Clifford Vaughan

Clifford Vaughan's career in music lasted for 80 years and took him from the concert hall to Hollywood's sound stages and back. Born in New Jersey, as a child he showed an interest in the violin but his parents directed him toward the piano instead. He enrolled in the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music at 15 and was soon giving recitals and started composing music. By his early twenties, he was making a living as a pianist and organist. His career breakthrough came in 1925 when he was hired by Ruth St. Denis as musical director of the Denishawn Dancers for their extended tour of the Far East, which included Japan, China, India, Burma, Java, and Ceylon. He absorbed the music of those locales and incorporated their influences into a dozen short ballets called the Oriental Translations. These were successful in the 1920s and when revived decades later, though Vaughan apparently never considered them serious pieces of music. By the early '30s, he'd written full-length ballets and was also one of the busiest arrangers in New York, but as the Great Depression took its toll on music activity, he turned to Hollywood, where the film studios -- newly enamored of large-scale music scores -- needed orchestrators, conductors, and composers. He went to work at Universal, where his first assignment was orchestrating Franz Waxman's music for The Bride of Frankenstein. Vaughan orchestrated most of Waxman's major scores of the 1930s, even after the composer left the studio. He also did a huge amount of re-orchestrating of existing screen music by Waxman, Heinz Roemheld, and Karl Hajos, as well as classical compositions for re-use in subsequent films. Vaughan wrote scores, as well, including the wonderfully Wagnerian title music for the serial Flash Gordon (1936). From the end of the '30s until 1958, he freelanced in films, which kept him reasonably well paid while leaving him the time to compose a violin concerto, the Hindu and Burmese rhapsodies, symphonies for organ, and the Esther Oratorio, among other works. He also found a champion in the concert hall in conductor Modest Altschuler. In a manner similar to Miklós Rózsa, Vaughan led a dual creative life in the concert hall and in movies, though unlike Rózsa, his concert work was distinctly different from his film music: modernistic though not dissonant and a hybrid of nineteenth and twentieth century sensibilities.
© TiVo