Dimitri Tiomkin accepts an Award of Merit from Robert Russell Bennett, president of the National Association for Composers and Conductors, December 1949.

In its heyday from the 1930s through 1960s, the National Association for American Composers and Conductors (NAACC) was devoted to the promotion and performance of American concert hall music. In the mid-1970s—some years after the deaths of both its founder, Henry Hadley, and his wife, Inez Barbour Hadley—the association’s name was changed to the title that it bears to this day, the National Association of Composers, USA (NACUSA).

In a bit of a departure from past routine, in 1949 the NAACC, for the first time in its history, gave a special award to a composer of motion picture music.

Co-presenter Sigmund Spaeth “said that this unusual distinction came to Tiomkin because ‘the inherent variety of America is apparent in his music on the two American themes.’” Spaeth is referencing Tiomkin’s music for two films released in 1949, Champion and Home of the Brave.

READ: The High and the Mighty goes to court (Sigmund Spaeth testimony)

Co-presenter Robert Russell Bennett’s skillful arrangements of music by Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers are legendary. In the late 1930s, after composer Max Steiner earlier brought Robert Russell Bennett to Hollywood from Broadway, Bennett served as an orchestrator on a few Tiomkin-scored films: Lost Horizon (1937), The Road Back (1937), and Lucky Partners (1940).

That in 1949 Tiomkin’s music for film was recognized by an organization largely made up of composers and conductors of American concert music is to be noted. Seven years later, when President Eisenhower made a selection of his favorite music and included “Do Not Forsake Me,” the theme song from the film High Noon, Tiomkin’s music once again transcended its roots as film music as it was the only such composition on the recording, “The President’s Favorite Music,” released by RCA Victor Records. The other compositions on the recording were by Bach, Beethoven, Gershwin, Mendelssohn, Strauss, and Verdi.

Dimitri Tiomkin holds his Academy Award statuette for The High and the Mighty (1954).

Tiomkin’s famous acceptance speech at the Academy Awards on March 30, 1955, includes some of those very same names: Strauss, Beethoven, and Gershwin. Tiomkin was always interested in honoring the musical past and perhaps the NAACC award and his Oscar acceptance speech can be taken in a larger context. The music Tiomkin was writing for films was no different than the music written by other (largely Classical) composers of the past.

READ: 60th anniversary of Tiomkin’s famous Academy Awards acceptance speech, March 30, 2015

Dimitri Tiomkin with Robert Russell Bennett and Sigmund Spaeth (far right), 1949

Sources

[news item], Syracuse Post-Standard, December 25, 1949

“Records Roundtable,” by Harvey Southgate, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, September 23, 1956

National Association of American Composers and Conductors records at the New York Public Library

Hollywood Rhapsody by Gary Marmorstein, New York: Schirmer Books, 1997

(Thirteenth in an occasional series featuring rare or unusual photographs.)