Nathaniel Shilkret

Nathaniel Shilkret (December 25, 1889 – February 18, 1982) was an American musician, composer, conductor and musical director.

Early life and family Nathaniel "Nat" Shilkret (originally named Natan Schüldkraut) was born in New York City on Christmas Day 1889. His parents, Rose and William Shilkret, had emigrated from Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine). The Shilkret family lived in the East Side of Manhattan until Nat was fifteen years old when they moved into a home his parents purchased in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He attended The City College of New York for one year.

Nat's father was a musician and his dad began teaching him to play the clarinet at the age of four. Both he and his older brother, Lew Shilkret, studied piano with Louis Gruenberg in their growing up years. Lew later was music director of the El Kadia Concert Orchestra in Atlantic City in the 1920s, and also made a small number of recordings as an organist for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Nat later studied piano with Charles Hambitzer who was also the teacher of George Gershwin.

Nat and Lou's younger brother Jack Shilkret also had a career in music; working as a pianist, composer of music for film, and as a music director for dance bands, radio, and the movies. Their youngest brother, Harry Shilkret, became a medical doctor but was also active as a trumpeter in Nathaniel's orchestra. He paid for his medical school tuition at the Yale School of Medicine by performing as a jazz cornetist in venues in New Haven in the mid 1920s. Harry also recorded professionally as a jazz trumpeter with both Nat's orchestra and Jack's orchestra, and with musicians like Rudy Vallee and Jimmy Ray.

Early career Shilkret was a child prodigy, and at the age of seven he toured the United States at the clarinet soloist with the New York Boys' Orchestra. He concurrently worked as a session musician for recordings made by the VTMC's Export Department. He made his first recording as music director of Victor's International Novelty Orchestra on March 2, 1922.

In 1924, Shilkret became "director of light music" for Victor; He was one of the top popular band leaders of the 1920s and 1930s and was considered a rival to Paul Whiteman. He composed and arranged thousands of pieces. His best-known popular composition was "The Lonesome Road", first sung by co-writer Gene Austin, and later by Jules Bledsoe (dubbing Stepin Fetchit) in the final scene of the 1929 part-talkie film version of Show Boat, and recorded by more than two hundred artists.

He composed the theme song "Lady Divine" for the Academy Award-winning film The Divine Lady in 1929. He also composed the theme song "Some Sweet Day" for the film Children of the Ritz in the same year. His composition "Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time" sold almost two million copies of sheet music and was also recorded by more than a hundred top artists. His Concerto for Trombone was premiered in 1945 by Tommy Dorsey, playing with the New York Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Leopold Stokowski.

Later career Shilkret left RCA Victor in mid-1935, but continued to record occasionally for the company. His last recording released on the Victor label was the American Banjo Album (P-218) recorded in October 1946. This album was reissued shortly after the Victor issue as one side of an LP under the Aztec label.

Shilkret moved to Los Angeles in late 1935 and there contributed music scores and musical direction for a string of Hollywood films for RKO (as musical director from 1935 to 1937), Walter Lantz Productions (one of the studio's musical directors during 1937) and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (as a musical director from 1942 to 1946). His films included Mary of Scotland (1936), Swing Time (1936), The Plough and the Stars (1937), and Shall We Dance (1937) and several films of Laurel and Hardy. He also received an Oscar nomination for his work scoring the film version of Maxwell Anderson's stage drama Winterset (1936).

In 1935 Shilkret was awarded an honorary doctorate by Bethany College of Kansas. In 1939, he conducted a group of soloists (including tenor Jan Peerce) and the Victor Symphony Orchestra for RCA Victor's multi-disc tribute to Victor Herbert, which were recorded following a special NBC radio broadcast, and he recorded a number of other albums in 1939 and 1940. Due to a serious abdominal operation for cancer removal, he did not conduct for most of 1941.

In 1944–45, Shilkret led the collaborative project that created Genesis Suite, a work for narrator, chorus, and orchestra based on the events in the biblical Book of Genesis. This collaboration involved Shilkret, plus six other composers who immigrated to the United States from Europe – most of whom were Jewish – contributing one movement each: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Darius Milhaud, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Alexandre Tansman and Ernst Toch. Shilkret also tried to involve Béla Bartók in the collaborative project, but this was unsuccessful.

He worked at RKO-Pathe, making short films from 1946 through the mid-1950s. During this same period he recorded at least 260 transcriptions for SESAC He was the pit orchestra conductor for the Broadway show Paris '90 in 1952.

Shilkret wrote the music for a brief 1951 documentary film, Flying Padre, that was directed by a young Stanley Kubrick.

He lived in his son's home in Franklin Square, New York from the mid-1950s, until his death in 1982. He was a great-uncle of actress Julie Warner.