinema and Television (usually called the USC Film School) where many great film makers have studied, and where friendships have been forged that have resulted in some of the most important collaborations in the movie industry.
http://www-cntv.usc.edu/