"The remarkable career of composer-orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) encompassed a wide variety of both "legitimate" and popular music-making on Broadway, in Hollywood, and for television. Bennett is principally responsible for what is known worldwide as the "Broadway sound" and for greatly elevating the status of the theater orchestrator. He worked alongside Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers and Frederick Loewe on much of the Broadway canon.

Among the more than 3OO musicals on which he worked between 1920 and 1975 are Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, Show Boat, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music."--BOOK JACKET. ""The Broadway Sound" is the first publication of Bennett's autobiography, which was written in the late 1970s. It also includes eight of his most important essays on the art of orchestration."--BOOK JACKET.