WILLIAM ALWYN (1905–1985)

William Alwyn was born in Northampton on the 7th November 1905. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music where, at the age of 21, he was appointed Professor of Composition, a position which he held for nearly 30 years. Amongst his works are five symphonies, concerti for flute, oboe, violin, harp and piano, three concerti grossi, many descriptive orchestral pieces, four operas and much chamber, instrumental and vocal music. In addition to this Alwyn composed nearly 200 scores for the cinema. He began his career in this medium in 1936, writing music for documentaries. In 1941 he wrote his first feature length score for Penn of Pennsylvania. Other notable film scores include Desert Victory, The Way Ahead, The True Glory, Odd Man Out, The History Of Mr Polly, The Fallen Idol, The Rocking Horse Winner, The Crimson Pirate, The Million Pound Note, The Winslow Boy, The Card, A Night To Remember and many others. In recognition of his services to the film medium he was made a Fellow of the British Film Academy, the only composer until very recently to have received this honour. There is also much incidental music for both radio and television.

His other appointments include serving as chairman for the Composers' Guild of Great Britain, in whose formation he was instrumental, in 1949, 1950 and 1954. He was a director of the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, a vice-president of the Society for the Promotion of New Music (S.P.N.M.) and Director of the Performing Rights Society. For many years he was a member of the panel reading new scores for the BBC. The conductor, Sir John Barbirolli, championed the first four symphonies, and the first is dedicated to him.

Alwyn spent the last 25 years of his life in Blythburgh, Suffolk, where, in those tranquil surroundings, he found the necessary inspiration to compose two operas, Juan, or the Libertine in four acts to his own libretto and Miss Julie in two acts after the play by August Strindberg. In addition to chamber and vocal music, he composed his last major orchestral works there; the Concerto Grosso No.3, commissioned as a tribute to Sir Henry Wood on the centenary of his birth in 1964 and first performed at the Proms that year by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer, the Sinfonietta for String Orchestra in 1970 and the Symphony No.5 'Hydriotaphia' during 1972-73. In 1978 he was awarded a CBE in recognition of his services to music. When not writing music he spent his time painting and writing, including much poetry and a short autobiography entitled Winged Chariot. He died on the 11th September 1985 just two months before his eightieth birthday.

Andrew Knowles
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THOMAS ARNE (1719–1778)

Thomas Augustine Arne was born to a well-off family in London in 1719 He adopted his middle name of Augustine as a child, showing allegiance to his mother's Roman Catholic faith. Arne was sent to Eton, where he kept the other boys awake by playing the recorder and spinet at nights, despite attempting to muffle the spinet strings with a handkerchief. He also took violin lessons secretly, taught himself composition, and attended operas by borrowing a footman's livery and listening to the music in the gallery provided for servants waiting for their masters.

After Eton he was apprenticed to a London lawyer but when his father caught him playing the violin in a concert at a neighbour's house, he allowed Arne to pursue his desired profession of music, and even let him teach his siblings singing. He obtained an accomplished violin teacher for his son, yet this was short-lived, the teacher falling victim to a practical joke (for which Arne had a great penchant – a trait that he did not lose with age).

The young Arne composed operas for his siblings to sing in and began to receive theatre commissions, including those for music to accompany Shakespeare's plays (amongst others). When his sister married an actor and playwright, Arne became house composer at Drury Lane. Another advantageous partnership was that of his own marriage to perhaps the greatest English soprano of his time, Cecilia Young. He swiftly became one of the leading figures in English music of that time, and was a founder member of the Society of Musicians.

He left London for Dublin in 1740, whence his sister had fled after a scandal arose concerning her marriage. He remained there for four years, before returning to London, where he took on Handel's friend Burney as an apprentice. He continued to write for Drury Lane, until his sister defected to Covent Garden, and he followed.

The latter years of Arne's life were beset with difficulties and grief, including the death of his sister, financial problems, growing indifference to his music by the theatres, and the marriage of his mistress, and singer pupil, Charlotte Brent, to a violinist. He still produced an amount of excellent music, and in 1777 was reconciled with his wife after a long estrangement. A few months later, however, he died of a 'spasmodic complaint' and was buried in the graveyard of St Paul's Church, Covent Garden.

