The Nelson Riddle Saga

November 10, 2025

I was excited to learn that Joan Ellison includes songs in her Judy Garland show that were orchestrated by Nelson Riddle. He was one of the preeminent arrangers of his time and a collaborator of Garland, as well as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Linda Ronstadt, and even the opera star Kiri Te Kanawa.

I’ve always thought it a shame that Riddle’s catalogue of masterful orchestrations has been largely forgotten. Then an idea struck me: instead of programming the usual holiday fare, what if we brought some of Riddle’s orchestrations back to life? I knew just where to look — the University of Arizona, my alma mater, which houses The Nelson Riddle Collection.

Trying to access this frame of mind mid-summer. Christopher Briscoe Photography

The online catalogue is eighty-nine pages long. One morning in the summer of 2025 I sat down and browsed through it in search of suitable numbers for our December concert. The challenge was that the information provided was rather minimal. I made a list of promising titles, then began the next phase: listening to recordings online. That narrowed the list considerably. I chuckled listening for hours to songs about snow, Christmas, and sleigh rides in the sweltering heat of early August.

Finally, I had a shortlist and reached out to the librarian overseeing the collection. Joan, our soloist, had warned me that getting a response might take time, so I introduced myself as a UA graduate (Go Wildcats!) and mentioned my conducting teacher, Dr. Thomas Cockrell, who still teaches there. Silence.

After a couple of weeks, I emailed Tom asking for help, which he promptly offered. He was conducting in Arkansas but promised to follow up once back in Tucson. Weeks went by. I reached out again to both Tom and the librarian. This time, I got traction—if not results. Tom reported that the library was in the midst of being moved, making access to materials difficult. Asadour and I developed a backup plan for orchestral numbers, but I wasn’t ready to give up.

I contacted another library—this one in Indiana—that held a small collection of Riddle arrangements, specifically asking about holiday music. I heard back almost immediately. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any season-appropriate numbers, though they kindly checked with a third library in New York City on my behalf. Still no luck.

Then Tom came through. He had located all the music I requested and offered to scan the scores so I could review them. It was quite a project, but a week later, I received the scans. My list shrank again, though I still had five or six contenders. The next hurdle: all of the scores were handwritten, full of corrections, rewrites, and notes that were hard to decipher without seeing the orchestral parts. Once more, my wonderful professor went above and beyond, scanning hundreds of pages of orchestral material. I can only imagine how many hours he spent—most of them, I suspect, after his teaching day had ended.

With all the materials in hand, I printed everything in the RVS office and began the final round of selection. One piece turned out to have no strings at all—the supposed string lines in the score were actually for a saxophone ensemble, and we only had one saxophonist for the show. Some songs unexpectedly included vocal parts (a delight to see one marked “Frank Sinatra”), and others were orchestrated quite differently from the recordings I’d found. Clearly, Riddle had reorchestrated certain numbers multiple times for different occasions and ensembles.

One by one, I had to set them aside—until only “The Christmas Song” remained. It lasts all of three minutes, and you’ll hear it at the top of the second half.

How many hours did this project consume—for me, for Tom, and for everyone involved? I wish I had more Riddle to show for it. Perhaps one day, if the Nelson Riddle Collection gets fully digitized, catalogued, and tagged. That would be a huge task though.

There are many wonderful rabbit holes to fall into in our field. This one yielded the beautiful Christmas Song. To the audience, it will add to the magic of the Rogue Valley Symphony’s program. To me, the gifts are aplenty: reconnecting with my teacher, sampling Riddle’s genius, glimpsing into the rich ecosystem of 1940s and ’50s popular music, discovering new tunes. Hours of effort distilled into three minutes of beauty? Totally worth it!

You can purchase tickets for the Judy Garland show on December 19 – 21, 2025 here.

Take a listen to The Christmas Song as arranged by Riddle here.