Herschel Burke Gilbert

Herschel Burke Gilbert was one of the finer composing talents to emerge in post-World War II Hollywood. Born in 1918, Gilbert studied composition and the viola at the Juilliard School of Music in the late '30s. He worked for bandleader Harry James as an arranger during the early '40s and entered the movie industry as an orchestrator in the middle of the decade. Gilbert's early credits as a composer were concentrated in low-budget suspense movies, but he excelled within that genre and several of the cues that he wrote for one such film, Open Secret (1948), took on a separate li...