Em Marshall
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SIR GRANVILLE BANTOCK (1868–1946)

Both as a man and composer, Sir Granville Bantock was a wonderfully colourful and idiosyncratic character. He has been described as 'a curious mixture of affability and reserve', and 'a generous, lovable nature, very free from artistic jealousy, and wonderfully ready to hold out a helping hand to others, [with] a sort of tropical profusion in his nature!' Something of this affability, and certainly the profusion, came through into his music, as a long and interesting life led to a huge body of work, ranging from songs and chamber works through to symphonies, operas and choral epics. Although he has been occasionally censured for not being critical enough of his own compositions, his work is nonetheless richly imaginative, dramatic, moving, wonderfully lush and romantic. The subject of composition was often heavily influenced by Bantock's particular – and peculiar – hobbies at that time. These were more like obsessions than mere interests, and tended to take over the current place of abode, so that, during a Japanese craze, one friend reported how 'Broad Meadow became a sort of Oriental museum. Shrines, gods, prints, drums, carvings, and curios were everywhere; and some horrible crapulous Japanese ghosts leered at you as you left the study so that you were glad to escape.' Other fads included Napoleon, geology, myths and legends, religion, and anything pagan, Celtic, oriental, exotic or Eastern (Elgar secretly gave him the appellation of 'Gran Ban the Sheikh')!

Although his determination to follow a musical career burgeoned fairly late, he nonetheless studied at the Royal Academy of Music. His other, sometimes rather quirky, interests were already manifesting themselves, so that once, when, during a rehearsal of a Bantock overture portraying Satan, Sir Alexander Mackenzie – the Principal of the Academy – asked the young composer where they were (the players had got rather lost), Bantock responded 'In hell, sir!'

After the Academy, Bantock at once started making his mark as a musician, conducting for touring theatre companies, and editing a new musical journal that he had founded – the New Quarterly Musical Review. When he was offered the post of Musical Director of the New Brighton Pleasure Gardens, near Liverpool, he set about transforming the band into a professional orchestra with a series of regular concerts. He broadened the musical tastes of the audience to the extent of including a great amount of contemporary music, commencing a life-long task of championing his fellow composers. In his early thirties, he was given a difficult choice between two more prestigious positions – that of joining the staff at the Royal Academy of Music, or becoming Principal of the Birmingham and Midland Institute School of Music (largely on Elgar's recommendation). He picked the latter, explaining with a quote from Milton that it was 'better to reign in hell than serve in heaven'. Several years later he took over from Elgar as professor of music at Birmingham University. He continued conducting and composing throughout his life, and at the age of sixty-five took up a new position at Trinity College, London. He died at the age of seventy-eight and his ashes were scattered in the Welsh mountain country that he had loved so well.

Em Marshall
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SIR ARNOLD BAX (1883–1953)

Arnold Bax was born in 1883 in Streatham. His family was cultured and wealthy, and his musical talent was first encouraged by his mother. In 1900 Bax enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music, studying piano with Tobias Matthay and composition with Frederick Corder, making Bax one of the few significant English composers of his generation not to have studied with Stanford (his fellow pupils Benjamin Dale and York Bowen rose to early prominence, but are only now emerging from decades of neglect).

Bax's discovery, in 1902, of the poetry of W.B. Yeats was an event of considerable importance, leading to a lasting fascination with Ireland. Bax visited Ireland throughout the rest of his life, particularly the west coast, also settling in Dublin for a number of years. In the early years of this fascination, Bax produced poetry, short stories and even plays on Irish subjects, mainly under the pseudonym Dermot O'Byrne, but eventually Ireland provided the inspiration for a series of tone poems that marked his first maturity as a composer. These included Into the Twilight and In the Faery Hills and culminated eventually with The Garden of Fand. The performances of the Russian Ballet in London, meanwhile, had revealed new musical horizons and influences.

Bax remained largely untroubled by the First World War, being unfit for active service due to a heart condition. During the war period he produced a number of increasingly mature works including a piano quintet, two violin sonatas, the tone poems The Garden of Fand, Nympholept, November Woods, Tintagel, and the substantial Symphonic Variations for piano and orchestra. The latter was written for Harriet Cohen, with whom Bax had a passionate love affair during the war years (contributing to the disintegration of his unhappy marriage to Elsita Sobrino), leading to a lasting relationship.

The works mentioned above, along with the Second Piano Sonata, Viola Sonata and Mater, ora filium had enhanced Bax's reputation considerably; the First Symphony, conceived originally as another piano sonata, confirmed his stature as a composer of significance. The symphony was premiéred in December 1922, and in the next eighteen years Bax produced six more symphonies. Although they are extremely accomplished and attractive works, his reputation as a symphonist was gradually overshadowed by composers such as Vaughan Williams and Walton. That said, the Third Symphony did achieve considerable popularity, and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are among Bax's greatest achievements. These, along with mature works such as the Winter Legends for piano and orchestra, and Bax's mature tone poems and chamber music, mark him out as one of the most original composers of his generation and one of the greatest British musical impressionists.

