RIP Emil Cadkin

 Dignity Memorial

12/17/2020

Composer Emil Cadkin died in Los Angeles, California on December 16, 2020. Born in Cleveland, Ohio on August 26, 1920 of Russian immigrants, he was a composer, orchestrator and music director.  He attended Yale University where he studied Music, specializing in composition and theory and then relocated to Los Angeles, California, where he began teaching and writing music until 1942 when he enlisted in the Air Force.

He was active in the American film industry from the 1940s and his work has been heard on numerous movies that include The Big Fix, Bury Me Dead, The Invisible Avenger, The Killer Shrews, Night of the Living Dead, Northwest Stampede, T-Men and many more.

Not restricting himself to the movies, he also worked on animations for Hanna Barbera and television series such as The Hathaways, Judge Roy Bean, Shannon and notably on 35 episodes of Hazel and 39 episodes of The Donna Reed Show.

During his career he often worked in collaboration with Harry Bluestone, William Loose and others as well as on his own, which resulted in short works totalling into thousands that were used as music cues for the film and television industry.  The company GRH Music, which he owned with William Loose, managed these works.

He later formed the Cadkin Trust to take care of all his copyrights and William Loose also formed his own Trust Fund, both of which named family members as trustees.   There was a lawsuit filed by Emil Cadkin against the Loose Trust in 2003 for copyright infringement where it was claimed that his name had been removed from his compositions on more than 5,000 music cues.   All compositions are now correctly credited to him via BMI.

CADKIN, Emil (Emil Milton Cadkin)

Born: 8/26/1920, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A.

Died: 12/16/2020, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

Emil Cadkin’s westerns – orchestrator, music supervisor, music editor, composer:

The Man from Texas – 1947 [orchestrator]

Northwest Stampede – 1948 [orchestrator]

Judge Roy Bean (TV) – 1955 [composer]

Gunsmoke in Tucson – 1958 [music supervisor]

The Law and Jake Wade – 1958 [composer]

Quick Draw McGraw (TV) – 1959-1960 [composer]

Huckleberry Hound Show (TV) – 1960 [composer]

Empire (TV) – 1962-1964 [music editor]

The Devil’s Bedroom – 1964 [orchestrator]

Navajo Run – 1964 [composer]