Richard Rodney Bennett

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, CBE (born 29 March 1936 in 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. 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 and Lennox Berkeley. During this time, he attended some of the... more

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, CBE (born 29 March 1936 in 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. 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 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 1998. He was the tutor of the celebrated composer Grayston Ives. As one of Britain’s most respected and... less