Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981) was an arranger, composer, and conductor who orchestrated the scores of more than three hundred Broadway musicals over a period spanning four decades

Bennett was born into a musical family. His father, George Robert Bennett, played the trumpet and the violin in the Kansas City Philharmonic orchestra. His mother, May Bradford, was a piano teacher. He had one sister. Bennett began to exhibit his musical gifts at the age of three, when he picked out on the piano the melody of a Beethoven sonata that he had heard his mother play. The following year the family moved to a farm south of Kansas City to aid Bennett's recovery from polio. His parents provided most of his schooling. During this period his mother taught him to play the piano and his father gave him lessons on a number of brass and woodwind instruments. When the...