Richard Rodney Bennett

Autobiography for Band Part 2

The suggestion that I write my autobiography was made at a time when anyone who did not write one risked being called eccentric. It became, and still is, a major sport among the oldsters. Some of the contemporary books aregoodreading indeed. One of the best of them is the result of an enormous research job, as is brought out in the introduction to the work. Imagine spending long hours and traveling many miles to find out about oneself: I am sureIwould be one of the first to be utterly bored by the subject. It was not so easy, however, to dismiss the whole idea as my friends presented it.

The only answer I could think of with any degree of enthusiasm was thisone, written purely for whatever pleasure it could give. My own part of the pleasure is mostly in utilizing the musical language of the concert band, with its apparently inexhaustible colors and its fabulous vitality.

Theform (if the term has any right being here) is seven short pictures, each about two minutes long, of my own personal seven ages. The two-minute idea may be the result of the loudspeakers spread all over the hotel in Arizona wherethepiece was composed. There was no getting out of ear-shot of those two-minute gems - in the dining rooms, around the swimming pools, by the putting green, everywhere-but I honestly do not believe any of them crept into what Iwaswriting. I do not believe I paid much more than passing attention to them.

Part Two:
IV. 1916: Mo. to N. Y.
V. 1919: The Merrill Miracle
VI. 1926: A Parisian in Paris
VII. 1935: What WastheQuestion?

The three of my seven ages in Part One took us to the legal end of my youth. Gathering up my unspectacular belongings, including my entire fortune of less than two hundred dollars, I swooped down on NewYorkfor no more reason than that it was New York and had a street in it called Broadway. The music borrows two or three rhythms from the era, but the only note-for-note quote is what the bugler at Camp Funston played every morning