Ronald Binge
Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox musical artist
Ronald Binge (15 July 1910 – 6 September 1979)<ref name="Larkin50">Template:Cite book</ref> was a British composer and arranger of light music.<ref name=carey/> He arranged many of Mantovani's most famous pieces before composing his own music, which included Elizabethan Serenade and Sailing By.<ref name=grove>Ades, David. 'Binge, Ronald', in Grove Music Online (2001)</ref> Template:External media
BiographyEdit
Binge was born in a working-class neighbourhood in Derby, Derbyshire, in the English Midlands.<ref name="Larkin50"/> In his childhood he was a chorister at Saint Andrew's Church (Church of England), London Road, Derby – 'the railwaymen's church' (demolished 1970). Binge was educated at the Derby School of Music, where he studied the organ.<ref name=tom/> Early in his career he was a cinema organist,<ref name=carey>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and later worked in summer orchestras in British seaside resorts (including Blackpool and Great Yarmouth), for which he learned to play the piano accordion. Binge's skill as a cinema organist was put to good use, and he played the organ in Mantovani's first band, the Tipica Orchestra.<ref name=grove/> During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Air Force, during which time he was much in demand organising in-camp entertainment.<ref name=biog>Carey, Mike. Sailing By, the Ronald Binge Story, Goodreads.com, (2000)</ref>
After the war, Mantovani offered Binge the job of arranging and composing for his new orchestra.<ref name="Larkin50"/> With Mantovani, Binge also orchestrated Noël Coward's musicals Pacific 1860 (1946) and Ace of Clubs (1950).<ref name=grove/> In 1951, his arrangement of "Charmaine" gave him and Mantovani worldwide success and recognition.<ref name=carey/> However, he tired of writing arrangements, and turned to composing original works and film scores.<ref name=grove/> Mantovani's orchestra began playing his light orchestral pieces for radio broadcast, and in 1952 Binge devised and conducted his own BBC radio programme called String Song, playing many of his own compositions. He regularly composed for production and library music publishers, and a number of his works were used for radio and television signature tunes.
Binge married Vera Simmons in 1945. During the 1950s they lived at 18, Smitham Bottom Lane in Purley, Croydon.<ref>Norris, Gerald. A Musical Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1981), p. 96</ref> He died in Ringwood, Hampshire, of liver cancer in 1979, aged 69, survived by his wife, son and daughter.<ref name=biog/>
CompositionsEdit
Binge was interested in the technicalities of composition and was most famous as the inventor of the "cascading strings" effect that is the signature sound of the Mantovani orchestra, much used in their arrangements of popular music.<ref name=scow/> First heard on the hit Charmaine (1951)<ref>Mackenzie, Colin. Mantovani: A Lifetime in Music (2005), pp. 126–7</ref> it was originally created to capture the essence of the echo properties of a building such as a cathedral, although it later became particularly associated with easy-listening music.<ref name=tom>Tomlinson, Ernest. 'Ronald Binge', in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)</ref>
Binge's catalogue includes hundreds of works, most of them light orchestral.<ref>Ronald Binge Music Catalogue, Ronaldbinge.com</ref> His first big compositional success was the orchestral overture Spitfire, composed in Blackpool while he was still on RAF service, which predated William Walton's orchestral tribute by a year.<ref name=scow>Scowcroft, Philip. L. British Light Music (1997), pp. 28–29</ref> Best known today is probably Elizabethan Serenade (1951),<ref name=scow/> which was used by the British Broadcasting Corporation as the theme for the popular 1950s series, "Music Tapestry", and as the play-out for the British Forces Network radio station, and for which in 1957 he won an Ivor Novello Award.<ref name="Larkin50"/> It was later turned into a vocal version called "Where the Gentle Avon Flows", with lyrics by the poet Christopher Hassall. A reggae version of the tune, "Elizabethan Reggae", was performed by Boris Gardiner in 1970.
Binge is also known for Sailing By (1963), which introduces the late-night Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4.<ref name=tom/><ref>Saylor, Eric. The Sea in British Musical Imagination (2015), p. 4</ref> Other well-known pieces include Miss Melanie (used as the theme for the CBS Network's radio comedy The Couple Next Door from 1957 to 1960), Like Old Times, The Watermill (1958) for oboe and strings (used as the theme for the BBC children's series The Secret Garden),<ref name=scow/> and his Concerto for Alto Saxophone in E-flat major (1956). His largest, longest, and most ambitious work is the four-movement Symphony in C (or Saturday Symphony), which was written during his retirement between 1966 and 1968,<ref name=scow/> and performed in Britain and Germany. It was issued as a recording by the South German Radio Orchestra, conducted by the composer.<ref>Saturday Symphony, YouTube</ref>