After the beginning of the Second World War Bax composed very little. He had been knighted in 1937 and was appointed Master of the King's Music in 1942, but interest in his music had decreased. Bax moved to Sussex, where he spent the last years of his life living above the White Horse Inn in Storrington. He produced an autobiographical volume, Farewell My Youth, in which he describes his youth and time spent in Ireland, but composition no longer came easy to him, complaining of 'feel[ing] no impulse towards any sort of creation'. He produced no more major works and died in 1953 in Cork, on one of his regular visits as external examiner at the university.

F.G. Huss
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SIR LENNOX BERKELEY (1903–1989)

Sir Lennox Berkeley surely deserves acclaim as a particularly versatile and skilled composer. The fact that he wrote music in almost every genre testifies to his desire and ability to continuously re-focus his compositional mind. Berkeley studied music and French at Oxford prior to travelling abroad to Paris, where he lived between 1926 and 1932. Whilst there, he undertook extensive training in compositional technique (something he felt had been systemically lacking during his earlier Oxford years) with Nadia Boulanger and embarked on an intricate study of harmony and counterpoint. Boulanger's thorough understanding of and reverence for the music of Stravinsky must have heightened Berkeley's interest in that composer, from whom he also learnt much. Berkeley's next seminal encounter was with the young Benjamin Britten at the 1936 ISCM Festival in Barcelona, and the two collaborated on the orchestral work Mont Juic, a symposium of Catalan folk tunes. Berkeley was appointed Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in 1946, a position he held for a considerable period (until 1968). Here, he taught a number of well-known composers, including John Tavener, William Mathias and John Manduell. Berkeley married Freda Bernstein, whom he met whilst working for the BBC during the war years, and enjoyed a marriage often described as unusually contented. The eldest of their children, Michael Berkeley, is of course a famous composer himself.

Study of the music of Lennox Berkeley undeniably serves to reveal a rich plethora of influences. However, the multitude of styles that can be identified in the composer's work alludes not so much to superfluous eclecticism as to an ability to assimilate differing styles and from them derive something unique and original. Berkeley's music is never a concoction of diametrically opposed pastiche elements; continuity and coherence, features often marginalised in modernism, are paramount within his technical strategy. Berkeley had great respect for his French predecessors, notably Fauré and Ravel, from whom he derived great sensitivity to harmonic colour as well as his lyrical inclinations. Welded to the structural incorporation of thematic fragmentation and repetition gained largely but not solely from the Stravinsky influence, Berkeley emerged as a confident, mature and original composer by the end of the 1930s with works like the Serenade (1939) and the First Symphony (1940). From the late 1950s onwards, Berkeley frequently attempted to grapple with more 'progressive' styles of composition that he had previously eschewed, something seen in the use of twelve tone rows in the Violin Concerto (1961) as well as the Third Symphony (1969) and the Windsor Variations (1969). However, there is still much pungent lyricism and ebullience in these works that makes it possible to wonder whether the change in direction from the Serenade has been over-emphasized. Contrary to the popular belief that Berkeley's music suffered a decline in quality after the rich productivity of the 1940s and 50s, much of the composer's best music dates from this period, including works like the Missa brevis (1960), the Mass for Five Voices (1964) and the Oboe Quartet (1967). It is worth remembering that Berkeley continued to compose throughout these years despite the constraints on his time arising from his professional appointment at the Academy. Berkeley remained active as a composer until the onset of dementia in the 1980s put an end to a remarkable creative life.

Douglas Stevens
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SIR ARTHUR BLISS (1891–1975)

Arthur Bliss was born in London in 1891, the eldest son of Agnes Kennard Davis, a keen amateur pianist, and Francis Edward Bliss, a businessman who had come to England from Springfield, Massachusetts. From his father he inherited skills in administration ᾰ his talent in music came from his mother, who died suddenly in 1895. His transatlantic heritage would later be reflected by his firmly international cultural outlook, fostered, no doubt, by the encouragement to pursue a musical career he received from his widowed father.

As a pupil at Rugby, Bliss was introduced to the music of Debussy and Ravel, participated in performances of works by Elgar and Vaughan Williams, and made his first tentative steps in composition. His conventionally middle-class education took him next to Pembroke College, Cambridge (where he came under the tutelage of Charles Wood and E. J. Dent), and thence to the Royal College of Music (under Stanford), before his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1914.

Bliss served with distinction throughout the war, during which he was wounded at the Somme and gassed at Cambrai. After demobilisation in 1919, he felt a keen urge to make up for lost time. A technically-promising composition student before the war, Bliss now found himself one of a few survivors from a virtually-lost generation.

