Person

Duning, George

1908-2000

Composer George Duning, born in Richmond, Indiana, began his musical training at home on the piano before he was five years old. His mother taught piano and organ; his father was a concert singer and conductor. His family moved to Cincinnati where he grew up. At the age of fifteen, he had his own dance band but soon found a job playing trumpet and piano, touring with Kay Kyser’s band in the early 1930s. In the summers he studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Kyser’s band recorded several hits and began a popular radio show with NBC, for which Duning continued to work for eight years. He then served for three years in the Navy branch of Armed Forces Radio, conducting and arranging command performances for Meredith Wilson. In Hollywood, after the war, he had private lessons in composition with the influential composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He worked for Columbia Pictures for 17 years, creating music for films; he averaged seven soundtracks a year for such films as “3:10 to Yuma, ” “Bell, Book and Candle,” and “Picnic.” He composed the “short scores” for films while his collaborator, Arthur Morton, usually supplied the orchestration. He left Columbia in 1962 and began free-lancing, chiefly for television series such as “Star Trek.” In his 40 years of film scoring, he composed soundtracks for more than 300 television and film scores. He received five Oscar nominations and three Golden Globe nominations.