| Biography | Louis Levy was an English film composer and music director, who worked in particular on Alfred Hitchcock and Will Hay films. He started his career in 1910 arranging and performing music for silent films. In 1916 he became musical director for the New Gallery Cinema in London. In 1921, he went to the Shepherds Bush Pavilion as Music Chief and is credited with being the first to develop the theme song in movies.
At the beginning of talkies, he joined the Gaumont British studios at Shepherds Bush, where he became the head of the music department for all Gainsborough Pictures productions from 1933 onwards. The rich sounds emanating from his large orchestra are all the more impressive when one realises that electrical sound industry was barely ten years old. He worked in particular on Alfred Hitchcock and Will Hay films.
He later had a long running BBC radio series Music From the Movies, which started in 1936 and went on until the 1950s. At this time, through the sheer necessity of having to produce so much music he employed several talented arrangers, among them Peter Yorke (who adapted the Levy sound for his own successful post-war concert orchestra) and Bretton Byrd, who was his chief music editor at Gaumont British. |