The remarkable career of composer-orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) encompassed a wide variety of both "legitimate" and popular music-making in Hollywood, on Broadway, and for television. Bennett is principally responsible for what is known worldwide as the "Broadway sound" and for greatly elevating the status of the theater orchestrator. He worked alongside Jerome Kern, Cole Porter,George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, and Frederick Loewe on much of the Broadway canon, eventually providing orchestrations for all or part of more than 300 musicals between 1920 and 1975. This work is the first publication of Bennett's autobiography, which was written in the late 1970s. It also includes eight of his most important essays on the art of orchestration.
George J. Ferencz is professor of music at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater.
Reviews
His ear for what the audience wanted to hear...was responsible for the lush, plangent scores... Crammed with fascinating anecdote about working with Porter, Berlin, Rodgers, Hammerstein, Hart et al... the immensely likeable personality of the man himself shines through... This is an important book for musical theatre scholars and students of 20th-century American classical music alike. --GRAMOPHONE (UK)Carefully edited and annotated, with a complete discography and lists of compositions, arrangements, and stage and film credits, this book succeeds both as biography and musical theater history. Highly recommended for academic libraries and large music collections. --LIBRARY JOURNAL
A warm, witty man emerges from every page of this marvellous autobiography...a remarkable portrait of musical life in the United States during most of last century. --CLASSICAL MUSIC