Inspired by visits to post-Armistice Paris (where he met Ravel and members of Les Six), he produced a series of experimental works for innovative instrumental combinations. Some of these – such as Rout and Rhapsody – employ the voice instrumentally (calling for wordless vocalisation and the rendition of nonsense syllables), while Conversations makes a clear nod towards the jazz idioms of Stravinsky and the 'machine-music' of Darius Milhaud. An indication of Bliss's somewhat chauvinistically anti-German musical manifesto can be gleaned from his contemporaneous music criticism.

In 1922, Elgar – with whom Bliss enjoyed a close but sometimes fractious relationship – secured the younger composer a Three Choirs Festival commission, for which he produced A Colour Symphony. The work, which explores the extra-musical associations of four colours, demonstrates astonishing maturity in view of its standing as Bliss's first significant effort at extended orchestral writing.

A two-year sabbatical in America followed, where Bliss met and married Trudy Hoffmann, before a return to England which heralded the completion of a journey to the very centre of musical life in Britain. During the remaining interwar years, he composed some of his most significant works in several genres, including the symphonic requiem Morning Heroes (1930), the Clarinet Quintet (1932), the first of several film scores in Things to Come (1934), the neo-romantic Music for Strings (1935) and his long-anticipated balletic debut Checkmate (1937).

The first performance of Bliss's Piano Concerto at Carnegie Hall in 1939 coincided with Britain's entry into the Second World War, causing the composer and his family to be stranded in America. Eventually, after a period spent teaching at Berkeley, he returned to England (leaving behind, with enormous difficulty, his wife and two daughters) to take up a position with the BBC, for whom he was later Director of Music.

Following an unenthusiastically received opera, The Olympians, staged at Covent Garden in 1949, Bliss was knighted in 1950 and appointed Master of the Queen's Music in 1953. It was in this capacity that he led a delegation of British musicians to the USSR in 1956. Bliss continued to compose prolifically – he produced more film and operatic scores, and his fascination with formal innovation and thematic manipulation found outlets in works such as Meditations on a Theme by John Blow (1955) and Metamorphic Variations (1972). He remained a central figure in British music until his death, after a short illness, in March 1975.

Sam Ellis
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WILLIAM BOYCE (1711–1779)

According to the musical historian Charles Burney (1726-1814) the Trio Sonatas of William Boyce were, 'more generally purchased, performed and admired, than any productions of the kind in this kingdom, except those of Corelli' and were 'in constant use, as chamber music in private concerts' and 'in our theatres … public gardens, as favourite pieces, during many years'. Such was the high esteem in which he was held during his lifetime. William Boyce was born in September 1711 in Maiden Lane (now Skinners Lane) in the City of London. The son of a cabinet-maker, his musical education began at the age of 12 when he became a chorister of St. Paul's Cathedral under the musical direction of Charles King. When William's voice broke he was accepted as a pupil to the composer Maurice Greene (1696-1755), the Cathedral organist.

He was later taught composition by John Pepusch (1667-1752), who gave him his great love of church music of the past. Boyce became organist at several London churches and augmented his income by teaching the harpsichord at schools. In 1736 he was appointed conductor at the Three Choirs Festival of Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford.

In 1740 he had enormous success with his Ode for St. Cecilia's Day and in 1743 with his music for the play 'Solomon'. Following a performance in 1762, the music critic John Potter wrote 'a fine piece of composition! It has a number of beautiful strokes of genius, it is fine, it is elegant and sublime … how delicate the airs in it, how charming the melody! Can anything be more so? Really it is almost impossible.'

His trio sonatas, published in 1747, attracted a huge number of subscribers (those who paid for and ordered a copy in advance). Against an average of 75 to 100, the trios attracted 631, including the composers Handel, Arne, Pepusch and Greene. In 1748 he married Hannah Nixon. They lived in Quality Court, Chancery Lane and had a daughter and a son, William, who became a famous double-bass player in the London orchestras. Boyce composed for the theatre, including, for the 1749/50 season at The Drury Lane Theatre Company under David Garrick, the music to The Chaplet and, more famously, for Romeo & Juliet.

After the death of Dr. Greene in 1755 Boyce was made his successor as Master of the King's band and also as conductor of the annual festival of 'Sons of the Clergy' at St. Paul's Cathedral. In 1758 he became one of the three organists of the Chapel Royal. To commemorate the British victories against the French in 'this wonderful year' (1759) Boyce wrote what was to become one of his most famous songs: 'Hearts of Oak'. In the 1760s Boyce's increasing deafness forced him to resign his organist positions and to give up teaching. He then retired to Kensington Gore where he edited his now famous collection of 'Cathedral Music'.

