Lalo Schifrin, 93, dies; composer of ‘Mission: Impossible’ and much more

Lalo Schifrin, the Grammy-winning Argentine-born composer who evoked the ticking, ominous suspense of espionage with his indelible theme to the television series “Mission: Impossible” as well as scored movies like “Cool Hand Luke,” “Bullitt” and “Dirty Harry,” died Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 93.

His wife, Donna, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of pneumonia.

Lalo Schifrin had a startlingly diverse career as a composer, arranger and conductor in a wide range of genres – from classical to jazz to Latin to folk to rock to hip-hop to electronic to the ancient music of the Aztecs.

He conducted symphony orchestras in London and Vienna, and philharmonic orchestras in Tel Aviv, Israel; Paris; and Los Angeles. He arranged music for the Three Tenors. He provided what the Washington Post called the music of “rebellious cool” for Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood.

But the prolific Schifrin, who wrote more than 100 film and television scores, was best known for “Mission: Impossible.” Interpretations of his propulsive theme have also been featured in the eight movies in the “Mission: Impossible” series, starring Tom Cruise, which began in 1996.

Like John Williams, whose many compositions for film include the theme from “Jaws,” Schifrin was a master of creating jittery unease and peril. Both composers worked with a recognizable style and a distinct purpose.

Williams used a repeated, hastening two-note “dun-dun, dun-dun” motif to create the serrated dread of a shark attack. Schifrin’s “Mission: Impossible” theme has an unusual five-quarter time signature: “DUN-dun da-da, DUN-dun da-da” (with the first “dun” lasting two beats). As a match-lit fuse sparked across the television screen toward the possible detonation of a bomb in the show’s opening montage, the driving rhythm induced jazzy tension and unsettling intrigue in a world of spycraft.

Some listeners found hints in Schifrin’s theme of “Take Five,” the Paul Desmond composition, also in five-quarter time, that was a hit for Dave Brubeck. Others noted a similarity to Morse code, with a dash-dash dot-dot beat that spells “M.I.” In 2006, Anthony Lane, a film critic for The New Yorker, lamented the sparse use of the theme music in “Mission: Impossible III,” calling Schifrin’s theme “only the most contagious tune ever heard by mortal ears.”

When asked about the five-quarter meter at a news conference in Vienna, Schifrin joked that what he had in mind was visitors arriving on interplanetary flights: “The people in outer space have five legs and couldn’t dance to our music, so I wrote it for them.”

The original series ran on CBS from 1966 to 1973, with a cast that over the years included Peter Graves, Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris and Peter Lupus. The show followed a team of secret government agents assigned to undermine dictatorial governments behind the Iron Curtain and in developing nations with urgency, disguises and elaborate tactics. (A second series ran for two seasons on ABC, beginning in 1988.)

In 2018, Schifrin told the British newspaper the Independent that Bruce Geller, the creator of “Mission: Impossible,” told him to write a piece of music that would get people’s attention, “something exciting” to accompany the image, in the show’s opening credit sequence, of a fuse being lit.

His first attempt was a march, but Geller wanted something more dramatic. He showed Schifrin a rough edit of the pilot episode.

“Make it sound like a promise that there’s going to be a little bit of action,” Schifrin recalled Geller telling him. “Like, when they’re in the kitchen having a soft drink and the television set is on in the living room, they’ll hear it and say, ‘Oh, “Mission: Impossible” is on!’ Then they’ll run immediately into the living room.”

So he wrote what became the familiar theme, with the working title “Burning Fuse,” which he said on numerous occasions took him all of 90 seconds. The percussive brass, woodwind and bongo sections took “maybe” three minutes, he said, creating a sound that The Independent likened to “a pounding step in a sensational chase sequence.”

“It was my own little mission impossible,” he was fond of saying.

Boris Claudio Schifrin was born June 21, 1932, in Buenos Aires. His father, Luis Schifrin, was a violinist and concertmaster with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic. His mother, Clara (Ester) Schifrin, who came from a musical family, ran the household.

Having grown up immersed in classical music (Lalo Schifrin learned to play the piano at age 6) and knowing little about jazz, he described hearing Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as “a religious conversion.”

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But, he told The New York Post in 2015, Juan Perón, the nationalist president of Argentina, restricted the import of American jazz records, so Schifrin befriended a merchant marine, who smuggled in music for him.

“I was breaking the law,” he said. “Even in the summer, I had to put on an overcoat and put the records under the belly and covered them with my belt.”

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)He studied law at the University of Buenos Aires, but his primary interest was music. He won a scholarship to the Paris Conservatory, where he studied by day while playing piano in jazz clubs at night. He returned to Buenos Aires in 1956.

Gillespie, impressed when he heard Schifrin’s big band at a reception at the U.S. Embassy there, invited him to come to the United States.

He did, but not right away. In 1958, he obtained a green card and moved to New York, where he later reunited with Gillespie, working with him as a pianist, arranger and composer from 1960 to 1962. His first album as a member of the Gillespie band, “Gillespiana,” was devoted entirely to Schifrin’s acclaimed suite of the same name.

He also recorded several albums as a leader for the Verve label and wrote arrangements for Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan and others.

Schifrin moved to Los Angeles in 1963. His first movie score was for a 1964 adventure film titled “Rhino!”

He won Grammy Awards for best original jazz composition for “The Cat” in 1965 and “Jazz Suite on the Mass Texts” in 1966. In 1968, his “Mission: Impossible” music won two Grammys, one for the theme and one for the soundtrack. His “Pampas” won a Latin Grammy in 2010 for best classical contemporary composition.

Schifrin was nominated for an Academy Award for his scores to six movies – “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), “The Fox” (1967), “Voyage of the Damned” (1967), “The Amityville Horror” (1979), “The Competition” (1980) and “The Sting II” (1983) – but never won. He did, however, receive an honorary Oscar in 2018. He was presented with the statuette by Eastwood, with whom he collaborated eight times.(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Perhaps Schifrin’s most provocative movie moment came in “Bullitt” (1968), with what The Washington Post described as “a radical absence of music.” As McQueen famously squealed through the streets of San Francisco in his Ford Mustang during a 10-minute car chase, there was no background music.

When the movie’s director, Peter Yates, objected, Schifrin is said to have responded, “Silence is also music.”

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In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1971, Schifrin is survived by their son, Ryan; a daughter, Frances Newcombe; a son, William Schifrin, from his marriage to Silvia Schon, which ended in divorce; and four grandchildren.

“I am proud of being eclectic,” Lalo Schifrin told Bruce Duffie, a Chicago radio host, in 1988. He added, “I don’t know why people have a tendency of putting labels, and thinking, for instance, classical music is something that belongs to a museum and jazz belongs to another kind of museum.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.