Composer, arranger and conductor
Ron Goodwin, the arranger who became Britain's march composer for hire
17 February 1925 – 8 January 2003
Ron Goodwin wrote tunes that a cinema audience walked out humming, which is a narrow and difficult specialism, and he was hired for it repeatedly across three decades of British film.
A trumpeter with a copyist’s job
Ron Goodwin was born in Plymouth on 17 February 1925 and came into music from the practical end. He played the trumpet, and his early employment included working for a music publisher, which in that period meant copying parts.
Copying is worth mentioning because of what it teaches. A copyist writes out, by hand, every part of every arrangement that passes through the office, which means reading an enormous quantity of other people’s orchestration at the closest possible level of attention. It is the least glamorous route into knowing how scores are put together and one of the most thorough.
From there he moved into arranging for the commercial recording industry, and by the 1950s he was leading his own orchestra and making light orchestral records, including for Parlophone in the years when George Martin was running that label. The film work came afterwards, and it came out of this rather than away from it.
The specialism
Ron Goodwin’s reputation rests on a single narrow ability, and it is worth being precise about it because it is easy to undervalue.
He could write a main theme that an audience remembered after one hearing. That means a tune that is immediately singable, that works at a march tempo behind titles and also stretched out slowly under dialogue, that can be scored for full orchestra or for four instruments without losing its character, and that carries the film’s tone within a few bars. It also has to be new, because a theme that resembles an existing one is useless.
Few composers can do this on demand. Plenty of composers write excellent film music without ever producing a theme anybody can hum, which is not a failing but is a different job. Producers hiring Goodwin were buying a specific outcome: an audience leaving the cinema with the tune, and a title sequence that sold the picture in ninety seconds.
Building a picture around one tune
The specialism only pays off if the theme is then used properly across the film, and that is a separate craft with its own vocabulary.
The process starts with spotting: the composer and the director run the cut and agree where music goes and where it does not, which is as much a dramatic decision as a musical one. What comes out is a cue list, each item timed to the frame, and the composer then has perhaps six weeks to write an hour of music to those timings. With a strong main theme in hand, most of that hour is not new material but transformation. The march becomes a slow string melody under a death, a fragment of its first four notes turns into suspense material by removing the harmony, the accompanying figure detaches and runs on its own as chase music, and the full statement is held back for the two or three places where the picture can carry it. Handled well this makes a film feel unified without the audience noticing why, and it is the reason a single good theme is worth more to a composer than a dozen adequate ideas.
Two constraints shape the result. Everything has to fit its timing exactly, because a cue that runs four seconds long does not work and cannot be argued with. And the recording happens in a small number of sessions with a large orchestra, so the writing has to be right on arrival, which is the same requirement described under working in light music and the reason the light-music trade produced good film composers.
The war pictures show the method plainly. In 633 Squadron and Where Eagles Dare the main material returns in a dozen guises, and a listener who knows only the title music will recognise most of the score as related to it without being able to say how. That is the intended effect.
The war pictures
The core of the filmography is the British war and adventure cycle of the 1960s: 633 Squadron, Operation Crossbow, Where Eagles Dare, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, and Battle of Britain.
These films needed a particular kind of music. They were built around machinery, aircraft mostly, and around collective effort rather than individual psychology, and the scoring convention that suited them was the march: propulsive, diatonic, brass-led, with a broad secondary melody for the reflective passages. It is close kin to the concert march tradition of Eric Coates, which is not a coincidence, since Coates’s Dam Busters March had established the register for exactly this kind of British picture a decade earlier.
Where Eagles Dare is the one that departs from the pattern most usefully. Its main material is darker and more driven than a straight march, built on a rising figure rather than on a singable tune, and it shows that the specialism was a choice rather than a limit.
Battle of Britain
The best-known episode of his career is not one of his scores but a dispute about one.
William Walton, one of the senior British concert composers of the century, was commissioned to score Battle of Britain. The production then largely rejected what he delivered, and Goodwin was brought in to replace it. Laurence Olivier, who appeared in the film, objected strongly to the treatment of Walton, and one Walton sequence was retained in the released picture as a result.
The affair is usually told as a story about philistine producers and a wronged composer, and there is something in that. It is also a story about two different jobs being confused. A production wanted a score that would work commercially for a mass-audience war film; it hired a composer whose reputation was built on concert music and who wrote accordingly; and when the result did not do what the producers wanted, they hired somebody whose entire professional identity was doing exactly that.
Neither composer behaved badly and neither piece of music is discredited by the episode. What it exposed was the gap between the two value systems described throughout this site: the critical hierarchy that put Walton above Goodwin, and the industrial hierarchy that valued the man who could reliably deliver what a picture needed. In 1969 those two hierarchies collided in public, and the industrial one won.
