Biography
After receiving instruction from Busch in Kansas City and from Boulanger in Paris, Bennett turned out compositions in numerous genres. These ranged across several symphonies and additional orchestral scores, pieces for chamber ensembles and wind bands, two operas, and a ballet-opera. Acclaim nevertheless attached chiefly to his achievements in orchestration, a path that opened in 1919 when the firm T.B. Harms commissioned him to arrange songs for the stage. One of the first results was Cole Porter’s An Old Fashioned Garden (1919). He subsequently served as principal orchestrator for Broadway musicals from the 1920s through the 1960s, supplying scores for roughly 300 productions that included works by Kern, Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers and Lowe. His arrangements supplied models that later orchestrators adopted and placed the craft on equal footing with the contributions of authors and composers. He also authored the treatise Instrumentally Speaking (Melville, NY, 1975).