Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email
Answers.com

Robert Russell Bennett

 
American Theater Guide: Robert Russell Bennett
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > American Theater Guide

Bennett, Robert Russell (1894–1981), orchestrator. He was born into a musical family and learned harmony, counterpoint, and composition under Carl Busch before migrating to New York from his native Kansas City, Missouri, in 1916 and getting work as a copyist with Schirmer, Inc. His first orchestrations were heard in Hitchy Koo, 1919. Among the more than three hundred musicals Bennett orchestrated were Rose‐Marie (1924), Show Boat (1927), Of Thee I Sing (1931), Music in the Air (1932), Anything Goes (1934), Oklahoma! (1943), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), My Fair Lady (1956), The Sound of Music (1959), and Camelot (1960). Bennett was the leading orchestrator of his day, and his rich, well‐balanced arrangements established the Broadway musical “sound” for the 1940s, 1950s, and much of the 1960s.

Search unanswered questions...

Enter a question here...
Search: All sources Community Q&A Reference topics

Music Encyclopedia: Robert Russell Bennett
Top
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Music Encyclopedia

(b Kansas City, mo, 15 June 1894; d New York, 18 Aug 1981). American orchestrator, conductor and composer. After study with Boulanger in Paris he worked as an orchestrator on Broadway, scoring c 300 musicals in 40 years. His original music often shows a mastery of instrumentation on a higher level than the musical material itself. His opera on the life of Maria Malibran was staged in New York in 1935.


Biography: Robert Russell Bennett
Top
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Biographies

Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) was an arranger, composer, and conductor who orchestrated the scores of more than three hundred Broadway musicals over a period spanning four decades

Bennett was born into a musical family. His father, George Robert Bennett, played the trumpet and the violin in the Kansas City Philharmonic orchestra. His mother, May Bradford, was a piano teacher. He had one sister. Bennett began to exhibit his musical gifts at the age of three, when he picked out on the piano the melody of a Beethoven sonata that he had heard his mother play. The following year the family moved to a farm south of Kansas City to aid Bennett's recovery from polio. His parents provided most of his schooling. During this period his mother taught him to play the piano and his father gave him lessons on a number of brass and woodwind instruments. When the senior Bennett organized a local band, his son was proficient enough to sit in for any absent member.

When Bennett was fifteen, his family returned to Kansas City, where he became a student of the Danish-American musician Carl Busch, studying harmony, counterpoint, and composition. Between lessons he played second violin in the Kansas City Symphony under Busch's direction. (He also played third base for a local semipro ball team.) To pay for his musical education, Bennett played piano in dance halls, movie theaters, and theatrical pit orchestras - discovering in the process his affinity for popular music.

In 1916 Bennett moved to New York City with just $200 in savings in his pocket. Again, he supported himself playing the piano in restaurants and dance halls. His first serious musical employment was with the music publishing house of George Schirmer, Inc., where he was hired as a copyist. When the United States entered World War I, Bennett was able to enlist in the army infantry despite some lingering disabilities from polio. Assigned to a headquarters unit back in Kansas City because of a crippled foot, Bennett organized and conducted army bands and scored dance arrangements. After the armistice, Bennett returned to New York where, on 26 December 1919, he married Louise Merrill, daughter of the headmistress at a finishing school where he had given music lessons. They had one daughter, Beatrice Jean.

Bennett applied for a position as orchestrator at T. B. Harms and Company, at that time the top music publisher in Tin Pan Alley, the center of Manhattan's music industry. The interview won him a chance to audition; he was instructed to orchestrate a Cole Porter tune, "An Old Fashioned Garden," which became the biggest hit of 1919, and Bennett was hired. Soon he was orchestrating entire productions.

