Mark Snow, a Juilliard-trained soundtrack composer who earned 15 Emmy Award nominations, including one for his eerily astral opening theme to “The X-Files,” a 1990s answer to the timeless “Twilight Zone” theme and the basis of a surprising dance hit in Europe, died on July 4 at his home in Washington, Conn. He was 78.
The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare form of blood cancer, his son-in-law Peter Ferland said.
Over an extraordinarily prolific five-decade career, during which he tallied more than 250 film and television credits, Mr. Snow excelled in a field that comes with built-in creative challenges.
“Some producers describe their musical idea as ‘fast but slow,’” he said in a 2000 interview with Film & Video magazine. “The director might say he wants to hear music that’s ‘blue with a hint of green.’ Now, no one really knows what those terms mean. That’s a big part of my job, interpreting the search for a project’s musical voice.”
Mr. Snow provided music for 90 episodes of “Hart to Hart,” which starred Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers as a jet-setting couple who double as amateur sleuths, and 40 episodes of “Falcon Crest,” the 1980s prime-time soap opera.
He also worked on a raft of police and detective shows, including “Starsky & Hutch,” starring David Soul, Paul Michael Glaser and an elaborately painted Ford Gran Torino; “T.J. Hooker,” with William Shatner in the title role; “Crazy Like a Fox,” starring Jack Warden; and “Blue Bloods,” with Tom Selleck.
His Emmy-nominated music included work on “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” the 1994 mini-series starring Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland; “Children of the Dust,” the 1995 western mini-series starring Sidney Poitier; and “Helter Skelter,” the 2004 TV movie interpretation the Charles Manson saga.
Even without those accomplishments, Mr. Snow’s contributions to all 217 episodes of “The X-Files” — for which he received six Emmy nominations alone — and its two big-screen spinoffs would have constituted an estimable career in itself.
As its legions of fans know, the long-running Fox series, which was created by Chris Carter and debuted in 1993, tracked the mind-melding adventures of Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who probe unsolved cases involving unexplained phenomena. “The X-Files” became one of the defining shows of its era — and it had a theme to match.
This is not to say that Mr. Snow sensed anything special when Mr. Carter approached him about the project. “I said, ‘Fine,’ you know?” he recalled in a 2016 interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” “It was just another pilot.”
But Mr. Carter had his sights set considerably higher. “I was looking for something that Boy Scouts could hum at the campfire as a scary song,” he told NPR. “Something akin to ‘The Twilight Zone.’”
Mr. Snow’s early attempts at a theme, which tended toward a more traditionally bold and aggressive science-fiction score, failed to spark Mr. Carter’s imagination.
It took a stroke of serendipity to land on a theme worthy of the show. One day in his studio, Mr. Snow accidentally leaned his elbow on a keyboard that was set with a spacey echo-delay effect. He quickly concluded that it would be the perfect foundation of the theme. Looking for a spooky element to flesh it out, he ran across an intriguing sample called “Whistling Joe” on his E-mu Proteus synthesizer.
His wife, Glynnis, was also intrigued by the sound, Mr. Snow told NPR. She told him: “You know, I’m a good whistler too. Maybe I could beef it up a little bit.’” A combination of her whistling and the machine’s ended up in the show’s opening credits.
Like the best television themes, it seemed to tell a story all by itself. Critics agreed. In 2022, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it 39th in its list of “The 100 Greatest TV Theme Songs of All Time,” above classic ones for “Bonanza” and “The Love Boat,” as crooned by Jack Jones.
“It flitters. It flutters. It whistles at you like some unidentified creature in a dark forest at night,” Sean T. Collins wrote in the magazine’s accompanying description. He called it “a perfect musical representation of the spooky, sexy adventures of F.B.I. agents Mulder and Scully.”
An up-tempo extended version of the theme became an unlikely international club hit, soaring to No. 1 in France and No. 2 in Britain. For a brief period, Mr. Snow glimpsed a new side career.
“The record company called up and said, ‘Boy, we had such success with this, do another!,” Mr. Snow recalled in a 2023 interview with the culture magazine Empire. “I tried all kinds of things and it just didn’t work out. For a moment I thought I was going to be like Moby, some guy who makes all these singles.”
Mark Snow was born Martin Fulterman on Aug. 26, 1946, in Brooklyn. (He changed his name when he started his Hollywood career.) His father, Harry Fulterman, was a drummer in big bands and Broadway orchestras. His mother, Lee (Kaplan) Fulterman, was a kindergarten teacher.
He began piano lessons at 13 and later shifted to oboe, his primary instrument as a student at New York’s High School of Music & Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), from which he graduated in 1964. Later, at Juilliard, he was on track to become a professional orchestra oboist.
His career course changed when he and his friend Michael Kamen, a fellow Juilliard student who went on to score films like “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard,” started a band called the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, which fused classical music with rock. The group made its first album in 1968 and performed at one of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic.
His experience with the group exposed Mr. Snow to the business side of music, which steered him to Hollywood, where he glimpsed great creative possibilities despite the commercial constraints.
“My greatest influence for film music,” he once told the music magazine Fifteen Questions, was Jerry Goldsmith’s score for “Planet of the Apes”: “I couldn’t believe that in Hollywood they let you write avant-garde 12-tone music for big movies.”
His survivors include his wife; three daughters, Sarah, Nora and Megan Snow; and four grandsons.
While he was more than qualified for the “X-Files” job, Mr. Snow also credited Los Angeles geography with helping him secure the gig.
In his Empire interview, he pointed out that Mr. Carter lived “in Pacific Palisades, and I lived in Santa Monica, which was close.” That allowed Mr. Carter to pop over to his studio to present the project for the first time. “Some of the other people I understand were in downtown L.A. or Simi Valley,” Mr. Snow said, “just far away.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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