Alex North

Alex North (December 4, 1910 – September 8, 1991) was an American composer best known for his many film scores, including A Streetcar Named Desire (one of the first jazz-based film scores), Viva Zapata!, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. He was the first composer to receive an Honorary Academy Award.

Early life

North was born Isadore Soifer in Chester, Pennsylvania to Russian Jewish parents.

Career

North managed to integrate his modernism into typical film music leitmotif structure, rich with themes. One of these became the famous song, "Unchained Melody". Nominated for fifteen Oscars but unsuccessful each time, North is one of only two film composers to receive the Lifetime Achievement Academy Award, the other being Ennio Morricone. North's frequent collaborator as orchestrator was the avant-garde composer Henry Brant. He won the 1968 Golden Globe award for his music to The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968).

His best-known film scores include A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Viva Zapata!, The Rainmaker, Spartacus, The Misfits, Cleopatra, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Dragonslayer and Under the Volcano. His music for The Wonderful Country makes use of Mexican and American motifs.

Unchained Melody

"Unchained Melody" is a 1955 song with music by Alex North and lyrics by Hy Zaret. North used the music as a theme for the little-known prison film Unchained, hence the name. Todd Duncan sang the vocals for the film soundtrack. It has since become one of the most recorded songs of the 20th century, most notably by the Righteous Brothers. According to the song's publishing administrator, over 1,500 recordings of "Unchained Melody" have been made by more than 670 artists in multiple languages.

In 1955, three versions of the song (Les Baxter, Al Hibbler, Roy Hamilton) charted in the Billboard Top 10 in the United States, and four versions (Al Hibbler, Les Baxter, Jimmy Young and Liberace) appeared in the Top 20 in the United Kingdom simultaneously, an unbeaten record for any song. It is also one of only two songs to reach number one by four different artists in the UK. Of the hundreds of recordings made, it was the July 1965 version by the Righteous Brothers, performed as a solo by Bobby Hatfield, that became a jukebox standard for the late 20th century. This version achieved a second round of great popularity when it was featured in the 1990 blockbuster film Ghost. In 2004 it finished at number 27 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs survey of top tunes in American cinema.

Porus

Porus or Poros (from the Greek Πῶρος, Pôros) was a king of the Pauravas whose territory spanned the region between the Hydaspes (Jhelum) and Acesines (Chenab) rivers in what is now Punjab. Porus famously fought Alexander the Great in the Battle of the Hydaspes in 326 BC and it was generally believed by historians that he was defeated. Alexander was however greatly impressed by his adversary and not only reinstated him as a satrap of his own kingdom but also granted him dominion over lands to the north extending until the Hyphasis (Beas). After Alexander's death in 323 BC, Porus was assassinated by one of Alexander's generals named Eudemus sometime between 321 and 315 BC.

Background

The only information available on Porus is of Greek origin. Historians however have reasoned that based on his name and the location of his domain, Porus was likely to have been a descendant of the Puru tribe mentioned in the Rig Veda.

The historian, Ishwari Prasad, noted that Porus might have been a Yaduvanshi Shoorsaini. He argued that Porus' vanguard soldiers carried a banner of Herakles whom Megasthenes—who travelled to India after Porus had been supplanted by Chandragupta—explicitly identified with the Shoorsainis of Mathura. This Herakles of Megasthenes and Arrian has been identified by some scholars as Krishna and by others as his elder brother Baladeva, who were both the ancestors and patron deities of Shoorsainis. Iswhari Prashad and others, following his lead, found further support of this conclusion in the fact that a section of Shoorsainis were supposed to have migrated westwards to Punjab and modern Afghanistan from Mathura and Dvārakā, after Krishna's demise and had established new kingdoms there.