The young Victor, who had begun playing violin at the age of six, was sent to Poland when he was ten to stay with his grandfather and study at Warsaw Imperial Conservatory (his teacher was Polish composer Roman Statkowski), achieving the Diploma of Merit.
When he graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory, World War I prevented him from returning to the U.S., so he remained in Poland (which was occupied by the Germans), earning his keep by playing with the Philharmonic and in a quartet and a quintet.
[6] In 1930, Chicago bandleader and radio-star Isham Jones commissioned Young to write an instrumental ballad band arrangement of Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust", which had been played, up until then, as an up-tempo number.
Young slowed it down and played the melody as a gorgeous romantic violin solo[7] which inspired Mitchell Parish to write lyrics for what then became a much-performed love song.
[10] In the mid-1930s, he moved to Hollywood where he concentrated on films, recordings of light music and providing backing for popular singers, including Bing Crosby.
He used first-rate vocalists, including Paul Small, Dick Robertson, Harlan Lattimore, Smith Ballew, Helen Rowland, Frank Munn, The Boswell Sisters, Lee Wiley and others.
The album featured Judy Garland and the Ken Darby Singers singing songs from the film in Young's own arrangements.
Young often collaborated with Ken Darby and the Singers for radio programs starring the popular Met Opera baritone John Charles Thomsen.
His other nominated scores include Anything Goes (1936),[12] The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936),[12] Artists and Models (1937),[12] The Gladiator (1938), Golden Boy (1939), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), The Uninvited (1944), Love Letters (1945), So Evil My Love (1948), The Emperor Waltz (1948),[12] The Paleface (1948),[12] Samson and Delilah (1949), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), Our Very Own (1950), September Affair (1950), My Favorite Spy (1951), Payment on Demand (1951), The Quiet Man (1952), Scaramouche (1952), Something to Live For (1952), Shane (1953), The Country Girl (1954),[12] A Man Alone (1955), The Conqueror (1956) and The Maverick Queen (1956).