Glenn Miller–Chattanooga Choo Choo–Nicholas Brothers

In the last post we spent time exploring the music of Glenn Miller, the singing of the Modernaires and the dancing of the Nicholas Brothers. We are going to stay with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and take a look at the music direction of Emil Newman, Alfred Newman’s younger brother. One year earlier than Orchestra Wives, in 1941, Emil and Glenn worked together on a movie called Sun Valley Serenade. Whereas Alfred Newman had been assisted by orchestrators Maurice De Packh and Edward Powell (we mistakenly put Conrad Salinger’s name in here yesterday), Emil was assisted by orchestrators David Raksin and Conrad Salinger.

What is interesting is that at one time all of these men worked at T.B. Harms in New York (as music directors or orchestrators), along with Robert Russell Bennet, Han Spialek, Max Steiner and Roy Webb. Max Dreyfus gathered together under the roof of one music publishing house a group of outstanding composers and orchestrators in the 1920’s and 1930’s, never to be equaled again.

Irving Berlin was never one of Max Dreyfus’ composers, because Berlin ran his own music publishing business; but looking at the major composers in 1925 (Victor Herbert had passed away in 1924), T.B. Harms had exclusive contracts with Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Vincent Youmans, Rudolf Friml, Sigmund Romberg, Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter.

You can read more about Max Dreyfus and T.B. Harms in our website under Production Personnel/Publishers.

As we mentioned in our previous post, Glenn Miller’s arrangement of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was used in Sun Valley Serenade. We hear the instrumental first, then the vocal and then the dance/vocal with the young and beautiful Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers. In a previous post, we mentioned that Dorothy played Bess in the 1959 movie, Porgy and Bess.