David Langley Hamilton was an Emmy Award-nominated composer. Born on May 4, 1951, in St. Louis, Hamilton studied classical piano while attending Macalester College in St. Paul before attending the University of Stirling in Scotland on an English literature exchange fellowship. While there, he continued studying piano at the Royal Academy of Music in Edinburgh.

After returning to St. Louis, he co-founded Pavlov’s Dog, a seven-piece progressive rock band with which he would record three albums for Columbia Records. The group toured with the likes of Journey, ELO, and Kraftwerk. The albums Pampered Menial (1975) and At the Sound of the Bell (1976), both cracked the Top 40 in Australia. Pampered Metal dented the Billboard 200 stateside, fueled by the single “Julia,” which Hamilton co-wrote.

He left the band in 1976 and later relocated to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a composer and writer. His first job was writing the music and script for the 20-part KOCE instructional series The Photographic Vision, which won him a Los Angeles Area Emmy Award for Best Music.

Hamilton continued to write music for TV and penned to score for Orleans, a CBS legal drama fronted by Larry Hagman. The series earned Hamilton a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series.

His next project was scoring Waco: The Rules of Engagement, about the ill-fated 1993 standoff with the Branch Davidian cult in the titular Texas town. The film earned a Best Documentary Oscar nomination and won the 1997 IDA Award from the International Documentary Association. Hamilton then composed the score for Thanks of a Grateful Nation, a scripted Showtime drama about the Gulf War that starred Ted Danson and won a Humanitas Prize.

Hamilton also had directing and scripting credits and most recently worked on Till the Rivers Rise, a Heartland-set musical project for which he wrote the book, music, and lyrics.