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Christopher Francis Palmer (9 September 1946 – 22 January 1995) was an English author, arranger, orchestrator and composer. He was also a biographer of composers, champion of lesser-known composers and commentator on film music and other musical subjects; record producer; and lecturer. Involved in a very wide range of projects, his output was prodigious and he came to be regarded as one of the finest symphonic orchestrators of his generation. He was dedicated to the conservation, recording and promotion of classic film scores by composers such as Bernard Herrmann, Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Miklós Rózsa, Elmer Bernstein and others. He wrote full biographies as well as sleeve notes, radio scripts, reviews and articles on composers such as Benjamin Britten, Frederick Delius, Karol Szymanowski, Arthur Bliss, George Dyson, Herbert Howells, Maurice Ravel, Nikolai Tcherepnin and others.
He arranged music from the film scores and other music of William Walton, Malcolm Arnold, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ernest Bloch. Artists who have performed his work include José Carreras, James Galway, Julian Lloyd Webber,[1] and Jill Gomez.[2] Outside the area of music, he put together anthologies of the prose of Arthur Machen and James Farrar.[3] He died of an AIDS-related disease at the age of 48.