Russell Bennett's Notebook

On the radio last Sunday, a U. S. composer poked mild fun at a friend. The fun was some low viola chitchat in a string orchestra: a musical impression of the almost inaudible wit of Musicritic Robert A. Simon of The New Yorker. It was performed by special dispensation, the work of the first ASCAP man to return to the networks with his own tunes. The composer and conductor was lanky, ruddy, silvery-haired Robert Russell Bennett, back on the air in a WOR-Mutual program called Russell Bennett's Notebook (7 p.m. E. S. T.). The program has been allowed to return, mainly because Mr.Bennett plays noncommercial music.

As a musician, Mr. Bennett has a dual personality. As Russell Bennett, he is a Tin Pan Alleyman who smartly arranges Broadway and Hollywood musicomedy scores, turning out 80 pages of orchestration in a day. In Broadway's louder and sweeter days, there were as many as 22 Bennett shows playing in one season.While keeping the tin pan boiling, Bennett has written--under the name of Robert Russell Bennett--an Abraham Lincoln Symphony, an opera, Maria Malibran, the fountain-&-fireworks music of the late New York World's Fair, many another serious piece. Now he can play the like of them on Russell Bennett's Notebook.

Composer Bennett's opener last fortnight was a "music opera" based upon a fine old U. S. song: The Man on the Flying Trapeze. Throughout the opera, the ballad tune dum-diddled along, festooned with Composer Bennett's shiniest orchestral and harmonic tricks. Best original snatch was sung by a clown: Which way does a young man start when a young man's heart has a well-known dart stuck away down low? Which way does a young girl turn when her arms both yearn and her lips both burn with a well-known glow? Ah, lackaday, how do I say to you which way they go? This week Composer Bennett performs a clarinet concerto dedicated to Benny Goodman, who once played under him in a theatre orchestra. Next week: repetition of an earlier "music-box opera," based on the ballad Clementine. The week after: a musical setting of a letter from an angry radio listener, and (not by Mr. Bennett) a 45-second song based on a phrase from TIME. The phrase: "slightly cockeyed, definitely popeyed, short, swart Yakichiro Suma."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.