Mark Snow, the prolific television composer best known for crafting the haunting theme to The X-Files, died Friday at his home in Connecticut. He was 78.
A Juilliard-trained musician with a career spanning five decades, Snow scored more than 200 episodes of The X-Files as well as its two feature films. His eerie whistling theme unexpectedly became a chart hit across Europe in the mid-1990s, despite its minimalist, all-electronic sound.
Snow was a 15-time Emmy nominee whose work extended far beyond Mulder and Scully. He composed music for a wide range of series, including Hart to Hart, T.J. Hooker, Smallville, The Ghost Whisperer, and Blue Bloods, as well as dozens of TV movies and miniseries. Six of his Emmy nominations were for The X-Files, with others recognizing work on Something About Amelia, Helter Skelter, and Children of the Dust.
Born Martin Fulterman in Brooklyn in 1946, he studied piano, oboe, and percussion before co-founding the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble with fellow Juilliard student Michael Kamen. After a move to Los Angeles in the 1970s, he began scoring television under the name Mark Snow, beginning with ABC’s The Rookies.
He became a fixture in episodic television, scoring Starsky & Hutch, Family, and Dynasty. Snow embraced electronic composition in the late ’80s, building a home studio that allowed him to score entire episodes solo, often creating as much as 40 minutes of music each week.
Snow also worked on French director Alain Resnais’s final four films and received a César nomination in 2007 for Private Fears in Public Places. Over his career, he earned 30 ASCAP awards and multiple honors recognizing his contributions to television music.
He is survived by his wife Glynnis, three daughters, and four grandchildren.
Source: Variety