| Contents |
Prologue. "Irving berlin and I" ; Musical snobbery ; The Lady with the Red Dress ; Abram Chasins and "talent" ; Publisher Max Dreyfus -- Chapter one. The Bennett family tree ; Poliomyelitis and other childhood memories ; Moving from Kansas City to a Freeman, Missouri farm ; A boyhood of music and baseball -- Chapter two. Growing up in Freeman ; High school graduation ; Early experiences with girls ; The Bennetts return to Kansas City ; Playing for vaudeville and silent films ; Study with Carl Busch -- Chapter three. To New York, 1916 ; Employment as copyist and arranger ; Winifred Merrill's Musical Autograms ; Army service during World War I ; Courtship and marriage to Louise Merrill ; Arranging at Harms, Inc. ; Incidental music for Shakespeare and the Barrymores ; Collaborations with Kern, Gershwin, et al. ; An astrologer's guidance -- Chapter four. To Paris, 1926 ; Lessons with Nadia Boulanger ; Beginning of a long association with Richard Rodgers -- Chapter five. Rodgers and Hart in London ; Show Boat and Helen Morgan ; Princess Charming and other London productions ; A Guggenheim fellowship ; RCA's $25,000 composition contest ; Paris, Berlin, and the Bennetts' return to New York ; Vinton and Freedly ; Gershwin and Girl Crazy -- Chapter six. To Hollywood, 1930 ; Two prizes from RCA ; Leopold Stokowski ; Oscar Hammerstein II, Irving Caesar, and other lyricists ; Dietz and Schwartz ; With Fritz Kreisler in Vienna ; Maria Malibran staged at Juilliard ; Sigmund Romberg ; Henry Hadley and the NAACC -- Chapter seven. Hollywood beckons again: Show Boat (1936) ; Gershwin and Kern's Shall We Dance, Swing Time, A Damsel in Distress ; Some late 1930s compositions - Hollywood, Eight Etudes, Enchanted Kiss ; An encounter with Stravinsky ; A bounty of band music for the 1939-40 New York world's fair ; Alfred Wallenstein ; Louis and Annette Kaufman ; Returning to New York -- Chapter eight. Russell Bennett's Notebook (1940) and other adventures in network radio ; Joseph Schillinger ; A Symphonic Picture of "Porgy and Bess" ; Oklahoma! ; Carmen Jones and Billy Rose ; Stars of the Future (radio) ; Carousel ; Annie Get Your Gun ; Carnegie Hall (film) ; The Goldman Band ; Hellen Keller ; Marian Anderson ; Robert Shaw -- Chapter nine. Victory at Sea: arrangements for Arthur Fiedler ; Oklahoma! On film ; American wind symphony ; Project 20 and NBC television ; My Fair Lady ; Overture to an Imaginary Drama ; Bells Are Ringing ; Flower Drum Song ; Marc Blitzstein's Juno -- Chapter ten. The Sound of Music ; Camelot ; Cinderella ; On a Clear Day You Can See Forever ; Lincoln Center revivals, 1966 (Annie Get Your Gun and Show Boat) ; Mata Hari -- Chapter eleven. Remembrances: Irving Berlin, Vincent Youmans, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern -- Chapter twelve. "The bohemians" ; Georges Enesco ; Symphony #7 for Fritz Reiner ; A collaboration with Rachmaninov ; Moving to the Warwick hotel ; Some 1970s compositions -- Eight selected essays by Robert Russell Bennett. Orchestrating for Broadway (1933) -- Orchestration of theatre and dance music (late-1930s) -- Backstage with the orchestrator (1943) -- A pretty girl is like a melody (1944) -- Eight bars and a pencil (1947) -- All I know about arranging music (1949) -- On writing harp music (1954) -- Fools give you reasons (1967) -- Afterword. A tribute by Robert Shaw -- Appendix A. Selected compositions -- Appendix B. Selected concert arrangements -- Appendix C. Selected stage and film credits -- Appendix D. Selected discography. |
| Abstract |
The remarkable career of composer-orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) encompassed a wide variety of both "legitimate" and popular music-making on Broadway, in Hollywood, 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. Among the more than 3OO musicals on which he worked between 1920 and 1975 are Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, Show Boat, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music. This book 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. |
