Gold, Ernest
Gold, Ernest
Gold, Ernest (real name, Ernest Goldner), Austrian-born American composer and conductor; b. Vienna, July 13, 1921. He studied piano and violin at home, and later piano, conducting and composition at the Vienna Academy of Music (1937-38). He went to the U.S. in 1938 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1946. After harmony studies with Otto Cesana and conducting with Leon Barzin in N.Y., he moved to Hollywood, where he worked as an arranger and took lessons with Antheil (1946-48). Gold became particularly successful as a composer for films, winning an Academy Award for his score for Exodus (1960). He was music director of the Santa Barbara Sym. Orch. (1958-60) and founder-conductor of Los Angeles’s Senior Citizens’ Orch.
Works
ORCH 2 syms.:No.l, Pan American (1941) and No. 2 (1947); Piano Concerto (1943); Ballad (1944); Symphonic Preludes (1944); Allegorical Overture (1947). F i l m : Many, including The Defiant Ones (1958), On the Beach (1959), Exodus (1960), Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Ship of Fools (1965), and The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969). M u s i c T h e a t e r : Too Warm for Furs (1956); I’m Solomon (1968). B a n d : Band in Hand for Narrator and Band (1966); Boston Pops March (1966). OTHER: Chamber music; piano pieces; songs.
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire