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(b New York, NY, 21 Nov 1896; d Beverly Hills, CA, 24 May 1960). Composer, arranger, orchestrator, and conductor. He studied the piano with Maurice Gould and Jeanne Franco and composition and orchestration with Frank Saddler. During the 1920s he worked as an arranger for Broadway musicals, including The Girlfriend, Manhattan Mary, and the Ziegfeld Follies of 1920 and 1921. He also wrote songs for the 1922 musical Glory. He established the De PackhEnsemble, which he conducted between 1928 and 1931, then in 1933 he went to Hollywood as an arranger and orchestrator. He worked first for MGM and smaller studios on films such as The Dancing Lady (1933) and Rip Tide (1934). He was also one of the team of five principal orchestrators who assisted composer Max Steiner with Gone with the Wind (1939), a score that exemplifies the richness of orchestral timbre and complexity of arrangement that were hallmarks of film music of the time. In the early 1940s he moved to Twentieth Century Fox, where he worked on a number of Betty Grable musicals, including ...

(b New York, NY, 29 June 1911; d Los Angeles, CA, 24 Dec 1975). Composer and conductor. In 1929, while still a student at DeWitt Clinton High School, he enrolled for classes in composition and conducting at New York University. The subsequent year he followed his conducting teacher Albert Stoessel to the Juilliard School of Music, where he was taught composition by the Dutch émigré Bernard Wagenaar. He left the Juilliard School after less than two years, apparently because he found the institution too conservative, and returned informally to New York University during the academic year 1932–3 to attend a course in composition and orchestration given by Percy Grainger. Grainger's eclectic approach revealed to Herrmann the range and diversity of the musical materials available to the contemporary composer. Early in 1933 he formed the New Chamber Orchestra from a group of unemployed musicians as a vehicle for his talents as both conductor and composer. The orchestra's repertory brought together contemporary compositions (including those of Charles Ives, with whom Herrmann formed a lasting friendship) and works by English composers such as Henry Purcell and Edward Elgar, symptomatic of his anglophile tendencies....

(b Chester, PA, 4 Dec 1910; d Los Angeles, CA, 8 Sept 1991). Composer and conductor.

After attending the Curtis Institute, where he studied the piano with George Frederick Boyle, he won a scholarship (1929) to the Juilliard School. He also studied on scholarship at the Moscow Conservatory (from 1933) and went on to serve as music director of the German Theatre Group and the Latvian State Theatre. He was the only American member of the Union of Soviet Composers, from which he received commissions for two choruses and a set of piano variations. In 1935 he returned to the United States and taught music for dance at Finch, Briarcliff, Sarah Lawrence, and Bennington colleges. In New York he studied composition with Aaron Copland and Ernst Toch and composed ballet scores for Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, and Agnes De Mille. In 1939 he went to Mexico as music director for Anna Sokolow's dance troupe, and while there he studied with ...

(b Vienna, Austria, 10 May 1888; d Beverly, Hills, CA, 28 Dec 1971). Composer and conductor of Austrian birth.

His father was a theatrical producer and his grandfather managed the Theater an der Wien when the operettas of Jacques Offenbach and Johann Strauss were produced there. Steiner showed exceptional musical talent at an early age, publishing his first song in 1897 and composing a one-act operetta, Die schöne Griechin, in 1903. He received academic training at the Vienna Conservatory, and a practical apprenticeship conducting and composing small works in the theaters of his father and of other contemporary Viennese impresarios. From 1904 to 1914 he worked throughout Europe, most frequently in London, Ireland, and Paris, acting as the musical director and conductor for a range of theatrical shows. He composed ballets for the Tiller Girls dance troupe, and he worked on shows for George Dance and Ned Wayburn. At the outbreak of World War I he moved to New York, where he worked as a copyist and later as an arranger, orchestrator, and conductor of musicals and revue shows, on and off Broadway. These shows included the George Gershwin's ...

(Pope)

(b Milwaukee, WI, 11 Sept 1885; d Los, Angeles, CA, 1 Feb 1949). Composer and conductor. He was educated in Milwaukee and then became involved in conducting and composing for theatrical productions at the University of Wisconsin. He began working as a conductor on Broadway in 1920, writing songs with the lyricists Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto Harbach, and collaborating with the composers Rudolf Friml, George Gershwin, and Vincent Youmans. In 1929 he moved to Hollywood to work for MGM, where he remained until his death, conducting and composing for more than 100 films. As a music director he was associated mainly with film musicals, notably The Wizard of Oz, for which he won an Academy Award, and those starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. As a composer he worked on almost all of MGM's prestige productions of the 1930s and 40s. His idiom incorporates thematic quotation from other composers, including Chopin (...

(Towner)

(b New York, NY, 8 Feb 1932). Composer, arranger, conductor, and pianist.

He learned the piano from the age of eight and after moving to Los Angeles with his family in 1948 studied with the pianist and arranger Bobby Van Eps. He served in the US Air Force (1951–4), orchestrating for and conducting service bands, then moved back to New York, where he studied for a year with Rosina Lhévinne at the Juilliard School and played in jazz clubs and recording studios. After returning to the West Coast he enrolled at UCLA and took up private composition studies with Arthur Olaf Andersen and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, among others. From 1956 Williams was a studio pianist in Hollywood and two years later began arranging and composing music for television, contributing the main title to Checkmate (1960; see Thomas and Burlingame). Through the mid-1960s he composed for several series and worked for Columbia Records as a pianist, arranger, and conductor; he also made a number of albums with André Previn. During this period Williams began scoring feature films, with many of his earliest scores for comedies, such as ...