Scope and Content Note
Materials from the Alex North Music for Documentary Film, Theater, Dance, and Concert chiefly comprise works composed during the 1930s and 1940s for projects mostly unrelated to North's celebrated career as a composer of feature film scores. There are trace amounts of such materials in the Music series for A Streetcar Named Desire and Spartacus, but primarily the collection focuses on other aspects of his work. It contains scores, sketches, and parts for documentary films, dance works, incidental music for theater productions, songs, musical comedies and revues, and concert pieces. Notable works include incidental music for Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), a ballet setting of A Streetcar Named Desire (1952), and scores for several uniquely American concert works, such as Negro Mother (1940) and Ballad of Valley Forge (1942). The collection also features North's critically acclaimed Revue for Clarinet and Orchestra (1946), as well as Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra (1939), Death of a Salesman Suite (1951), Dance Preludes for Piano (1948), and many other works that represent his forays into American art music. North also collaborated extensively with dancer Anna Sokolow on nearly a dozen productions, several of which are represented in the collection, including Ballad in a Popular Style (1936), War is Beautiful, and Exile (1939), among others. In addition to music materials, the collection contains a small series of Subject files with scripts, promotional materials, and clippings related to North's scoring projects.