David Shire

David Shire (born in Buffalo, New York, USA on 3 July 1937) is an American Pianist, songwriter and the composer of stage musicals and film and television scores. Some of his best known works include the soundtrack to the 1974 movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and parts of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack such as "Night on Disco Mountain", an adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. His other work includes the score of the 1985 film, Return to Oz, the "sequel-in-part" of The Wizard of Oz. Shire is married to actress Didi Conn.

Born the son of Buffalo society band leader and piano teacher Irving Shire, he met his long-time theater collaborator lyricist/director Richard Maltby, Jr. at Yale University, where the two wrote two musicals, Cyrano and Grand Tour, which were produced by the Yale Dramat. Shire also co-fronted a jazz group at school, the Shire-Fogg Quintet, and was a Phi Beta Kappa honors student, with a double major in English and music. He was a member of the Pundits and Elihu and he graduated magna cum laude in 1959.

After a semester of graduate work at Brandeis University (where he was the first Eddie Fisher Fellow) and six months in the National Guard infantry, Shire took up residence in New York City, working as a dance class pianist, theater rehearsal and pit pianist, and society band musician while constantly working with Maltby on musicals. Their first off-Broadway show, The Sap of Life, was produced in 1960 at the Sheridan Square Theater in Greenwich Village.