Mark Snow, the veteran television composer who turned “The X-Files” theme into an unlikely chart hit in the 1990s, died Friday at his home in Connecticut. He was 78.
A 15-time Emmy nominee, he not only scored more than 200 episodes of Chris Carter’s spooky Fox series (and both its big-screen incarnations, all starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson), he also provided the music for other series including “Hart to Hart,” “T.J. Hooker,” “Smallville,” “The Ghost Whisperer” and “Blue Bloods.”
Six of his 15 Emmy nominations were for “The X-Files,” but five others were for such highly rated TV movies and miniseries, including “Something About Amelia,” “An American Story,” “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” “Children of the Dust” and “Helter Skelter.”
The Juilliard-trained composer started out, like most TV composers in the 1970s, writing for full orchestra, but Snow was among the first to transition to the all-electronic milieu in the late 1980s, working alone in his home studio. All of the “X-Files” TV music (sometimes as much as 40 minutes per weekly episode) was created on his synthesizers, samplers and other music-making machines.
Composer Sean Callery (“24”), who considered Snow a mentor and then close friend of more than three decades, told Variety: “His limitless talent and boundless creativity was matched only by the generosity he bestowed upon other composers who sought his guidance. He would give the most inspiring and intelligent feedback when listening to the work of other young artists (myself included). He combined his decades of experience with the encouragement that composers cultivate: to trust in themselves, embrace their own unique voice, and learn to rely on their own instincts. And he did so with a humor and self-deprecation that made his wisdom all the more enduring.“
Snow recalls coming up with an echoing rhythmic figure, then adding an eerie, whistling melody atop it, as he was scoring the pilot for “The wild.”
Callery believes Snow’s “X-Files” scores “brought an entirely new language of musical storytelling to television.”
Snow also scored Carter’s other series, “Millennium,” “Harsh Realm” and “The Lone Gunmen,” and earned another Emmy nomination for his theme for “Nowhere Man” in 1996.
As he explained in a 2016 Television Academy interview: “It took quite a few years to get to where I felt comfortable with the electronics, trying to make something that approximated melodic music. Mostly it was used for ambient sound-effect type scores. But the technology kept changing so quickly. There was much more control, and the spectrum of sound really warmed up and started to breathe. These electronic instruments could really make something approximating music. [Now] I have my keyboard, here’s the show on the screen in front of me, and I just start playing along with it. I improvise, and then I hit on something I like, and I go over it again and again.”
He also wrote the music for the final four films of acclaimed French filmmaker Alain Resnais, earning a César nomination for the first, 2007’s “Private Fears in Public Places.”
He was born Martin Fulterman on Aug. 26, 1946, in Brooklyn. He began piano studies at 10, later adding drums and oboe to his repertoire. He studied at New York’s High School of Music and Art and soon befriended another future film composer, Michael Kamen (“Lethal Weapon,” “Die Hard”).
The two became roommates when both went on to study at the Juilliard School of Music from 1964 to 1968. They co-founded the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble to perform both classical and innovative pop music. Immediately signed to Atlantic Records, they went on to record and perform for the next five years (including a 1969 appearance on Leonard Bernstein’s televised “Young People’s Concerts”).
In 1974, after a brief stint as a record producer, he moved to Los Angeles, where his brother-in-law, actor Georg Stanford Brown, convinced producer Aaron Spelling to take a chance on the young composer by commissioning a score for ABC’s “The Rookies.”
It was on this first of six “Rookies” scores that Martin Fulterman adopted the pseudonym Mark Snow (initially to dodge threats from his previous employer, it became his professional moniker). He soon became busy in episodic TV, writing scores for “Starsky & Hutch” (including its third-season theme), “Gemini Man,” “Family” and other series. He also studied with veteran TV composer Earle Hagen (“The Andy Griffith Show”) and serial music teacher George Tremblay to improve his scoring techniques.
“Hart to Hart,” the Robert Wagner-Stefanie Powers romantic drama, was his first big hit, composing the theme and more than 90 scores for the ABC series. He went on to write the theme and early scores for William Shatner’s “T.J. Hooker,” the theme for Jack Warden’s “Crazy Like a Fox,” and scores for such other series as “The Love Boat,” “Dynasty,” “Vega$,” “Cagney & Lacey” and “Falcon Crest.”
In the aftermath of his 1990s success with the “X-Files” music, Snow scored the first six seasons of “Smallville” for the WB network, all five seasons of “Ghost Whisperer” on CBS (earning two more Emmy nominations) and nearly 290 episodes of the long-running Tom Selleck family police drama “Blue Bloods” on CBS.
Among his other TV movies and miniseries were “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” with John Travolta, HBO’s “Vietnam War Stories,” the Louis L’Amour western “Down the Long Hills,” “Murder Ordained” with Keith Carradine, “Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure,” “The Lost Capone,” six “In the Line of Duty” films including “Siege at Waco,” “A Woman Scored: The Betty Broderick Story” with Meredith Baxter, “The Day Lincoln Was Shot” with Rob Morrow, and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” starring Michael Caine.
His other feature films included “Ernest Saves Christmas,” “Cold Dog Soup” produced by George Harrison’s Handmade Films,” Antonio Banderas’ debut as director “Crazy in Alabama,” Marvel Entertainment’s “The New Mutants” and the two “X-Files” films, “The X-Files” and “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” both of which departed from the all-electronic TV style in favor of traditional orchestral scores.
In addition to his Emmy nominations, Snow received ASCAP’s Golden Note Award in 2005 “in recognition of his unprecedented success as one of the most versatile and popular composers in television and film” and a Career Achievement Award from the TV Academy’s music peer group in 2014.
Among the survivors are his wife Glynnis, plus three daughters and grandchildren.
