The British composer, film musician and jazz pianist Sir Richard Rodney Bennett has died in New York at the age of 76, according to British press reports.
Born in Kent in 1936, Bennett came from a musical family; his mother was a pupil of the composer Gustav Holst. He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in 1953. His teachers were Lennox Berkeley and Howard Ferguson. He was introduced to avant-garde music by the composer Elizabeth Lutyens and, with the support of the French government, he studied with Pierre Boulez for two years. He was also a frequent guest at the Darmstadt Summer Course.
Bennett developed his own language, known as "neo-romantic serialism". In the 1960s, Bennett wrote several operas, including the children's opera "All the King's Men", which is still very popular today.
In addition to orchestral music, Bennett also wrote a number of successful film scores, for which he was nominated for an Oscar three times. His last work for film was the music for "Four Weddings and a Funeral" in 1994. He was also active as a jazz pianist.