Boyce died at the age of 67 on 7th February 1779 and was buried under the centre of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, the combined choirs of St. Paul's, Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal singing his anthem 'If we believe that Jesus died'. The composer Charles Wesley (1757-1834) said of him: 'a more modest man than Dr. Boyce I have never known. I never heard him speak a vain or ill-natured word, either to exalt himself or deprecate another.'

Roger Slade
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HAVERGAL BRIAN (1876–1972)

William Havergal Brian was born on 29 January 1876 into a working-class Potteries family in Dresden, Staffordshire. His early musical experience was in church choirs and as a church organist. He also learned violin and cello, playing in local bands and orchestras. Although given a thorough theoretical grounding, he was virtually self-taught in composition. Nevertheless, he rapidly acquired an invincible desire to be a composer and began to make a name for himself. Works of his were admired by Elgar, some were performed by such as Henry Wood and Thomas Beecham and, for a number of years, he was supported by a wealthy patron, leaving him free to compose. This ended abruptly, however, just before World War 1, when various personal crises forced him to leave his home and family. For many years he struggled to support a growing second family.

By the late 1920s Brian was assistant editor on the journal Musical Opinion, which kept him well informed on the latest continental developments. However, his own mature works remained almost entirely unknown and unperformed, despite Sir Donald Tovey being moved to write in 1934 that 'even for the recognition of his smaller works he is being made to wait ... far longer than is good for any country whose musical reputation is worth praying for'. After his great friend Bantock died in 1946, advocates were virtually non-existent until the early 1950s, when Robert Simpson, then a young BBC music producer, began to champion his music. Starting with Brian's Eighth Symphony in 1954 (the first of his symphonies that the 78-year old Brian heard), Simpson mounted a growing number of performances, mostly for broadcasts, stirring wider recognition of Brian's achievement. Perhaps inspired by this renewed interest, his remaining years were something of an Indian summer of composition, including 20 further symphonies. His last work, completed in October 1968 was his 32nd Symphony.

He died on 28 November 1972 after a fall, two months before his 97th birthday. Though he knew that the BBC had committed to broadcasting all of his symphonies, he died never having heard many of his finest works.

John Grimshaw
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FRANK BRIDGE (1879–1941)

Long remembered principally for being the young Benjamin Britten's mentor, Frank Bridge is coming to be recognised as one of the outstanding British composers of the twentieth century. Born in 1879 into a musical family, he was given early opportunities to play in and conduct his father's orchestra in Brighton. He entered the Royal College of Music as a violin student in 1896, winning a composition scholarship in 1899, and also taking up the viola, the instrument with which he was to become most closely associated as a performer. He played for many years in the English String Quartet, among others, and appeared with the Joachim Quartet in 1906. Although he failed to secure a regular appointment, he was also regarded as a conductor of considerable ability, deputising for Henry Wood at the Proms, earning him a reputation as a reliable 'ambulance conductor'
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Bridge's enthusiasm as a chamber music player is reflected in the student compositions completed under Stanford at the RCM; indeed, most of the substantial works produced in the early years of his career are chamber music. After the impressive technical command displayed in his student works, Bridge soon began to forge a personal style in works such as his submissions for the Cobbett chamber music competitions and other increasingly mature chamber and orchestral works. His symphonic suite The Sea was a particular success, although Bridge came to resent its lasting popularity compared to the hostile critical reactions to his later, more modern music.

Subsequent works such as the Dance Poem, Summer, the Second String Quartet and the Cello Sonata reveal increasing technical maturity and an apparent urge to break away from the superficially conservative style of his earlier works. The implications of this tendency are fulfilled in the Piano Sonata of 1924 and Bridge's subsequent works, which represent a combination of Bridge's earlier musical priorities with an uncompromising modernist aesthetic. Unlike the witty modernism of contemporary composers such as Bliss and Walton, Bridge's serious engagement with contemporary developments found little popular or critical favour, and only in recent times have his late masterpieces come to be recognised as such. Essential to Bridge's perseverance in the face of such hostility was the support of the American patroness Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, allowing Bridge to produce a series of works of consistent mastery, including the orchestral works Enter Spring, Oration, Phantasm, There is a willow grows aslant a brook and Rebus, and the late chamber works (two string quartets, a piano trio, a violin sonata, the Rhapsody Trio for viola and violins, and the Divertimenti for wind quartet), which are among the supreme achievements of British chamber music in the twentieth century.

Various explanations for Bridge's remarkable stylistic evolution have been offered, including a reaction of his fervent pacifism to the First World War, his childlessness and his rejection by the musical establishment, and these are valid considerations. In purely musical terms, however, the stages of Bridge's stylistic development are not as divergent as they might at first appear, and at no time does his quest for a personal and relevant musical language interfere with his exacting technical standards. These ideals, of seeking to realise one's musical potential while maintaining complete technical mastery, pervade Bridge's output and account for its outstanding quality.