Miss Marple, and the afterlife of a title theme
Against the war pictures sits the music for the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films of the early 1960s, and it is probably the most heard thing he wrote.
The theme is quick, light and rhythmically pointed, scored for modest forces, and it establishes a very specific register within a few bars: English, genteel, faintly absurd, not entirely serious about murder. It has since become a general-purpose signifier for that whole territory, used by producers who want to evoke a certain kind of English detective fiction and have no connection to the films.
That is the same fate described under Charles Williams and Eric Coates: a piece written for a specific job becomes a piece of cultural furniture, detached from its origin and from its author. Goodwin at least had a screen credit, which puts him ahead of the library composers.
Conducting, and the concert afterlife
Goodwin conducted his own music on the recording sessions and, increasingly, in concert.
This mattered institutionally. Film music was beginning to be programmed as concert repertoire in Britain during his career, and the practice needed composers who could stand in front of an orchestra and present the material properly. He toured with British orchestras doing exactly that, which helped normalise the idea that a film score was a concert item and not merely a soundtrack.
There is a further reason the conducting mattered. A composer who conducts his own film music in concert is also editing it: a cue written to a timing has to be reshaped into something that stands alone, which means joining fragments, writing transitions and deciding what the piece is without the picture. The suites that resulted are not the score, and they are the form in which most of this music is now heard.
He died on 8 January 2003, aged seventy-seven.
The part of the career that is missing
His film work is better documented than almost anything else on this site, because films have credits and soundtrack albums have collectors. Dates, orchestras and cue listings can generally be established.
The gap is at the start. The arranging he did in the commercial recording industry through the late 1940s and 1950s, before the film career, was session work for other people’s records, credited to the orchestra or to the artist in the usual way. That is the same problem set out under Billy Ternent, and it means the decade in which he actually learned his trade is the decade about which least is known. If you want to trace how a copyist became a composer capable of writing those themes, the evidence for the transition is largely not there.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Ron Goodwin?
An English composer, arranger and conductor, born in Plymouth in 1925 and active until his death in 2003. Ron Goodwin began as a trumpeter and arranger in the light music and recording world, led his own orchestra, and from the late 1950s became one of the most frequently employed film composers in Britain.
What are his best-known film scores?
633 Squadron, Where Eagles Dare, Operation Crossbow, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and Battle of Britain among the war and adventure pictures, and the Miss Marple films of the early 1960s, whose jaunty theme is probably the single most recognised thing he wrote. He also scored Hitchcock's Frenzy.
What happened with the Battle of Britain score?
William Walton was commissioned and his score was then largely rejected by the production, with Ron Goodwin brought in to replace it. Laurence Olivier, who was in the film, objected strongly, and one Walton sequence was retained as a result. It is the best-known score-replacement controversy in British cinema and it says more about production politics than about either composer.
What was his particular skill?
Writing a strong, memorable march or main theme that survives being separated from the film. That sounds simple and very few composers can do it reliably. A theme has to be immediately singable, work at two or three tempi and orchestral weights across a picture, and carry the film's character in about eight bars. He was hired repeatedly because he delivered it repeatedly.
Did he come from light music?
Squarely. He worked as an arranger in the commercial recording world before film scoring, led an orchestra that made light orchestral records, and recorded for Parlophone during the period when George Martin ran that label. The film career grew out of that trade rather than replacing it, and the scoring technique is recognisably the same craft applied to picture.
What is the Miss Marple theme?
The main title music for the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films of the early 1960s, a quick and rhythmically pointed piece for a small orchestra that has become shorthand for genteel English detection. Its afterlife is entirely independent of the films: it is used constantly as period signalling by people who have never seen them.
Was he considered a serious composer?
Not by the critical establishment of his time, which took the same view of film music that it took of light music, and for the same reasons. Among musicians and in the industry he was respected as an extremely reliable professional. The Battle of Britain affair, in which a knighted concert composer's score was replaced by his, sharpened that division rather than settling it.
Did he conduct his own music?
Extensively, on the recording sessions and later in concert. He toured with British orchestras performing his film music, at a period when film scores were beginning to be programmed as concert items, and the existence of a composer able and willing to conduct the material helped establish that practice in Britain.
How does he compare with Eric Coates?
They are the two British composers of memorable marches, a generation apart and reached from opposite directions. Eric Coates wrote marches as concert pieces that broadcasters later adopted. Ron Goodwin wrote them to commission for specific films. The result in both cases is a tune the public knows and generally cannot attribute.
Is his music available?
Better served than most of the composers on this site. Film music has a collectors' market, so the scores have been issued and reissued as soundtracks, and his own orchestral recordings appear on light music compilations. The gap is his pre-film arranging, which was session work under other people's names and has never been catalogued.
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