Morris Stoloff

Morris Stoloff was born in Philadelphia in 1898 and was a violin prodigy who studied with the renowned teacher Leopold Auer. He toured as a young soloist and joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic as a teenager. After years as a studio violinist and concertmaster at Paramount, he was hired in 1936 to head the music department at Columbia Pictures, a post he held for more than twenty-five years.

At Columbia, Stoloff was less a composer than a musical architect. He supervised scores, hired composers and arrangers, and conducted the studio orchestra on hundreds of films, including Frank Capra's Lost Horizon and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He had a special gift for musicals and won three Academy Awards for scoring.

The first was for Cover Girl (1944), shared with Carmen Dragon, in which Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly danced to songs by Jerome Kern and Ira Gershwin. The second was for The Jolson Story (1946), which brought Al Jolson's voice and songs to a new generation and became one of the biggest hits of its year. The third came for Song Without End (1960), a film biography of Franz Liszt.

Stoloff also supervised music for dramatic hits such as From Here to Eternity and Picnic, and his recording of the "Moonglow" and Picnic theme medley reached number one on the pop charts in 1956. His career reflects an important part of the studio system: the music directors who shaped a studio's sound as much as any individual composer. He died in 1980.