Orchestrated Work of Major Composers

It has been said that Bennett is the reason why musical arrangers get their names on theater programs today. His orchestrations embraced the work of every major composer of Broadway musicals for an entire generation: Rudolph Friml (Rose Marie, 1924); Vincent Youmans (No, No, Nanette, 1925); Jerome Kern (Show Boat, 1927; Roberta, 1933; and Very Warm for May, 1939); George Gershwin (Of Thee I Sing, 1931, and Porgy and Bess, 1935); Irving Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun, 1946); Cole Porter (Kiss Me, Kate, 1948); Burton Lane (Finian's Rainbow, 1947); and Kurt Weill (Lady in the Dark, 1941). He even re-orchestrated Georges Bizet's opera Carmen for the all-black production, Carmen Jones (1943). Perhaps his best-known work was with Richard Rodgers, for whom he orchestrated Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and The Sound of Music (1959), among others. The best-known works of the latter part of his career are his orchestrations for Fritz Loewe's My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960). For both of these shows, Bennett collaborated with Philip J. Lang.

Bennett's astonishingly rapid method of orchestration was legendary. Watching a number two or three times in rehearsal, he was able to score it from memory, often turning out eighty pages of orchestrations a day. Thus, he occasionally had more than twenty shows running at the same time and almost never fewer than four or five per season.

Studied in Paris

In 1926, after successfully orchestrating more than sixty musicals, Bennett threw over this lucrative career to go to Paris to study classical composition with Nadia Boulanger. In 1927 and 1928 he won Guggenheim Fellowships enabling him to continue these studies. During this period he composed two symphonies, a ballet, and a oneact opera. In 1931 he was among the winners (along with Aaron Copland, Ernest Bloch, and Louis Gruenberg) of a contest sponsored by RCA for the best musical work by an American. The following year he collaborated with Robert A. Simon on a full-length opera, Maria Malibran, which opened at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City in 1935 to mixed reviews. Ironically, the RCA award led to many commissions as an arranger; so many, in fact, that his work as a composer languished. However, in the late 1930s Bennett provided original music as well as orchestrations for a number of Hollywood productions, including Show Boat (1936), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), and Rebecca (1940). During this period he composed the music for the Lagoon of Nations at the New York World's Fair in 1939 and 1940. In 1943 Bennett was commissioned by the Saturday Evening Post to write a symphony on The Four Freedoms, based on the famous Norman Rockwell painting done for that magazine. Eugene Ormandy, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, played it many times, as did other orchestras throughout the country during World War II.

The new medium of television gave additional scope to Bennett's abilities. In 1952 he orchestrated the Richard Rodgers score for the naval history of World War II, called Victory at Sea. Recordings of this score continued to sell well for many years. During the 1950s Bennett again worked periodically in Hollywood. For one of his orchestrations, Oklahoma! (1955), he won an Oscar. Tall, slender, and distinguished, Bennett was sometimes likened to the film star Ronald Coleman. His hobbies were tennis, baseball, and pool, and every morning he studied the racing form to place bets. He died in New York City at the age of eighty-seven.

Structured and Melodic Compositions

Conservative in both style and outlook, Bennett avoided the atonal mode of much serious twentieth-century music. His compositions are generally structured and melodic. Unlike the many composers with whom he worked, Bennett did not place great value on his efforts as an orchestrator. "The orchestrator's value is his sensitiveness to melody," he said once. "If the melody has something to say, he can put colors into the outlines. If the melody has nothing to say, he is powerless." Bennett took a rather snobbish view of Broadway show tunes. "Don't confuse this with music," he once told an interviewer. "I make my living with the Gershwins, the Porters, and the Kerns, but for my own consumption, no. When I have time to myself, I study the scores of the great masters." The passage of time has proven him wrong on two counts: both on what constitutes "music" and on the value of his contribution to it.

Periodicals

New York Times, October 24, 1943; August 19, 1981.

Opera News, July 1993.

