Robert Ginzler

Robert "Red" Ginzler (20 July 1910, Leechburg, Pennsylvania – 29 December 1962, New York) was an American orchestrator, principally remembered for his contributions to the landmark Broadway shows Gypsy, Bye Bye Birdie and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. A frequent collaborator with fellow arrangers Sid Ramin and Don Walker, he was also billed as Seymour Robert Ginzler until his heyday in the late 1950s.

Despite his relatively short career, Ginzler became an important musical mentor for Robert Farnon, John Kander and Jonathan Tunick. Contemporary reviewers often singled out his racy arrangements as being clever and first-class. Ginzler’s biographer quotes him as having said, “The more music you know, the more music you love.”

Ginzler was a self-taught trombonist who left his separated mother as a teenager in Detroit in 1926. He joined the Jean Goldkette band and roomed with Bix Beiderbecke, with whom he graduated to the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. While playing at the famed Casa Loma hotel he met his wife and by 1930 had joined the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as first trombone.

In the early 1930s he worked with Percy Faith and the CBC Radio Orchestra where he met Don Walker and found success arranging for the Luigi Romanelli band. During this period Robert Farnon whom he knew from the brass section became his first protégé. "Red", as he was known, went back to the U.S. when the Canadian government declared that, in order to work at a radio station, a person had to be a British subject; Ginzler, who frequently had jobs at the CBC, was unwilling to give up his U.S. citizenship and, by the end of 1940, the family had settled in New York City.

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