Deadline Composer

Spurred by a weekly radio deadline, David Rose was fast becoming America's most prolific contemporary composer. Last week, for the eighth week in a row, he presented an original composition on his Holiday for Music (CBS, 10:30 p.m., E.D.S.T.). To many a listener he seemed the freshest figure in this spring's broadcasting.

Dave Rose, who hated piano lessons as a kid, was only 17 when he became Ted Fio Rito's tricky pianist in 1927. For the next ten years, he mingled with the great and near-great of Chicago's golden days of popular music, playing or arranging for Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Bud Freeman.

He hit Hollywood in 1937, wrote background scores for movies, gained fame chiefly for marrying (and being divorced by) Martha Raye and Judy Garland. On the side, he knocked out some good modern melodies: Holiday for Strings, One Love. The Chicago Symphony played his three full-length symphonic tone poems--Ensenada Escapade, Shadows, Nostalgia.

When war put Rose into uniform in the Signal Corps, General H. H. ("Hap") Arnold soon swiped him to direct the music for Moss Hart's service hit, Winged Victory. His new show is his first radio project since leaving the Air Forces last summer.

For a man with such musical and marital accomplishments, 36-year-old Dave Rose seems painfully shy. He spends most of his time at the piano or with his miniature railroad (1,000 feet of track). His deadline composing and arranging amaze his friends. Most weeks, he begins preparing his broadcast only a day in advance. Modern composers do not amaze David Rose. He regards them as "a bunch of arrangers suffering from over-excitement."

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