Herschel Burke Gilbert(1918-2003)
- Music Department
- Composer
- Soundtrack
Composer, arranger and orchestrator of prolific output. Trained on
violin and leader of his own dance band by the age of fifteen. Studied
at the Juilliard Institute of Musical Art (1939-41), subsequently
learned composition under the tutelage of
Aaron Copland,
Leonard Bernstein, and
Lukas Foss. Briefly joined the big band of
Harry James as arranger and violist
in 1943. In Hollywood between 1944 and 1958, variously under contract
with Columbia, United Artists and 20th Century Fox as arranger/music
director. His most productive spell was between 1952 and 1954, when he
became the first person to receive Oscar nominations for the categories
of Original Score, Song and Musical Adaptation in the course of three
successive years. From 1958 to 1965, he worked as Music Director
respectively for Dick Powell's Four
Star Television Company and for the CBS TV Network. He was acclaimed
for numerous television background scores, including such seminal
series as
The Detectives (1959),
The Rifleman (1958) and
Burke's Law (1963). In 1974, he
founded his own music label, Laurel Records, as an outlet for classical
chamber music and jazz, featuring mainly American composers. Gilbert
was a former president of the Screen Composers of America (SCA) and of
the American Society of Music Arrangers. He also served as president
and vice president of the Society for the Preservation of Film Music.
