Roy Webb

Born in Manhattan, New York, Webb orchestrated and conducted for the Broadway stage before moving to Hollywood in the late 1920s to work as music director for Radio Pictures, later RKO Pictures. He remained at RKO until 1955, then worked freelance for several years, scoring several episodes of Wagon Train. Webb is credited as composer or arranger on more than 200 films, and received Academy Award nominations for Quality Street (1937), My Favorite Wife (1940), I Married a Witch (1942), Joan of Paris (1942), The Fallen Sparrow (1943), The Fighting Seabees (1944), and The Enchanted Cottage (1945). His piano concerto from The Enchanted Cottage was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Constantin Bakaleinikoff, in concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 1945. In 1961, a house fire destroyed Webb's manuscripts, including film scores and unpublished concert music, after which he ceased composing. Musicologist Christopher Palmer worked with Webb to reconstruct many of the latter's scores.^[2]

An alumnus of Columbia University, Webb wrote the fight song "Roar, Lion, Roar" for his alma mater in 1925.^[3] He received his first screen credit for Alice Adams (1935). He made uncredited contributions to two famous films by Orson Welles. Musical cues by Webb were used in the newsreel montage of Charles Foster Kane's life in Citizen Kane (1941).^[4] After The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was re-edited, several of Webb's cues replaced those by Bernard Herrmann. Webb also composed cues (uncredited) for This is Cinerama (1952), the first Cinerama production.

Webb died in 1982 from a heart attack. He was 94.^[3]

The Christopher Palmer Collection of Roy Webb Scores is held at Syracuse University.^[5]