Composer, arranger and conductor
Robert Farnon, composer and arranger of light orchestral music
24 July 1917 – 23 April 2005
For much of the second half of the twentieth century Robert Farnon was regarded as the leading composer of light orchestral music working in Britain, and as the arranger whose scoring other arrangers studied.
Early life and Canadian broadcasting
Robert Joseph Farnon was born in Toronto on 24 July 1917, the third of four children. His sister Norah was the eldest. His two brothers both made careers in music, Brian on the American west coast and Dennis as an arranger and record producer. Music was the family trade rather than its accomplishment, and Farnon entered it as a player.
His instrument was the trumpet, and his first professional work was in Canadian radio in the 1930s, where he played in the orchestras that filled the CBC’s schedules and began writing for them. That apprenticeship matters to everything that followed. He learned orchestration in a studio, under a deadline, with the players in the room rather than in a composition class, and the fluency this produced is the quality colleagues consistently singled out. By his early twenties he was arranging and conducting for Canadian broadcasting rather than playing in it.
The wartime band and the move to Britain
In the Second World War the Allied Expeditionary Force maintained service bands intended for broadcasting to troops, and each of the principal Allies supplied one. The American band was directed by Glenn Miller and the British by George Melachrino. The Canadian Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force was conducted by Farnon, and it brought him to Britain in 1944, at twenty-seven, in front of an ensemble and an audience of millions.
He stayed. The decision shaped British light music for the next thirty years, because it placed a musician trained in North American big-band writing inside a British institutional system that had developed more conservative orchestral habits. Farnon did not abandon the British idiom. But his harmonic language was audibly different from that of his new colleagues, richer and more chromatic, with voicings drawn from dance-band practice rather than from the salon orchestra, and it moved the genre towards him rather than the other way round.
The light orchestral works
Farnon’s reputation with the general public rests on a group of short orchestral pieces written largely in the decade after the war, when demand from broadcasting and from the publishers’ recording libraries was at its height.
Jumping Bean is the best known. It is a novelty piece in the strict sense, a short and fast miniature built on a single rhythmic idea, and it became one of the most-played items in the British light music catalogue, in constant use as broadcast and newsreel material. Portrait of a Flirt works the same territory with more harmonic incident. Peanut Polka and A Star Is Born sit alongside them.
Against these he set a body of slower, sustained writing that shows the range the novelty pieces conceal. Westminster Waltz is the most successful of them and took an Ivor Novello Award in 1956. The award year is documented; the year of composition is not, and it is left open here rather than estimated. Melody Fair, Journey into Melody and How Beautiful Is Night belong to the same family. In these the string writing is unhurried and the harmony does the work that rhythm does in Jumping Bean. Taken together the two groups explain his standing. He could supply the library catalogues with exactly the brisk, useful material they wanted, and he could also write a melody that survived being separated from its function.
Later, for television, he wrote the march used as the theme for the BBC drama series Colditz, which introduced his name to an audience that had no interest in light music as a category.
Robert Farnon as an arranger
The arranging is the half of the career musicians rate most highly, and it took him well outside the light orchestral field.
He wrote for singers who could have engaged anyone. Frank Sinatra recorded Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain in London in 1962 with Farnon arranging and conducting, a record made because Sinatra wanted British material handled by someone who understood it from the inside. Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne and Vera Lynn all used him. He also worked with jazz instrumentalists, among them the trombonist J. J. Johnson, in settings that put a soloist in front of a full orchestra without reducing the orchestra to accompaniment.
What distinguishes the arrangements is the treatment of the middle of the texture. Farnon’s inner parts move. The harmony is voiced so that the second and third lines are worth hearing on their own, and the effect is a warmth that does not depend on volume or on doubling the tune. This is difficult to do and easy to hear, which is why the scores circulated among other arrangers as models.
How the scores are put together
The technical description of Farnon’s writing that recurs in accounts by other arrangers concerns three things, and none of them is melody.
