Art & Creativity Quote by Alex North

A Friday script and a Tuesday session describes an assembly-line rhythm that clashes with the way music is actually made. Alex North is protesting not laziness but the erosion of a process: the time needed to read a story, spot the scenes, discover themes, test harmonies, orchestrate, rewrite, hire players, rehearse, and record. In the era he knew, most of that work was analog and collaborative, involving orchestrators and copyists, without the safety net of digital fixes. Compressing it into a long weekend turns subtlety into triage.

North, whose scores for A Streetcar Named Desire, Spartacus, and Cleopatra show a psychological and orchestral sophistication, understood how music shapes narrative from the inside. His complaint targets a culture of production, especially television, that treats music as a just-in-time utility rather than as co-authorship. Weekly broadcast schedules and tight budgets forced composers to deliver hours of cues at speed, pushing them toward formulas, recycled textures, and library tracks. The result is not only thinner music but a blunter drama, because the score is the emotional architecture beneath the images. When there is no room to experiment, to discard a cue and try another, the show loses its capacity for surprise and depth.

Calling it dreadful to impose on gifted talent is an ethical claim as much as an aesthetic one. The system squanders the very skill it is trying to exploit, asking for excellence while engineering conditions that make excellence unlikely. It also shifts blame: audiences hear something generic and fault the composer, when the timeline all but guaranteed it. North points to a structural mismatch between the expectations put on artists and the time art requires. That warning resonates beyond his moment. Whenever speed becomes the highest virtue, the people most capable of making something enduring are reduced to surviving deadlines, and both the craft and the audience pay the price.