David Newman
David Newman, the Early YearsNewman was born on March 11th, 1954 in Los Angeles, to the late composer Alfred Newman. He is also a brother of the composer Thomas Newman and a cousin of the composer Randy Newman.Over history, there have been such families which demonstrated notable musical talents, and the ‘Newman’s of Hollywood’ are one such gifted family, who has been present writing music for television and movies over the whole past century. David Newman has accomplished very much himself as a movie composer, scoring over 100 movies in 20 years. Newman studied at the University of Southern California and apart from composing, he is also a successful concert conductor and an accomplished violinist. He began his career as a concert violinist and performed in many grand orchestrations, including a part in one of the Stephen Spielberg blockbusters, ‘Close Encounter of the Third Part’, for which he was unaccredited. His first composition was in 1984 for the movie ‘Frankenweenie’, which wasn’t that well perceived. However, David’s composing talent came to view very quickly with some of the more memorable movie soundtracks, such as ‘Dragnet’ and ‘Throw Mamma from the Train’ in 1987. David Newman, the ConductorDavid’s activities are not solely attached to composing soundtracks for Hollywood films. One of his recent compositions is ‘Norbit’ in 2007, starring Eddie Murphy. In addition to composing, he is also known as a respected conductor, who led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2005 for a concert of classic film music. He previously conducted the American Symphony in New York and the Utah Symphony in 1989 for the Sundance film festival.See David Newman talks about the scoring process for 'Norbit'David Newman, his Music StyleIn his music he has been paying homage to such greats as Igor Stravinsky and Bela Bartok, but keeping a sense of humor and maintaining fresh and open-minded music style. With ‘Serenity’ soundtrack, he ventured however into a different style when compared to his light-hearted comedy scores and some other of his known work. ‘Serenity’ doesn’t look like anything he has done previously and is quite out of ordinary for a sci-fi movie. He stayed away from the traditional sci-fi electronic sound, giving advantage to western acoustic instruments, such as guitar and banjo. ‘Serenity’ has earned him a huge fan-base with no hints to this day of fading in popularity.Newman’s success seems to be related to his connection with actor and director Danny DeVito, with whom he started collaboration in 1987 with ‘Throw Mamma from the Train’. It continued with ‘The War of the Roses’, ‘Other people’s money’, ‘Hoffa’, ‘Matilda’ and ‘Death to Smoochy’. Is inclination towards comedy resulted in such scores as for ‘The Flintstones’, ‘The Mighty Ducks’, ‘The Nutty Professor’ and ‘Bill and Ted’s excellent adventure’. And he is constantly receiving new requests to score comedies. His other notable scores are: ‘The Phantom’, ‘The Brave little Toaster’, ‘Anastasia’, ‘Malone’, ‘Ice Age’ and ‘R.O.T.O.R.’. For his score for the animated film ‘Anastasia’, he received an Academy Award nomination.
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