News
News: entries added, and corrections made to entries already published
A reference work's news is what it has added and what it got wrong, so both are listed here with the date each page was last checked against its sources.
Everything below is generated from the pages themselves rather than kept as a separate list, so it cannot fall out of step with the site. The date against each entry is the date its statements were last checked against the sources listed on it, which is not the same as the date it was written and is the more useful of the two.
28 August 2026
- Frank Comstock Entry American arranger; Les Brown's Band of Renown, and Adam-12
26 August 2026
- Clifton Parker Entry Film composer; over fifty features, and the sea music from Western Approaches
- Fantastic new bands of the United Kingdom, and their circuit Article Live music
- Ray Martin Entry Composer, arranger and EMI producer; credited over 2,000 works, some of them to himself under another name
- Robert Farnon and His Orchestra: how a studio band was assembled Article Orchestra
- Robert Farnon works: the catalogue, the symphonies and the losses Article Catalogue
- Sound restoration Entry Transfer and restoration: the reason this repertoire is audible at all
- The Robert Farnon filmography, and why its credits and dates disagree Article Screen
- Which musical instrument to choose, and what year one demands Article Practice
25 August 2026
- 1920s jazz standards Entry The repertoire British dance bands actually played
- André Kostelanetz Entry Orchestral popular music, and the Lincoln Portrait commission
- Angela Morley Entry Arranger for the Goon Show and Scott Walker; twice Oscar-nominated
- Before broadcasting Entry Salon orchestras, spas, piers and the cinema pit
- Billy Ternent Entry Arranger to Jack Hylton; wartime BBC Dance Orchestra
- Carry On Henry Entry Eric Rogers and the Carry On scores
- Charles Williams Entry Library composer; The Devil’s Galop and Girls in Grey
- Conrad Salinger Entry The orchestrator behind the MGM musical sound
- Edmundo Ros Entry Trinidad-born bandleader who made Latin dance music British
- Eric Coates Entry Violist turned composer; four BBC signature tunes
- Frank Chacksfield Entry Bandleader; Ebb Tide and thirty years of Decca albums
- Gene Lees Entry Critic and lyricist; the writer who took arrangers seriously
- Haydn Wood Entry Concert violinist; Roses of Picardy and the Manx orchestral works
- Leighton Lucas Entry Ballets Russes dancer turned conductor and film composer
- Norrie Paramor Entry Light orchestral leader and the EMI producer behind Cliff Richard
- Philip Lane Entry Composer, and reconstructor of lost British film scores
- Robert Farnon Entry Composer and arranger; the figure British arrangers deferred to
- Ron Goodwin Entry Film marches; 633 Squadron and the Miss Marple theme
- Ronald Binge Entry Devised the cascading string effect; wrote Sailing By
- The recorded legacy Entry What survives on record, and what has been lost
- The Robert Farnon Society, founded 1956, and its journal Article Organisation
- Trevor Duncan Entry BBC engineer turned library composer; the Dr Finlay march
- Vivian Ellis Entry Musical comedy, Coronation Scot, and the Performing Right Society
- Working in light music Entry Sessions, the union, and the needle-time agreements
What counts as a correction
A change of substance: a date, a credit, an attribution, or a claim that turned out to rest on less than it appeared to. Those are recorded, because a reference work that revises silently cannot be cited with confidence by anybody. Typographical and wording changes are not recorded, because listing them would bury the corrections that matter.
The most common correction in this subject is a date, and the most common cause is a source that gave one kind of date without saying which kind. A recording has a session date, a release date and a catalogue date; a film has a production year and two or more release years. Where a page here has been corrected on a date, it is usually because the original reading merged two of those.
Corrections are welcome, and the ones worth most are the ones backed by paperwork. A session sheet settles who played. A publisher catalogue entry settles when a library disc entered circulation. A reissue booklet frequently carries a recording date that appears nowhere else in print, because the compiler was working from the documents while writing it. If you hold any of those and a page here contradicts it, the document wins and the page will say so. Contact details are on the imprint page.
One thing this page deliberately does not do is present itself as busier than it is. A dated list is easy to inflate by recording trivial edits, and a site that appears to change constantly reads as more authoritative than one that does not. The entries below are pages whose substance was checked on the date given, and nothing has been added to make the list longer.