Tag: Murder She Wrote

Today is the 100th birthday of Academy Award winning composer John Addison.

Addison was awarded his statuette for “Tom Jones” in 1964. The score is a brilliant admixture of unusual instrumentation (harpsichord, well-worn upright, banjo, accordion) and music hall brio.

Addison also provided the memorable music for “Sleuth.”

And, for television, “Murder She Wrote.”

Addison was the composer to whom Alfred Hitchcock turned, notoriously, after his falling out with Bernard Herrmann over the scoring of “Torn Curtain.” The studio was pressuring Hitch for a more “popular” sound. Ironically, Addison just wound up trying to conjure Herrmann – as did every one of Hitch’s collaborators thereafter.

Addison also provided music for “The Entertainer,” “A Taste of Honey,” “The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner,” “Start the Revolution Without Me,” “Luther,” “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” “A Bridge Too Far,” and the television miniseries “Centennial.”

A student of Gordon Jacob at the Royal College of Music in London, he wrote a number of concert works, though he remarked, “If you find you’re good at something, as I was as a film composer, it’s stupid to do anything else.”

Here is Addison’s Trumpet Concerto:

Over a half century before Warren Beauty and Faye Dunaway got caught up in the infamous “La La Land” snafu, Sammy Davis Jr. was bitten by “Tom Jones”:

Happy birthday, John Addison!