The first is the disposition of the strings. He divided them more finely than the British light orchestral norm and used the divisions to sustain a chord across a wider register than the number of players would suggest, so a section of modest size reads as fuller than it is. The second is the placement of the harp and keyboard desk. Where much light music uses the harp decoratively, at cadences and in glissandi, Farnon frequently gave it a structural line, so that it supplies rhythmic definition rather than ornament, with the piano or celeste doubling at the octave to sharpen the attack. The third, and the one arrangers mention most, is the voicing of the inner parts. Chords are spaced so that the second and third voices carry intervals of independent interest, which means the harmony continues to move even when the melody sits still.
The practical consequence is a texture that does not rely on doubling the tune to sound rich, and therefore does not thin out when it is heard through a small loudspeaker. For music written to be broadcast on AM radio that was not a refinement but the whole problem, and it is the clearest link between his dance-band training and his orchestral work.
The composer’s film and television scores
Farnon scored feature films from the late 1940s onwards, working mostly within the British industry. The credits include Spring in Park Lane and Maytime in Mayfair, the Herbert Wilcox comedies that were among the biggest British box-office successes of their day, the naval adventure Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. in 1951, and later the western Shalako.
Film work suited him for the same reason library work did. It required a composer who could produce correctly timed, immediately playable orchestral music at speed. It also kept him anonymous. A great deal of his output reached large audiences without his name registering, which is the normal condition of the profession and one reason a specialist literature grew up around it.
An unresolved catalogue of works
One consequence of that anonymity is worth stating plainly rather than tidying away: nobody knows exactly how much Farnon wrote. Library discs were indexed by mood and duration for the benefit of producers, not by composer for the benefit of scholars. Credits were abbreviated, omitted, or replaced by house pseudonyms, and the session paperwork that would settle the question survives patchily and in private hands.
The effect is that his accepted catalogue has grown rather than stabilised. Each reissue project that works through a publisher’s archive with the documentation alongside the discs tends to return attributions that were not previously made, and there is no reason to think the process has finished. If you go looking for a particular piece and cannot find it under his name, that absence is not evidence.
Standing among his colleagues
Farnon’s reputation inside the trade was higher than his public profile, and unusually explicit. He was known among British arrangers as “the Governor”, and the figures who said so were not minor ones. André Previn, Quincy Jones and J. J. Johnson all named him as the arranger they most admired. The respect was technical rather than sentimental. What was being praised was command of the orchestra, the ability to get a specific sound from a specific number of players, first time.
An appreciation society, the Robert Farnon Society, was founded in 1956 and has published a journal devoted to him and to light music more broadly ever since. Its existence is itself evidence of the gap between his standing among listeners who followed this repertoire closely and his standing in general musical criticism, which largely ignored him.
Recordings, and where the music is now
Farnon’s output survives in three distinct kinds of source, and the distinction matters to anyone trying to find a particular piece.
The earliest layer is commercial 78rpm discs, issued while the pieces were current. The second, and by far the largest, is the publishers’ recording libraries: sessions recorded not for sale to the public but for licensing to film, newsreel, radio and television producers, pressed in small quantities and sent to production offices. Much of the light orchestral catalogue exists only here, which is why a piece can have been heard by millions without ever having been on sale. The third layer is the LPs he made later as a conductor in his own right, together with the arrangements he wrote for other artists’ albums, where the credit is on the sleeve.
From the 1990s onwards specialist labels began transferring the first two layers to CD, and the reissue series devoted to British light music are now the practical route to most of this material. Those transfers are also the reason the repertoire is documented at all. Session dates, personnel and catalogue detail for a great deal of it are known today only because an engineer worked through a publisher’s archive with the paperwork alongside the discs. Details of the series are collected under recordings.
Later years
Farnon moved to Guernsey and worked from there for the rest of his life, continuing to compose, arrange and conduct, and appearing with British orchestras including those that supplied the BBC’s long-running light music programmes. He held four Ivor Novello Awards and was appointed to the Order of Canada, and the recognition arrived from two countries that each regarded him as the other’s.
The later work moved deliberately away from the three-minute form he was known for. Robert Farnon wrote three symphonies, the last of them completed early in 2004 and dedicated to Edinburgh after a visit to the festival there. He did not hear it played. He died on 23 April 2005, aged eighty-seven, at a hospice near the house he had lived in for forty years, about three weeks before the premiere.
