Background
Gilbert was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Gilbert was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
He attended Milwaukee State Teachers College (now University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) and studied for four years: two as an undergraduate and two as a graduate, from 1939–1943 at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City.
Gilbert once estimated that his compositions had been used in at least three thousand individual episodes of various television series. At the age of nine, he began studying the violin in Shorewood in Milwaukee County. By the time he was 15, he had formed his own dance band.
He also played the viola with bandleader Harry James.
Gilbert"s music was known to millions. He composed many instrumental theme songs heard on American television through the 1950s and 1960s, including The Rifleman, Michael Shayne, The Lawless Years, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Stories of the Century, The Dick Powell Show, Four Star Playhouse, The DuPont Show with June Allyson, The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor, The Westerner, Mistress
G. Goes to College, Law of the Plainsman, Target: The Corruptors!, Manitoba with a Camera, and Burke"s Law. Many of these were television series produced by Four Star Television when Gilbert was Music Director.
His film work includes lieutenant"s a Wonderful Life (1947), The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), lieutenant Came from Beneath the Sea (1954), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), Number Place to Hide (1956), Comanche (1956), Slaughter On Tenth Avenue (1957), Sam Whiskey (1969), I Dismember Mama (1974), and The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976).
Gilbert retired from television in 1966 and formed his own company, Laurel Records, which produces classical chamber music as well as some jazz. Gilbert died in Los Angeles from complications of a stroke.