Artist: Robert Russell Bennett
Top
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Classical Artists
  • Period: Modern (1910-1949)
  • Born: June 15, 1894 in Kansas City, MO
  • Died: August 18, 1981 in New York, NY
  • Genres: Keyboard Music

Biography

Bennett studied with Busch in Kansas City and with Boulanger in Paris. He composed a wide variety of music, including several symphonies and orchestral works, music for chamber groups and wind bands, two operas and a ballet-opera. However, Bennett's recognition stems from his work in orchestration. This career started with a commission in 1919 by the publishers T.B. Harms to orchestrate songs for the theatre. One of his earliest efforts was Cole Porter's =An Old Fashioned Garden= (1919). He went on to become the leading orchestrator for Broadway musicals from the 1920s to the 60s. He scored some 300 productions, including the works of Kern, Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers and Lowe. His efforts established criteria for other orchestrators to follow, and elevated the status of the orchestrator to equal to that of the authors and composers. =Instrumentally Speaking= (Melville, NY, 1975), is the title of his book on orchestration. ~ Lynn Vought, All Music Guide
Wikipedia: Robert Russell Bennett
Top
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
Robert Russell Bennett
Born June 15, 1894
Died August 18, 1981 (aged 87)

Robert Russell Bennett (June 15, 1894 – August 18, 1981) was an American composer and arranger, best known for his orchestration of many well-known Broadway and Hollywood musicals by other composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers.[1][2] In 1957 and 2008, Bennett received Tony Awards recognizing his orchestrations for Broadway shows. Early in his career he was often billed as Russell Bennett, dropping his first name as was common for maestros.

Contents

Life and career

Early life

Robert Russell Bennett was born in 1894 to a very musical family in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, George Bennett, played violin in the Kansas City Symphony and trumpet at the Grand Opera House, while his mother, May, worked as a pianist and teacher. She taught Bennett piano, while his father taught him violin and trumpet.

The Bennett family moved to a farm in Freeman, Missouri, when Bennett was four, to speed his recovery from polio. By that time, he had demonstrated his aptitude for music and his remarkable ear by picking out the finale of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 on the white keys of the piano. By his early adolescence, his father often called upon him to play any given instrument as a utility member or substitute player within Bennett’s Band in Freeman. In his autobiography, Bennett recalled finding a ragtime tune on the piano at age ten and being informed by his mother that such music was trash—this lesson taught him to be, as he called it, a “life-long musical snob.” His mother also taught his academic lessons until he was twelve due to health concerns; his health remained an obstacle when Bennett later decided to join the Army.

Early career

After completing his secondary education, Bennett moved to Kansas City to be a freelance musician, performing throughout the city as well as with the symphony. He also began his first musical training outside of a home environment with Danish composer-conductor Dr. Carl Busch. Busch taught him counterpoint and harmony until 1916, when Bennett took his savings and moved to New York City. He eventually found a job as a copyist with G. Schirmer while continuing to freelance and to build a network of contacts, particularly with the New York Flute Club.

In 1917 he volunteered for the Army. Although he yearned for an active role, his youthful health woes caused the draft board to mark him for limited service. However, he successfully appealed this classification and became the director of the 70th Infantry Band at Camp Funston, Kansas. He valiantly attempted to improve the “disgraceful” musical standards of the unit, but found his efforts thwarted when the Spanish flu swept through the post in 1918. Upon his discharge several months later, he returned to New York. His relationship with Winifred Edgerton Merrill, a society matron who had been the first woman to receive a doctorate from Columbia University, led to rewards both financial and emotional—she had been one of his first employers in the city, and she introduced him to her daughter Louise, whom he married on December 26, 1919. Their daughter, Jean, was born a year later. Bennett later studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger 1926-1929.

Broadway arranger

His career as an arranger began to blossom in 1919 while he was employed by T.B. Harms, a prominent publishing firm for Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. Dependable yet creative within the confines of formulaic arranging, Bennett soon branched out as an orchestrator and arranger for Broadway productions, collaborating particularly with Jerome Kern.

Although Bennett would work with several of the top names on Broadway and in film including George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Kurt Weill, his collaborations with Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers stand out both for sheer volume and for highlighting different facets of an arranger’s relationship with a composer. Bennett described his own philosophy: "The perfect arrangement is one that manages to be most ‘becoming’ to the melody at all points." Through this, he kept his commercial arrangements simple and straightforward, with a careful ear for balance and color.

With Jerome Kern

Kern's working relationship with Bennett serves as a clear illustration of this point. For example, when orchestrating Show Boat, Bennett would work from sketches laid out quite specifically by Kern, which included melodies, rough parts, and harmonies. The original sketches appear remarkably close to Bennett’s completed scores; as one scholar puts it, "Bennett didn't have much to make up."

