Valentino was born in the outskirts of
Palermo,
Sicily, Italy. His family immigrated to the U.S. in 1911. He began his career in the 1920s as a piano and organ tuner for
Wurlitzer on trans-Atlantic steamers docking in New York. In the 1930s, he created live sound effects for
Broadway productions, while becoming a sales representative for
Gennett Recordings. He started his own sound effects company, Thomas J. Valentino Inc., which was later shortened to Valentino Inc. He provided the sound effects for many Broadway shows, including
The Heiress,
Death of a Salesman,
The Diary of Anne Frank, and
The Glass Menagerie, eventually compiling a library of sound cues for hundreds of live shows. His sound effects library at the time was also available on
78 RPM records, which were sold to radio stations during the 1930s and 1940s, at the time effectively being the only broadcasting outlets. With the advent of television, the "Valentino Sound Effects Library" was marketed during the 1950s under the
Major record label, and became the preeminent source for pre-recorded
sound effects for the broadcasting industry. In 1958 he expanded into a similar product for music, establishing the "Valentino Production Music Library" under the Major label. Valentino published, produced, or acquired copyrights to an extensive collection of music, with Major's music library being used in thousands of movies, television shows, cable productions, and educational and industrial recordings around the world. Eventually the work of over 125 composers was represented by the company variously under publishing arms affiliated with
ASCAP (Thomas J. Valentino Inc.) and
BMI (RFT Music Publishing). In the mid-1970s, Valentino increasingly published contemporary music, entering the popular
disco style of the period. He commissioned a student at the
Manhattan School of Music,
Walter Murphy, to compose several popular music themes to add to the music library. A disco version of
Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony - "
A Fifth of Beethoven" - became a No. 1 hit on the
Billboard Hot 100 in 1976. "A Fifth of Beethoven" was included in the soundtrack album of the movie
Saturday Night Fever, which sold over 40 million copies over the years. With most of the songs done by the
Bee Gees, this album ranks as the No. 1 best-selling soundtrack of all time. Valentino served as a vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America (
R.I.A.A.) during that time, and received the
1979 Grammy award as co-producer of the
Album of the Year for the
Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. ==References==