Van Cleave

Nathan Lang Van Cleave (May 8, 1910 – July 3, 1970) was a composer, arranger, and orchestrator for film, television, and radio over four decades of the twentieth century. He usually used "Van" as his first name. He moved to New York City where he led his own band, the Van Cleave Orchestra, in the early 1930s, then played trumpet and arranged music for Charlie Barnet's orchestra.

In 1933, he married Doris Blumenfeld, a Broadway chorus girl and the child of vaudeville actors of the German Blumenfeld circus family.

Musical studies and technical inventions Van Cleave studied music with noted composer and music theorist Joseph Schillinger, a composer known for his system of musical composition based on mathematical principles. Van Cleave used that approach in his later work in radio, where he introduced a "six-way" formula for scoring dramatic programs while working on the Columbia Workshop show. That compositional method was subsequently used on other dramatic programs of the era.

Van Cleave also worked to ensure that his musical scores for radio dramas actually achieved what he set out to do. That fixation led him to begin recording each broadcast on a home recording set in order to hear how his scores sounded to the radio audience and how each individual musician performed. He soon discovered that these commercial sets produced poor quality recordings and designed his own model to improve their sound quality. Even that did not resolve all of their quality issues, so Van Cleave then proceeded to investigate the phonograph needles he was using. With the help of a friend who had worked as an engineer with Western Electric, they developed new needles with improved sound, which they then manufactured and sold through their Duotone Company. That company expanded the products it offered for sale as Van Cleve and his partner continued to work to improve the sound quality of their equipment.

He succeeded Bernard Herrmann as the musical director for The Man Behind the Gun, a wartime radio program that focused on the experiences of soldiers, sailors and marines, for which Cleave composed many of the scores. The show won a Peabody Award, in large part due to Van Cleave's expressive scores and his recreation of the actual sounds of war in the studio. . Despite this very public controversy over Van Cleave's role in rewriting the film's theme he received no screen credit for it.

Van Cleave also worked at other studios, on films such as MGM's Easter Parade (1954), Cinerama Holiday (1954) for the Cinerama Company, and In Search of the Castaways (1962) at Walt Disney Productions. In addition, he worked on many TV episodes of Gunsmoke and The Twilight Zone, where he pioneered the use of the theremin in television scores. In the Gunsmoke episode "The Quest for Asa Janin," the last episode of season 8, from June 1963, with music by Van Cleave, the five-note main theme used throughout 1964's Robinson Crusoe on Mars can be heard several times.

Later years Van Cleave continued working up until his death, despite suffering from heart problems. He died from a heart attack at age 60,