F.G. Huss
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SIR JOHN FREDERICK BRIDGE (1844–1924)

Concertgoers could be forgiven for thinking that Sir John Frederick Bridge occupied a negligible position in the annals of British music. For example, out of his large catalogue of works, only two are at present available on CD. Yet habitués of Westminster Abbey will know that he was one of the most interesting and versatile, if not virtuosic, characters to hold the post of organist in that great place of worship.

John Frederick Bridge was born in Oldbury, Worcestershire on December 5 1844. When he was six years old he became a chorister or 'practising boy' at Rochester Cathedral, where he was taught by his father who was a lay-clerk there. Later he studied with Sir John Goss, organist of Holy Trinity Church, Windsor. It was here that he met Hubert Parry and other important figures in the Victorian musical scene. Bridge's first major professional appointment was as organist at Manchester Cathedral. He held this post with distinction for six years. During this time he was also Professor of Harmony at Owen's College, which was to later become part of Manchester University. Bridge received his doctorate from Oxford in 1874. Upon the retirement of James Turle from the post of organist at Westminster Abbey, Bridge was appointed as 'Permanent Deputy Organist'; after Turle's death in 1882 he succeeded to the full title.

The Abbey organist, then as now, had to organise and officiate at a large number of official and special services. For Bridge this was to include twenty-four years of musical spectaculars – from the Jubilee service of Queen Victoria in 1887 until the Coronation of King George and Queen Mary in 1911. Musical anniversaries were celebrated as well as state occasions, including the important bi-centenary of the death of Henry Purcell in 1895. Bridge edited that composer's great Te Deum and managed to return the score to its original musical condition, removing many accretions added by other hands over the years.

On the last day of 1918 Bridge retired from his post. He retained the title of 'Emeritus Organist' and kept his house at Little Cloisters. On a personal note, Bridge was married three times and had one son and two daughters. Finally, John Frederick Bridge died in London on 18th March 1924.

Bridge was also noted as a writer and a lecturer. His research formed the basis of a number of Gresham Lectures. He wrote a number of books including Samuel Pepys, Lover of Musique, Twelve Good Musicians from John Bull to Henry Purcell and an exploration of the 'Cryes of London' which makes fascinating, if slightly dated, reading today. However, his greatest literary triumph is his autobiographical A Westminster Pilgrim, which was published in 1919. It is a book that is as amusing as it is informative about late nineteenth century music making!

Explorers of second-hand bookshops will often come across copies of the Novello edition of Bridge's The Flag of England – a choral setting of words by Rudyard Kipling – who did not then suffer the intellectual disapprobation that he does today. However, there were many oratorios, cantatas, part songs, choral ballads and organ pieces that are all by and large forgotten about. Perhaps a rediscovery of some of his shorter works may well provide a glimpse at this interesting and largely ignored man.

John France
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BENJAMIN BRITTEN (1913–1976)

Britten was born in Suffolk and he remained there for the majority of his professional life. He took lessons in composition with Frank Bridge in advance of pursuing a scholarship at the Royal College of Music in London where he studied composition with John Ireland and piano with Arthur Benjamin. Britten's compositional style is founded upon a firm professional individual technique which is more stylistically indebted to music of the past, such as Purcell, than closely associated with either the nationalist movement in British music or contemporary European influences such as Schoenberg. His international reputation is built primarily upon the success of his writing for voice. Britten's long-standing close professional and personal relationship with the tenor Peter Pears was significant to both his selection of genre, compositional output and their joint successful recital careers.

Britten's first operatic endeavour, while in America, was with the 'operetta' Paul Bunyan. The immediate success in 1945 of the opera Peter Grimes heralded the rejuvenation of English language opera and afforded Britten international recognition. He went on to compose nine further full operas (Owen Wingrave being produced for television), three church parables, three stage works specifically for children and a ballet.

Britten's art songs number in excess of 150, many contained in song-cycles, revealing a musical imagination exercised by poetic inspiration and attesting to the quality of Britten's poetic discernment. His early collaboration with W.H. Auden marks a distinction from Britten's later practice of setting poets of the past.

Britten composed a significant volume of choral music often religious in origin but not liturgical in purpose. Significant early works include A Boy was Born, Hymn to St Ceclia, A Cermony of Carols and Rejoice in the Lamb. With these works Britten contributes vocal colour and virtuosity to the British choral tradition. In the War Requiem of 1961 Britten attempts post-World War II reconciliation, with large and varied musical forces responding to the juxtaposition and interweaving of the Requiem text and the pacifist poetry of Wilfred Owen. The occasion of its first performance was the re-consecration of Coventry Cathedral, at which the soloists were to be a Russian Soprano (who was unable to obtain the permission of the Soviet government to attend), an English tenor and a German Baritone.