With Richard Rodgers

In contrast, Rodgers allowed Bennett a greater degree of autonomy. The pair had first collaborated in 1927, but the majority of their partnership occurred in the 1940s and 1950s. While scoring Oklahoma! in 1943, Bennett proved himself invaluable by reworking an elaborate and possibly out-of-place selection into the title song. His most legendary contribution to the partnership, however, occurred during the scoring of the television series Victory at Sea (1952–3). Richard Rodgers contributed twelve basic themes for the series, with three earmarked for the first episode, but those who worked on the series attribute its eleven-and-a-half hours worth of music principally to Bennett. Rodgers himself wrote, “I give him [the credit] without undue modesty, for making my music sound better than it was.”

Bennett once spoke of the most valuable lessons to be learned by any orchestrator, but these words apply equally well to his work as a composer. “The first thing you study, to become a famous music arranger, is to do without sleep…The second [is]: Learn to do without regular food.”

Musical profile

Schooled by his mother to disdain popular music, Robert Russell Bennett found the dichotomy between his serious compositions and his arranging work to be a lifelong struggle. In spite of his prolific output, which included the opera Maria Malibran, more than seven symphonies, a large variety of chamber works, and at least five concertos, his reputation today as a classical composer rests primarily on two oft-recorded pieces, the Suite of Old American Dances and Symphonic Songs for Band. This may be attributed both to the modesty so characteristic of Bennett and to the Eastman Wind Ensemble recordings which popularized them. In his composing, Bennett brought to bear his considerable talent for orchestration as well as a gift for conceiving melodies and harmonic structure in his head; longtime Bennett copyist Adele Combattente (of Chappell Music) confirmed his ability to write parts in score order, as opposed to filling in leftover parts and doublings as he completed primary melodic lines. He nearly always scored directly in ink, rather than pencil.

Many of Bennett’s original works came about through direct commission; the 1939 World’s Fair, CBS radio ("Hollywood" for orchestra), and the League of Composers ("Mademoiselle" for the Goldman Band) provide prominent examples. A significant number of commissions were initiated by Robert Austin Boudreau, a former member of the Goldman Band, and his American Wind Symphony. The AWS traveled via American rivers and waterways, inspiring several works with nautical themes, including the Ohio River Suite and West Virginia Epic. Boudreau would provide a basic concept to Bennett, who would complete the new work rapidly and who would always attend the premiere. Boudreau recalls, “We never offered him a lot of money for those commissions…He was an elegant person. He was always more interested in music than in dollars.”

Later years and legacy

In later years, Bennett again developed major health problems. “He never talked about it, but always showed joy,” Boudreau states. “It wasn’t just a business relationship we had, it was more than just music. We were pals, and he would treat me as a son.” Bennett did not slow his output, creating original works for the nation’s bicentennial celebrations and accepting commissions from a variety of sources, including a Presbyterian church in Florida, for which he accepted only a modest fee.

Bennett died of liver cancer in 1981. His memory rests largely on the popular arrangements which so conflicted the composer, but those who knew him also remember him as a close friend and gracious mentor. Robert Shaw wrote, “And it is just as certainly because of his kindness, honesty, humor, and wisdom that our hearts are warmed to see Robert Russell Bennett without peer in his field.” Robert Russell Bennett is also known to have taught the Broadway and concert arranger William David Brohn.

List of Works (incomplete)

Books

Bennett's book Instrumentally Speaking was published in 1975 by Belwin-Mills, but is now out of print. His autobiography, Nor Is Not Moved—A Music Arranger's Story, was nearly complete at the time of his death in New York City, and was edited and published later (1999) in the book The Broadway Sound ISBN 1-58046-022-4. George Ferencz, who edited The Broadway Sound, has also written a thoroughly researched bio-bibliography about the composer.

