Richard Robbins, former Director of The Rivers School Conservatory from 1980-1984, passed away at his home on November 7. He was 71.

Robbins is best known as a film composer, creating memorable scores for such films as "A Room With a View," "Howards End" and "The Remains of the Day" during a quarter-century collaboration with director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant.

Robbins created the score for nearly every Merchant-Ivory film from "The Europeans" in 1979 to "The White Countess" in 2005. He earned back-to-back Academy Award nominations for his original music for "Howards End" (1992) and "The Remains of the Day" (1993). The Ivory-Robbins working partnership, which lasted more than three decades, outdid in longevity such celebrated director-composer unions as Federico Fellini-Nino Rota, Michelangelo Antonioni-Giovanni Fusco and Alfred Hitchcock-Bernard Herrmann.

Richard Stephen Robbins was born December 4, 1940, in South Weymouth, MA, and began playing the piano at the age of 5. He graduated from the New England Conservatory in Boston.

Robbins’ work was honored in 1996 at a gala concert in Carnegie Hall to benefit AIDS research.