Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, CBE (born 29 March 1936, Broadstairs, Kent) is an English composer renowned for his film scores and his jazz performance as much as for his challenging concert works. He has lived in New York City since 1979.
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Richard Rodney Bennett was a pupil at Leighton Park School, the Quaker school in Reading, studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Howard Ferguson, Lennox Berkeley and Cornelius Cardew. During this time, he attended some of the Darmstadt summer courses, where he was exposed to serialism. He later spent two years in Paris as a student of the prominent serialist Pierre Boulez.
Bennett taught at the Royal Academy of Music between 1963 and 1965, at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, United States from 1970 to 1971, and was later International Chair of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music between 1994 and the year 2000. He received a CBE in 1977, and was knighted in 1998.[1]
As one of Britain’s most respected and versatile musicians, Bennett has produced over two hundred works for the concert hall, and fifty scores for film and television, as well as having been a writer and performer of jazz songs for fifty years. Studies with Boulez in the 1950s immersed him in the techniques of the European avant-garde, though he subsequently developed his own distinctive dramato-abstract style. In recent years, he has adopted an increasingly tonal idiom.
Anthony Meredith's biography of Bennett was published in November 2010.[2]
Despite his early studies in modernist techniques, Bennett's tastes are catholic. He has written in a wide range of styles, including jazz, which has particular fondness for. Early on, he found success by writing music for feature films, although he considered this to be subordinate to his concert music.
He has written music for films and television; among his scores are the Doctor Who story The Aztecs (1964) for television, and the feature film Billion Dollar Brain (1967). His scores for Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), each garnered him Academy Award nominations, with Murder on the Orient Express earning him a BAFTA award. Later works include Enchanted April (1992), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), and The Tale of Sweeney Todd (1998). He is also a prolific composer of orchestral works, piano solos, choral works and operas. Despite this eclecticism, Bennett's music rarely involves crossover of styles.
The Birds Lament
Richard Rodney Bennett sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill for a portrait[3] in clay. The correspondence file relating to the Bennett portrait bust is held as part of the Thornhill Papers (2006:56) in the archive[4] of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist.
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