“Nothing really big happens in the song. It stays in A-minor, there’s no singing, drums or guitars, and it was a smash hit. That’s pretty wild”: Tributes paid to X-Files composer Mark Snow

Mark Snow, the TV composer who scored a surprise 1990s chart hit with the theme to The X-Files has died, aged 78.

Snow trained at Julliard and like most composers in the 1970s, started off writing for full orchestra. But he was one of the first of his generation to make the move into electronic music in the late 1980s. All of the music for The X Files, which often totalled as much as 40 minutes each episode, was created in his own studio on synthesizers and samplers.

The composer Sean Callery (who worked on the 24 series) was a close friend of Snow’s and in an interview with Variety has said this about the composer: “His limitless talent and boundless creativity was matched only by the generosity he bestowed upon other composers who sought his guidance. He would give the most inspiring and intelligent feedback when listening to the work of other young artists (myself included).”

“He combined his decades of experience with the encouragement that composers cultivate: to trust in themselves, embrace their own unique voice, and learn to rely on their own instincts. And he did so with a humour and self-deprecation that made his wisdom all the more enduring.”

Snow was born Martin Fulterman in August 1946 in Brooklyn. After Julliard, he formed the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble with future film composer Mark Kamen to perform classical and innovative pop music. By the mid-1970s he had switched to TV work, getting his first commission on ABC’s cop show The Rookies.

It was at this point he changed his professional name, to dodge threats from a former employer and success on the Rookies led to work on Starsky And Hutch, the Gemini Man and Hart To Hart. Snow would go on to compose the theme to William Shatner’s TJ Hooker and the scores for other 1980s hits such as The Love Boat, Dynasty and Cagney and Lacey.

But it was The X-Files, with its deliberately eerie whistling melody, that was to become his most famous work. Its chart success bemused him at the time: “Nothing really big happens in the song,” he said at the time. “It stays in A minor, there’s no singing, drums or guitars, and it was a smash hit. That’s pretty wild.”

Callery paid tribute, saying the X Files theme “brought an entirely new language of musical storytelling to television.”