Original compositions

  1. Suite of Old American Dances
  2. Autobiography Part 1 and Part 2
  3. Symphonic Songs for Band
  4. Rose Variations for Cornet and Band
  5. Four Preludes for Band
  6. Sights and Sounds (An Orchestral Entertainment)
  7. Abraham Lincoln: A Likeness in Symphony Form
  8. Symphony in D for Dodgers
  9. A suite of demonstration pieces for an RCA High-Fidelity recording, with playful titles like "Waltz of the Vinylite Biscuits"
  10. "Symphony in D for the Dodgers" a 1941 composition incorporating speeches by sportscaster Red Barber.

Broadway arrangements and orchestrations (a selection)

  1. Friml, Hammerstein and Harbach: Rose-Marie (1924)
  2. Gershwin: Oh, Kay! (1926)
  3. Kern and Hammerstein: Show Boat (1927) (new orchestrations 1946 and 1966)
  4. Gershwin: Girl Crazy (1930)
  5. Gershwin: Of Thee I Sing (1931)
  6. Kern and Harbach: The Cat and the Fiddle (1931) (shared with Jerome Kern, who, as always was credited for the music, but not for the orchestrations)
  7. Kern and Hammerstein: Music in the Air (1932)[3]
  8. Porter: Anything Goes (1934)
  9. Porter: Jubilee (1935)
  10. Rodgers and Hammerstein: Oklahoma! (1943)
  11. Bizet, Hammerstein: Carmen Jones (1943) (shared with Georges Bizet, composer of the 1875 opera Carmen)
  12. Irving Berlin: Annie Get Your Gun (1946)
  13. Harburg and Lane: Finian's Rainbow (1947) (shared with Don Walker)
  14. Rodgers and Hammerstein: Allegro (1947)
  15. Porter: Kiss Me, Kate (1948)
  16. Rodgers and Hammerstein: South Pacific (1949)
  17. Rodgers and Hammerstein: The King and I (1951)
  18. Lerner and Loewe: My Fair Lady (1956)
  19. Styne, Comden, and Green: Bells Are Ringing (1956)
  20. Rodgers and Hammerstein: Flower Drum Song (1958)
  21. Rodgers and Hammerstein: The Sound of Music (1959)
  22. Lerner and Loewe: Camelot (1960) (shared with Philip J. Lang)
  23. Lerner and Lane: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965)

Bennett also did the orchestrations for the 1936 film version of Show Boat, and for the 1955 film version of Oklahoma! Some of his stage orchestrations were used in the 1958 film version of South Pacific, and the 1956 film version of The King and I.

He conducted Rodgers' "Victory at Sea" which was the soundtrack for the early 1950s TV miniseries of the same name; it was one of the first of its kind and billed as one most ambitious.

He also orchestrated the score for the original television broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, in 1957.

Concert Arrangements

In 1942, Bennett arranged Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture, using melodies from George Gershwin's now-celebrated opera. Bennett's arrangements were largely based on Gershwin's original orchestrations for the opera.

Bennett was also responsible for The Many Moods of Christmas, a 1963 48-minute medley of Christmas carols , arranged especially for the Robert Shaw Chorale and Orchestra. They recorded it that year, and in 1983, Robert Shaw re-recorded it with the Atlanta Symphony Chorus and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

Awards and honors

Bennett was given a Special Tony Award in 1957. In 2008 he received a posthumous Special Tony Award "in recognition of his historic contribution to American musical theatre in the field of orchestrations, as represented on Broadway this season by Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific."[4].

Bennett was the first president of the American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers (ASMAC).[5]

References

  1. ^ "Robert Russell Bennett" – Internet Broadway Database (Retrieved on May 1, 2008)
  2. ^ "Robert Russell Bennett" – Internet Movie Database (Retrieved on March 24, 2009)
  3. ^ "Orchestrator on His Own" – Time Magazine (Monday, Dec. 12, 1932) (Retrieved on May 1, 2008)
  4. ^ Announcement of Tony Award nominations, 2008
  5. ^ "ASMAC HISTORY: 69 YEARS AND STILL GOING STRONG". American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers. http://www.asmac.org/templates/System/details.asp?id=39902&PID=478567. Retrieved 2008-04-10. 

External links


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

 

Copyrights:

American Theater Guide. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Music Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Artist. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Music Guide ®, a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Robert Russell Bennett".  Read more