Applebaum, Louis, 1918-2000

Louis Applebaum was born on April 3, 1918, in Toronto, Ontario.

He was a Canadian composer, administrator, and conductor. After studying at the Toronto Conservatory of Music and the University of Toronto, Applebaum went to New York to study composition. By the mid-1940s, he had moved to Hollywood, where his film scores were in great demand, but in 1949, he returned to Canada. He composed approximately 250 film scores for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) between 1942 and 1960, serving as its music director (1942-1948) and a consultant (1949-1953). He was nominated, along with co-composer Ann Ronell, for an Academy Award for the score of the 1945 war film The Story of G.I. Joe. He won a 1968 Canadian Film Award for his non-feature music score of Athabasca. He won a 1989 Gemini Award for the Best Original Music Score for a Program or Mini-Series for Glory Enough for All. He was the first music director of the Stratford Festival, and in 1955, he established the Stratford Music Festival as an offshoot of the then two-year-old theatre festival. He resigned from his administrative duties at Stratford in 1960, though he continued until 1999 to provide incidental music for festival productions. He was a composer, music director or sound designer for 70 productions over 46 years. His fanfares have been played before every performance at Stratford's main stage since 1953. After resigning from Stratford in 1960, he served as president of Group Four Productions, a documentary and television production company, until 1966. He was a music consultant for CBC Television (1960-1963) and a chairman of the music, opera, and ballet advisory committee for the National Arts Centre (1963-1966). He wrote a 1965 government-commissioned report, which led to the formation of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, as well as a plan for the establishment of a department of music at the University of Ottawa. He served as chairman of a Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada (CAPAC)/Canadian Association of Broadcasters committee for the promotion of Canadian music (1965-1970) and was in charge of member relations for CAPAC (1968–1971), also serving on its board. He served on an advisory arts panel, and was a jury member for the Canada Council (1970-1971) and was a consultant for the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts (1968-1970). He was executive director of the Ontario Arts Council (1971-1980). Working on behalf of the Government of Canada as chairman of the Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee, he co-authored with Jacques Hébert the influential Applebaum-Hébert Report, the first review of Canadian cultural institutions and federal cultural policy since 1951. He also served as vice president of the Canadian League of Composers. In 1976, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Applebaum was appointed to the Order of Ontario in 1989 and the Companion of the Order of Canada in 1995. In 1997, Applebaum was awarded the inaugural Special Achievement Award at the SOCAN Awards in Toronto. In 1998, the Ontario Arts Foundation established the Louis Applebaum Composers Award.

He died on April 19, 2000, in Toronto, Ontario.