Clifton Parker Biography

Clifton Parker was part of that generation of serious British composers, exemplified by William Alwyn and Brian Easdale, who found a haven -- between concert commissions and teaching jobs -- in the film industry. Born Edward John Clifton Parker in London in 1905, he was the youngest son of bank officer Theophilis Parker, who intended to send all of his boys into the fields of banking and finance. The youngest of the Parker siblings, however, had a decidedly creative, musical leaning in his personality, which he nurtured by himself; he was educated privately and, insofar as music was concerned, self-taught. He managed to escape his father's plans for his future by virtue of an early success: at 16, he authored his first mature work, Romance For Violin and Piano, which was good enough to secure publication. He was, thus, able to keep his feet in music even as he worked in business, holding jobs as a sales assistant for a mantle manufacturer, among other positions, into his early twenties. It wasn't until he was his mid-twenties that he was able to devote himself entirely to music, working as a copyist for his basic livelihood and continuing to write works which found favor at the BBC. At 31, Parker was appointed organist/arranger with the Folkstone Municipal Orchestra and a year later became a pianist and composer at the Jooss-Leeder School of Dance. It was there that he met Yoma Sasburgh, the dancer who would become his second wife. He wrote a huge number of dance scores to which she applied her talents as a choreographer over the next three decades. Parker entered film music in collaboration with Nicholas Brodszky on the thriller Unpublished Story (1942), directed by Harold French. Brodszky, whose real skill lay in songwriting and small-scale instrumental compositions, ended up ceding much of the project to Parker, who ended up writing at least half of the score, which was above average in complexity and richness for a topical thriller of this type. Parker was also Noël Coward's uncredited collaborator on In Which We Serve that same year, and those duties led him to a series of assignments (again, brokered through the better-established Brodszky) with the Ministry of Information. Finally, in 1943, he received his first credit for a major commercial film when he scored Herbert Wilcox's production Yellow Canary, starring Anna Neagle, then the reigning dramatic actress in British cinema. He further established his credits when he distilled his music for the government-sponsored documentary Western Approaches to a four-minute orchestral piece entitled "Seascape," which found great popularity on record in the concert hall and on the radio. From the mid-'40s onward, Parker was the first-choice composer for any British producer making a movie dealing with ocean voyages or the sea, and his music ended up being featured in such high-profile postwar films as The Blue Lagoon (1948), Treasure Island (1950) -- which brought him to the attention of Walt Disney Productions -- and later films such as Sink the Bismarck (1960) and Damn the Defiant (1962). Outside of that realm of filmmaking, he was very busy across the decades with dramas such as Girl on Approval (1961), and did the music for one widely acknowledged horror classic, Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon (1957). Throughout his career, he continued to score documentary films as well, and to write for the concert hall, and, additionally, wrote extensively for the stage, including many Shakespearean productions, among them several featuring choreography by his wife; and he still authored the occasional free-standing orchestral piece or light-classical work for the radio. All of that activity -- which also included much maneuvering and lobbying for the rights of film composers -- took its toll, and by age 58, Parker had decided to abandon film composition. He limited his work to theater. Declining health forced Parker to give up most of his work after age 68, and he spent his last decade in a quiet retirement, passing away in 1989 at age 85. In the decades since his death, several of the movies he scored have come to be highly regarded by critics, among them Sink the Bismarck. One of his best, the original 1948 version of The Blue Lagoon, has also been unseen since the early 1980s as a result of remake rights sold for the version starring Brooke Shields. Chandos Records' release of The Film Music of Clifton Parker, with its inclusion of "The Blue Lagoon: Rhapsody for Orchestra," is indeed the widest release any component of the 1948 movie had received in two decades. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi