ABSTRACT
Although throughout the 1960s the Australian composer Don Banks (1923–80) provided scores for many Hammer Studio films, including Captain Clegg, The Evil of Frankenstein, The Mummy’s Shroud, and Rasputin the Mad Monk, at the same time he was a sought-after composer of music for the concert hall. In the same year that he wrote the music for The Reptile (1966), for example, he also wrote a Horn Concerto for Barry Tuckwell and the London Symphony Orchestra; his music for the BBC included content for the radio comedy Hancock’s Half-Hour but also a Violin Concerto that Wolfgang Marscher premiered at the BBC Proms. Banks’s many commercial scores sit alongside modernist works written for the London Sinfonietta, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and the Cheltenham Festival. Some of his music crossed genres, yet by and large – and especially in the 1960s – he kept separate his two spheres of musical output. This chapter gives an overview of the music that Banks wrote for the concert hall during the period when he was most in demand as a composer of music for film.
