Mark Snow, the acclaimed television composer best known for helming the popular theme song to the 1990s sci-fi hit The X-Files, died on Friday, a representative confirmed to Rolling Stone. According to Variety, he spent his last moments in his Connecticut home. He was 78.
Snow, born Martin Fulterman on Aug. 26, 1946, has earned 15 Emmy nominations for his various TV soundscapes. Six of those nominations came from his X-Files work, where he scored over 200 episodes of the series. In 2022, Rolling Stone named Snow’s X-Files theme one of the 100 Greatest TV Theme Songs of All Time. Two of his Emmy nominations were for his work on the popular series Ghost Whisperer, and several others for miniseries and specials like An American Story, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, and Children of the Dust.
Snow’s music covered even more series, including Hart to Hart, T.J. Hooker, Smallville, and Blue Bloods. He began his career writing orchestral music but learned to adopt the electronic techniques more common today. He reportedly wrote the X-Files theme by accident, when his elbow struck his keyboard and created the sound he’d been looking for.
As Variety reports, in a 2016 Television Academy interview, Snow said “it took quite a few years to get to where I felt comfortable with the electronics, trying to make something that approximated melodic music. Mostly it was used for ambient sound-effect type scores. But the technology kept changing so quickly. There was much more control, and the spectrum of sound really warmed up and started to breathe. These electronic instruments could really make something approximating music. [Now] I have my keyboard, here’s the show on the screen in front of me, and I just start playing along with it. I improvise, and then I hit on something I like, and I go over it again and again.”
From Rolling Stone US