Instrumental works predominate in his early output, including the didactic Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. Britten's primary focus in this genre is on chamber music and music for reduced ensembles, often composing for specific performers and occasions such as the cello suites and sonatas for the Russian cellist Rostropovich.

Throughout the range of his output Britten musically explores the following recurring ideas and themes: youth and innocence and its corruption, night and sleep, the sea, and war and pacifism. Even thirty years after Britten's death the extent of interest in his music pays tribute to a life devoted to music.

Paul Higgins
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GEORGE BUTTERWORTH (1885–1916)

Of all the young composers slaughtered in the carnage of the First World War, none have posthumously gained a more significant reputation than George Butterworth, whose music immutably evokes the atmosphere of pre-1914 Britain. His background was privileged: the son of Sir Alexander Butterworth, General Manager of the North Eastern Railway, he was educated at Eton, Trinity College, Oxford and, later, at the Royal College of Music. Butterworth made an indelible impression on all who knew him. His Yorkshire roots were reflected in his abrupt manner, but his enthusiasm and steadfast loyalty to friends and, in his last days, inspiring cheerfulness in the trenches, endeared him to all.

After a spell of school-teaching, Butterworth worked as a critic for the Times and produced a small, but original, series of works including the orchestral pieces, The Banks of Green Willow (1913) and the Rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad (1912), which shares its name with his cycle of six songs (1911). Butterworth formed a close friendship with Vaughan Williams, sowed the seeds for what later became A London Symphony (1913) and, when the score was lost in Germany after August 1914, supervised its reconstruction from the orchestral parts. Vaughan Williams later recalled that, 'he possessed, in common with very few composers, a wonderful power of criticism of other men's work, and insight into their ideas and motives.'

Butterworth was an enthusiastic collector of folksongs and collected Morris dances in Oxfordshire and folksongs in Sussex. There were, though, shadows in Butterworth's life. He was often tormented by a sense of purposelessness and his enthusiastic enlistment in the Light Infantry on the outbreak of the First World War may have offered an escape, not only from his inner demons, but also from music itself. Although often seen as the most tragic musical loss of the war, it is, for all his tremendous promise, difficult to imagine how, if at all, his music might have developed in the more ironic world of the 20s and 30s. Such a problem was not to arise though for, on the 5 August 1916, at Pozières, he was killed in action. He was thirty-one years of age.

Peter Reynolds
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PAUL CARR (*1961)

Paul Carr was born in Cornwall, England in 1961 to Anglo-Australian nationality and has been writing music since the age of 15. From 1984 – 1998 his main career was in opera stage management and he has worked with some of the world's leading companies including English National Opera, The Australian Opera, The New Israeli Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera and Garsington Opera, as well as various free-lance contracts including the annual Raymond Gubbay Opera at The Royal Albert Hall. In 2004 he retired from stage management, and in April of that year moved to Mallorca to concentrate more fully on composition as well as developing his interest in abstract painting. He has exhibited work in three exhibitions in Mallorca, and in April 2007 Galleria Ca'n Pinos in Palma presented his first solo show.

Paul has written scores for several British films including 'Janice Beard 4wpm', 'Being Considered', and 'Lady Audley's Secret'. TV work includes the popular Children's series 'Girls in Love' for Granada.

Paul's concert work is varied, and over the past few years performances include a Viola Concerto, a Piano Concerto, a Sonatina for Flute & Piano, a 2nd Flute Concerto, Chasing Aunt Sally (a concert overture premiered by the Worthing Symphony Orchestra conducted by John Gibbons), a wind quintet Diverting Sundays (premiered at the 2003 Brighton Festival by The Galliard Ensemble), and Jazz Cardigans (a suite of 5 guitar pieces premiered by Craig Ogden at the 2006 Brighton Festival).

Most recent works include A Very English Music for string orchestra, an Oboe Concerto (for Nicholas Daniel), a Bassoon Concerto, a Piano Quartet, a Sinfonietta for Orchestra, Concertos for Trombone, and for Trumpet, and three versions of the same work: Air for Strings, Air for Orchestra, and Viola Air. His Requiem For An Angel, for 2 soloists, choir & orchestra, was premiered in June 2006 in Warminster and received its 2nd performance in Brighton in November 2007 given by the East Sussex Bach Choir and the Sussex Symphony Orchestra.

