George Duning

• Born 25 Febryary 1908, Richmond, Indiana
• Died 27 February 2000, San Diego, Califonia

One of the least-known but most respected composers in film, George Duning earned five Oscar nominations and contributed one of the standards of the space age pop era, the medley of "Moonglow" and Duning's original theme to the motion picture, Picnic.

Duning grew up in a musical family. His father was a concert singer and conductor and his mother a piano and organ teacher. He became playing piano before the age of 5, and took up the trumpet in his early teens. By 15, he was leading his own dance band, and he went on to study at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, where he took composition from the influential teacher and composer, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. After leaving the Conservatory, however, he quickly moved from classical to popular music, getting a job with NBC Radio in New York in 1932. Comically-inclined bandleader Kay Kyser joined with Duning to create his hit radio series, "Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge" in 1935.

Kyser made a number of musical short films while the show was on the air, and he brought Duning along to Hollywood as his chief arranger and orchestrator. This first exposed Duning to Hollywood, and vice versa, and he was courted by several studios for their musical production staffs. Before he could expect, however, he was enlisted into the U.S. Navy, where he served for three years doing much the same job he had for NBC: arranging and conducting, only this time for Armed Forces Radio.

When Duning mustered out in 1946, Morris Stoloff was quick to hire him to his staff at Columbia. Over the next 15 years, Duning scored an average of seven films a year, everything from forgettable B-movie Westerns and Three Stooges shorts to A-list pictures like From Here to Eternity, Picnic, and That Touch of Mink.

Duning provided the Columbia library with some of its enduring material. John Stanley claims, for example, that horse chase music from Duning's score for the 1948 Glenn Ford western, The Man from Colorado, and a piece titled "Mine Shaft" from another 1948 film, Relentless, was used countless times in Columbia B-movies and serials over the next ten years.

Duning and Stoloff were nominated three times for the Academy Award for best score: The Jolson Story in 1949; From Here to Eternity in 1952; and Picnic in 1955. His other nominations were for No Sad Songs for Me in 1950 and The Eddy Duchin Story in 1956. Duning never won an Oscar, however.

Among his colleagues, however, Duning was considered one of the finest creative talents in the studio business. Orchestrator Arthur Morton once said, "George always had a shrewd sense of what could and wouldn't work in scoring films, of what you could and couldn't do. Working with him was a pleasure." The Composer's Guild of America recognized Duning's work on Picnic with an award for "the best original underscore for a nonmusical film," which is a convoluted way of saying "best score."

Duning himself credited Stoloff for helping him develop as a composer:

Stoloff knew that music was emotion. Get the emotion down on paper and you have achieved your goal. That wasn't always easy, believe me. However, I was always able to sense the emotional content of a film. It was something that was just there for me. At least it lasted long enough for me to get it down on paper.

Elmer Bernstein credited Duning and Morton for nuturing him through his early years in film music:

My office at Columbia Pictures, my first employer, was right next to George Duning and Arthur Morton, who were under contract to Columbia at the time. And I have to tell you, the atmosphere was amazing. They helped teach me about mechanical things that I didn't know, about how film worked. It was an era in which we went to each other's recordings, and it's amazing to think about that.

Recordings