Muir Mathieson

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Muir Mathieson (born January 24, 1911 in Stirling , Scotland , United Kingdom ; † August 2, 1975 in Oxford , England , ibid) was an extremely productive, British, musical director and conductor with a few excursions into film composition.

Life

Mathieson received his artistic training at London's Royal College of Music in the early 1930s and joined film immediately after graduating in 1933. Here he was hired by the country's most important film producer at the time, Alexander Korda .

In the film The Private Life of Henry VIII , Mathieson initially worked as the assistant to the musical director, the German Kurt Schroder , who was only temporarily in England . In the following year, in Korda's next three lavish large-scale productions, the historical monumental film Catherine the Great , the romance The Private Life of Don Juan and the adventure drama The Scarlet Flower set in revolutionary France , he was responsible for the musical direction.

From then on, Muir Mathieson was for the next four decades - during the Second World War also in the service of the British Ministry of Information - the busiest film musician in his country, even if he was rarely commissioned to write an independent film. Instead, Mathieson was responsible for well over 500 films as musical director or conductor. His own film compositions are consistently meaningless. He ended his film career at the age of 60, and since then he has appeared primarily as the conductor of the Oxfordshire County Youth Orchestra. Muir Mathieson, who was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1957, was married to the ballet dancer Hermione Darnborough (1915-2010).

Filmography

as a film composer

  • 1944: Wonderful Times (This Happy Breed) (anonymous)
  • 1958: Vertigo - From the realm of the dead (Vertigo)
  • 1961: diamonds on board (Hunted in Holland)
  • 1961: Corpse on vacation (What a Carve Up!)
  • 1962: Bob on Safari (Call Me Bwana)
  • 1963: The Young Detectives (TV series)
  • 1963: Hide and Seek
  • 1965: In Kitty Hawk Bay (Dead End Creek) (TV series)
  • 1967: A horned cattle named Amalie (Calamity the Cow)
  • 1971: Mr. Horatio Knibbles
  • 1972: Anoop and the Elephant (Anoop and the Elephant)
  • 1973: Come Away In (short film)
  • 1974: Going Places East (short documentary film)

as musical director or conductor (small selection)

literature

  • International Motion Picture Almanac 1965, p. 189
  • Ephraim Katz : The Film Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. Revised by Fred Klein and Ronald Dean Nolen. New York 2001, p. 917
  • SJ Hetherington: Muir Mathieson: A Life in Film Music , Scottish Cultural Press 2006, ISBN 1-898218-11-0

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Mathieson, Muir
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British musical director and conductor
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Stirling , Scotland , United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH 2nd August 1975
Place of death Stirling , Scotland , United Kingdom