Legendary composer Alex North was born in 1910 and next year will see the 15-time Academy Award nominee being remembered at the Úbeda International Film Music Festival in Spain. The festival today announced “a large-scale tribute, including a number of special-interest sessions, workshops, live performances and many other activities yet-to-be-disclosed.” If there will be a whole concert devoted to North’s music remains to be confirmed, but the show is already in safe hands as soundtrack producer Robert Townson, who has released a large number of Alex North’s most important scores both in original format and in re-recorded versions, is the one in charge of the festival’s artistic direction.

Alex North was the first film composer to receive a Liftime Achievement Oscar (in 1986). He is credited with pioneering the use of jazz in film scores, writing the first Hollywood jazz score for Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951. North was essentially a modernist composer who large scale symphonic scores with great stylistic integrity. Among his many acclaimed scores were Spartacus, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Cleopatra. As a songwriter, North is best known for ‘Unchained Melody,’ written originally for the 1955 drama Unchained and subsequently recorded in over 500 versions and reused in many other films, most notably in the 1990 hit movie Ghost.