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.

20th century

The 20th century was a century that began on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000. It was the tenth and final century of the 2nd millennium. It is distinct from the century known as the 1900s (sometimes written as 19XX), which began on January 1, 1900 and ended on December 31, 1999.

Dubbed the "short twentieth century", this century in human history was dominated by chain of events that heralded significant changes in world history as to redefine the era: World War I and World War II, nationalism and decolonization, the Cold War and Post-Cold War conflicts, cultural homogenization through developments in transportation and communications technology, world population growth, awareness of environmental degradation, ecological extinction and the birth of the Digital Revolution. It saw great advances in communication and medical technology that by the late 1980s allowed for near-instantaneous worldwide computer communication and genetic modification of life.

Overview

The century had the first global-scale total wars between world powers across continents and oceans in World War I and World War II. Nationalism became a major political issue in the world in the 20th century, acknowledged in international law along with the right of nations to self-determination, official decolonization in the mid-century, and nationalist-influenced armed regional-conflicts.

Goto

Goto (goto, GOTO, GO TO or other case combinations, depending on the programming language) is a statement found in many computer programming languages. It performs a one-way transfer of control to another line of code; in contrast a function call normally returns control. The jumped-to locations are usually identified using labels, though some languages use line numbers. At the machine code level, a goto is a form of branch or jump statement. Many languages support the goto statement, and many do not (see language support).

The structured program theorem proved that the goto statement is not necessary to write programs; some combination of the three programming constructs of sequence, selection/choice, and repetition/iteration are sufficient for any computation that can be performed by a Turing machine, with the caveat that code duplication and additional variables may need to be introduced. At machine code level, goto is used to implement the structured programming constructs.

In the past there was considerable debate in academia and industry on the merits of the use of goto statements. Use of goto was formerly common, but since the advent of structured programming in the 1960s and 1970s its use has declined significantly. The primary criticism is that code that uses goto statements is harder to understand than alternative constructions. Goto remains in use in certain common usage patterns, but alternatives are generally used if available. Debates over its (more limited) uses continue in academia and software industry circles.

Alex Goot

Alexander George Gut (born March 15, 1988, Poughkeepsie, New York) is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist from New York. Goot grew rapidly through the channel lists YouTube Top 200 with his covers of famous songs and his original songs such as his song "Sensitivity". His channel, GootMusic, is one among the over 1000 registered with more than two million subscribers. He plays acoustic guitar, bass guitar, piano, drums and other instruments.

Biography and career

"My goals have been to reach as many people as possible with my music, and enhance peoples' lives by making music that they can enjoy any time."

Goot began recording music in 2004 at the age of 16 and since then has gained popularity from his profiles on various social network sites, as well as his own website, from which he distributes some of his music and provides news and regular updates. His time is almost all spent in his home studio self-producing all audio and video for his releases, or touring the world.

Goot released his first studio album In Your Atmosphere, which was made possible by his fans via an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign. He is the example of celebrity in the YouTube age; self-driven, self-promoting, aside from his musicianship, relying on modern messaging and technology to get heard. His YouTube channel has about 2,000,000 subscribers and his videos have been viewed over 330 million times. His celebrity rank has fallen and he is now ranked in the 400's among subscribers and 800's in views.

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.