A note on that date, since it is not consistent across the reference literature: 23 April is the date given by the standard biographical sources and is corroborated by the interval to the symphony’s first performance. At least one film-music reference gives 25 April. Whichever is right, the discrepancy is a small example of the documentation problem that runs through this whole subject.
His music remains in circulation in two forms. The library recordings and the original 78s have been extensively reissued, which is how most of the light orchestral catalogue is now heard. And the handful of pieces that entered broadcasting as signature material continue to be played by people who have never seen his name.
Frequently asked questions
What is Robert Farnon best known for?
It depends who is asked, and the two answers barely overlap. To a general British audience Robert Farnon is the composer of short orchestral pieces, above all Jumping Bean and Westminster Waltz, and of the march used as the theme for the BBC series Colditz. To musicians he is first an arranger, and the credit usually named is Frank Sinatra's Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain, recorded in London in 1962. The gap between those two reputations is the defining fact of his career.
Was Robert Farnon British or Canadian?
Canadian by birth. He was born in Toronto on 24 July 1917 and worked in Canadian radio through the 1930s. He arrived in Britain in 1944 as conductor of the Canadian Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force and stayed for the rest of his life, later settling in Guernsey. His music is discussed as part of the British light music repertoire because that is the tradition he worked in and shaped, not because of his nationality.
Why was Robert Farnon called the Governor?
It was the term British arrangers used among themselves for him, and it referred to technical command rather than seniority or age. An arranger's problem is predicting what a score will sound like before the session, when there is no time to fix it afterwards. Farnon was unusually accurate at that, and the people who said so were doing the same job. André Previn, Quincy Jones and the trombonist J. J. Johnson all named him as the arranger they most admired.
Which pieces did Robert Farnon write?
The best-known are short orchestral works from the decade after the war: Jumping Bean, Portrait of a Flirt, Peanut Polka and A Star Is Born on the fast, rhythmically pointed side; Westminster Waltz, Melody Fair, Journey into Melody and How Beautiful Is Night among the slower ones. He also wrote film scores and, for television, the Colditz march. A large further quantity was written for publishers' recording libraries and issued without prominent credit.
How does Farnon's writing differ from other British light music?
Chiefly in its harmony and in the way the middle of the texture is handled. Farnon came from North American dance-band practice, so his chords are more chromatic than the British salon-orchestra norm and his voicings are spaced so that the second and third lines carry intervals worth hearing. The result is a warmth that does not depend on volume or on doubling the melody. British colleagues trained in a more conservative idiom moved towards him rather than the reverse.
Did Robert Farnon arrange for Frank Sinatra?
Yes. Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain was recorded in London in June 1962, with Farnon arranging and conducting. The album exists because Sinatra wanted British material handled by someone who understood the repertoire from the inside rather than adapted at a distance. Farnon also wrote for Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne and Vera Lynn, and worked with jazz instrumentalists in settings that placed a soloist in front of a full orchestra without reducing the orchestra to accompaniment.
Where can Robert Farnon's music be heard now?
In three places, and they are not equally easy to search. Commercial 78s hold the pieces that were issued for sale while they were current. The publishers' recording libraries hold a much larger body of work that was never on sale to the public, only licensed to producers. Later LPs carry his own conducting and his arrangements for other artists. Specialist labels have transferred a great deal of the first two categories to CD since the 1990s, and those reissues are the practical route in.
What did Robert Farnon write for film and television?
He scored British features from the late 1940s, among them the Herbert Wilcox comedies Spring in Park Lane and Maytime in Mayfair, the naval adventure Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. in 1951, and later the western Shalako. For television his most widely heard piece is the march written for the BBC drama series Colditz in 1972, which reached an audience with no interest in light music as a category.
Is the full extent of his output known?
No, and it probably cannot be settled. Library recordings were catalogued by mood and duration rather than by composer, credits were often abbreviated or omitted, and some material circulated under house pseudonyms. Session paperwork survives unevenly. Each reissue project that works through a publisher's archive tends to add attributions, which is why the accepted list of his library pieces has grown rather than stabilised.
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