Orchestra

Robert Farnon and His Orchestra: how a studio band was assembled

A studio orchestra is not a smaller symphony orchestra. It is a differently shaped instrument, built around what a three-hour session can produce, and Farnon's was built to score at speed for whatever the broadcaster needed that week.

Three hours, and a score nobody has played yet

A session is called for ten in the morning. The players arrive, the parts are on the stands, and nobody in the room has seen the music before. There are three hours, a producer with a running time to fill, and four or five pieces to get onto tape. The arranger is standing in front of them, and what he wrote three days earlier has to work first time, at tempo, with a single run-through.

Everything about Robert Farnon and His Orchestra follows from that room. The size of the band, the way the parts are laid out on the page, the choice of which lines get doubled and which do not, the decision to put the interest in the second violins rather than in a solo instrument that might be covered by a deputy: all of it is shaped by having one pass at it.

This is the part of the light orchestral tradition that gets described as though it were a style. It was a production method.

What the billing actually named

The phrase “and His Orchestra” invites a picture of a standing ensemble with a membership list, and that is not what it was. In British recording and broadcasting of the period the billing identified three things: the conductor, the arranging voice, and a contractor’s book of London freelance players who could be called on for a given date.

Personnel therefore moved. The same orchestra name across two recordings a year apart might share half its players or fewer, and the string section could be twenty-four on one session and fourteen on the next, because the size was a budget decision made before a note was written. An arranger in this world does not write for his orchestra. He writes for the orchestra he has been told he can have.

The consequence for anyone using a discography is worth stating plainly. The orchestra name is reliable evidence of who was in charge and of very little about who was playing.

Where the sound comes from

The identifiable quality of these recordings is in the strings, and specifically in how few players are made to sound like how many.

The technique is division rather than volume. Instead of a section playing a melody in octaves with everything else supporting it, the parts are separated into lines that move independently: an inner voice descending while the top line holds, a viola figure crossing under the second violins, a cello line that is melodic rather than harmonic filler. Chords are voiced so that the notes closest together sit in the middle of the texture rather than at the top, which is what stops a small section sounding thin at the point where it is most exposed.

Two colours recur and both are diagnostic. The harp is used far more freely than comparable concert scoring would use it, for glissandi and for the arpeggiated figures that fill space under a sustained tune. And a solo instrument is allowed to carry a whole strain alone, on the assumption that the player booked can do it, which is a statement of confidence in the standard of London session work at the time.

None of this is technically obscure. What is unusual is the consistency, and the fact that it survives being played by different people on different days, because it is written into the parts rather than achieved in rehearsal. That is the difference between an arranger’s sound and a conductor’s.

The deputy, and what it does to a score

One practical feature of London session work in this period explains a compositional habit that otherwise looks like restraint.

A booked player who received a better or earlier offer could send a deputy, and the practice was normal rather than disreputable. It followed from the economics: freelance players took the work available, dates clashed, and the contractor’s obligation was to put a competent player in the chair rather than a specific one. For a conductor with one run-through this is a real constraint. The person playing the exposed line at ten past eleven may be somebody who has never played your music and was telephoned the previous evening.

Scores written for that environment share a set of features, and they are visible on the page. Exposed entries are cued in the parts, so a player who has lost the count can find the bar. Difficulty is distributed rather than concentrated, because one unplayable passage costs the session more than four moderately hard ones. Where a solo is genuinely demanding it goes to the principal, whose deputising is the least likely. And the sound is carried by the writing rather than by any individual, which is exactly why the recordings hold together across sessions with different personnel.

The habit reads as modesty and is nothing of the kind. It is a design response to a labour market.

It also produces the effect that makes this repertoire useful to a student arranger. Because the intent is written down rather than negotiated in the room, the parts say what the arranger meant, and a score of this kind can be read as instruction in a way that a score dependent on a particular orchestra’s habits cannot.

The contract that paid for all of it

Here the chronology has to stop, because the reason Britain had orchestras like this one has nothing to do with music.

Agreements between the Musicians’ Union and the broadcasters limited how much commercially issued gramophone record could be transmitted. The limit was expressed in hours, and it was negotiated rather than technical. A broadcaster with airtime to fill and a ceiling on records had exactly one remaining option, which was to employ musicians to make the music live. So it did, at scale, for decades: staff orchestras on salary, name orchestras booked by the session, and a continuous demand for arrangements that could be recorded quickly.

That is the whole economic basis of the studio-orchestra profession in Britain, and it explains features of the repertoire that look like aesthetic choices. Pieces are short because they filled defined slots. They are scored for a mixed light-orchestral complement because that is what a broadcaster kept under contract. They are written to be sight-readable because the schedule allowed nothing else. A composer working in this system was solving a production problem, and the elegance is in how good the solutions turned out to be.

When the limit was relaxed the demand went, quickly and permanently. The orchestras were disbanded not because the music had gone out of fashion but because a broadcaster that may play records does not need to hire a string section, and if you want a single sentence for why this repertoire fell out of general hearing, that is closer to it than any account of changing taste.

June 1962, Bayswater

The best documented session under Farnon’s direction is also the one that shows what the band was for.

In June 1962 Frank Sinatra, in Britain on tour, recorded an album at CTS Studios in Bayswater with a British orchestra arranged and conducted by Farnon. The programme was entirely songs by British writers, and the record remains the only Sinatra album made in Britain. The circumstances were the ordinary circumstances of studio work: a fixed number of dates, a singer with a schedule, local players, and an arranger who had to deliver charts that would work with a performer who did not rehearse in the usual sense.

What it demonstrates is the specific competence the profession was built on. An arranger of this kind is not primarily a stylist. He is somebody who can be handed a programme, a singer’s keys, a booked orchestra and a deadline, and produce parts that work on the first take. The reason other arrangers spoke about Farnon as they did is that this is much harder than it sounds and he was visibly better at it than the people saying so.

What the record does not tell you

The orchestra is documented at the level of the session and not at the level of the players, and that gap is permanent rather than merely awkward.

Dates, studios and conductors are recoverable, because they appear on paperwork that had a commercial reason to survive. Personnel usually are not. Contractors’ books and session sheets are the documents that would settle it, and they were kept as working records rather than as archives, which means they survive where somebody happened to keep them and not otherwise. Individual players can occasionally be identified from a solo by people who knew their playing, and that is testimony rather than evidence.

So the honest description of Robert Farnon and His Orchestra is that the arranging is fully available for study, the recordings are largely accessible through reissue, the economic reason for its existence is documented in negotiated agreements, and the membership of any particular session is mostly unrecoverable. The band can be heard clearly and cannot be listed.

Sources

• Robert Farnon — Wikipedia
• Sinatra Sings Great Songs from Great Britain — Wikipedia
• Robert Farnon — mfiles
• Musicians' Union

Checked

2026-08-26

ART/RF-ORCHESTRA · 4 sources