Richard Rodney Bennett

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Sir Richard Rodney Bennett (born March 29, 1936) is a British composer.

1 Biography
2 Music
3 Selected works
4 References
5 External Links

Biography

Born in Broadstairs, Kent, England, Richard Rodney Bennett studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Howard Ferguson and Lennox Berkeley. 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 arch-serialist Pierre Boulez.

Bennett taught at the Royal Academy of Music between 1963 and 1965, and 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 1999.

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Music

Despite his early studies in modernist techniques, Bennett's tastes are catholic, and he has written in a wide range of styles, being particularly fond of jazz. Early on, he found success by writing music for feature films, although he considered this to be subordinate to his concert music. Nevertheless, he has continued to write music for films and television; among his best-known scores are the Doctor Who story The Aztecs (1964), Far from the Madding Crowd (1967 ), Murder on the Orient Express (1975), Enchanted April (1992) and Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). 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.