Roger Roger

Roger Roger (5 August 1911 – 12 June 1995) was a French composer of light orchestral music and film scores, as well as a conductor and bandleader. His aliases included Eric Swan and Cecil Leuter, the last being a pseudonym he used for his electronic music productions, of which he was somewhat of a pioneer. He is best known for his intricately composed and arranged orchestral contributions to commercial production music during the 1950s and 1960s, many of which have more recently achieved wider recognition. He helped revive the musical exotica genre with his album Jungle Obsession in 1971. Career Roger Roger was born in Rouen in Normandy. His father Edmond Roger was a conductor at the Paris Opera and a friend of Claude Debussy, who is said to have named his son Roger "to satisfy a personal whim". He was taught in the classical tradition, influenced especially by Ravel, but he also discovered American popular song, analysing the compositions and arrangements of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin. Roger Roger began conducting at the age of 18 in music halls, and quickly moved into the world of broadcast music. By the late 1930s he was composing for French feature films and documentaries. Film credits include Fou d'amour (1943), Le camion blanc (1943), L'ange de la nuit (1944) and L'atomique Monsieur Placido (1950). He orchestrated the pantomime sections in Marcel Carné's acclaimed film Les Enfants du Paradis in 1945. After the war he came to the attention of the London publishing house Chappell & Co, which signed him up as part of its drive to expand the Chappell Recorded Music Library, formed in 1941. Mostly through the library system (rather than from specially commissioned scores), Roger Roger's music is said to have been used for over 50 radio productions, nearly as many television productions, and in over 500 films. He recorded over 20 albums of his own compositions for Chappell from the mid-1950s on.