A review of Paul's music on the Classical Music Web reads: 'Paul Carr writes music that is without pretence, fluent and fluid, singing, concise and joyous'. A disc of Paul's orchestral music, Crowded Streets, is available on Claudio Records performed by the Sussex Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mark Andrew James. His string suite A Very English Music was recorded for vol.6 of English String Miniatures by The Royal Ballet Sinfonia conducted by Gavin Sutherland, and was released on the NAXOS label in September 2006. Also in 2006 two flute works, Summer was in August and Three Pieces Blue were released by Campion Cameo Records on a CD of British flute music. In 2007 his Air for Strings was recorded for CD by Barry Wordsworth and the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, and the Oboe Concerto recorded in January, 2008, by Nicholas Daniel and the RBS conducted by Gavin Sutherland.

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FREDERIC CLIFFE (1857–1931)

Frederic Cliffe was born in Lowmoor, near Bradford, on 2 May 1857, the same year as Elgar and in the same town as Delius, although Cliffe was not to achieve the enduring fame and prominence of his two near contemporaries. However, in his day, he was one of the best known of the younger generation of British musical hopefuls. He was something of a prodigy, becoming a church organist at 11 and eventually being the organist to the Leeds Triennial Music Festival where, in 1886, he assisted Sir Arthur Sullivan at the first performance of his dramatic cantata, The Golden Legend. He went on to write two symphonies, a violin concerto (to be heard at this year's EMF), a scena for contralto and orchestra, The Triumph of Alcestis, for Clara Butt, as well as a major work for chorus and orchestra, Ode to the North-East Wind. No piano or chamber music survives. He went on to become Professor of Piano at the Royal College of Music (RCM) where his pupils included John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin.

Cliffe was hailed as one of the great hopes of British music when his Symphony, op. 1, received its first performance at Crystal Palace in 1889, conducted by none other than August Manns. On 22 April 1889, The Daily Telegraph published the following remarkable review of what was then the work of an unknown composer:

'It may be doubted whether musical history can show on any of its pages the record of such an Opus 1. The symphony is a masterpiece, and the composer, one might think, feels terrified at his own success. For our own part, noting the imaginative power displayed in the work, the easy command of all resources, the beauty and freshness of the themes, and their brilliant development, we feel inclined to ask a question, propounded concerning another phenomenon “Whence has this man these things?” Mr Cliffe has by one effort passed from obscurity to fame, and must be regarded as a bright and shining star on the horizon of our English art.'

Indeed this work is a masterpiece and stands comparison with any late 19th century symphony. Yet, when he died in 1931 he was a totally forgotten figure. Indeed, a contemporary composer of Cliffe's who was a fellow student at the RCM, Algernon Ashton (also now a forgotten composer, but who can forget the wonderful performance of his Viola Sonata at the first EMF!), was stimulated to write to the Musical Times complaining about the lack of a proper obituary in that journal and pointing out the great enthusiasm with which his works were received in their time.

Indeed in 1905, the Musical Times itself had carried an extensive three-page review of the first performance at Sheffield of his choral and orchestral work Ode to the North-East Wind, based on Charles Kingsley's poem of the same name. The first performances of his Second Symphony (Leeds 1892) and the Violin Concerto (Norwich 1896) had received favourable reviews. Earlier editions of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians allocated as much space to Cliffe (several pages) as to Elgar and Delius. He only warrants a single paragraph today. However, despite further performances of both his First and Second Symphonies, especially in Bournemouth, and of his Violin Concerto, his name would soon be forgotten to the musical public. Arthur Benjamin, the Australian composer, who along with John Ireland was one of his piano pupils at the RCM, gives us a clue as to why his music fell into disfavour and he stopped composing. Benjamin had come to Cliffe for piano lessons, perhaps because Cliffe's wife Zillah was a cousin of his father. He had heard a performance of a Cliffe Symphony and was extremely impressed, as he was by the score of the Ode. However, it appeared that Cliffe and his wife had strayed into a rather elite circle and this perhaps had removed the stimulus for Cliffe to compose. More likely, though, was the increasing indifference by the musical establishment to this generation of composers in Britain (including Elgar and Delius), especially after the First World War. Cliffe felt that indifference and was, like York Bowen, not inclined to write music in an artificially contemporary style. Modern music was anathema to him and as a result his name was 'air brushed' out of our musical consciousness. The performance of the Violin Concerto at this year's EMF is the first professional performance of any Cliffe orchestral work in the last hundred years.

Dr. David Green
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IAN COPLEY (1926–1988)

Ian Copley was born in Dartford in1926 and died in Brighton in1988. His studies at the Royal College of Music, interrupted by war service, included composition lessons with David Moule Evans and Herbert Howells, and he subsequently published about 100 original works and arrangements, mostly solo songs, choral and educational music, with Chappell, Curwen, Roberton, Thames Publishing and other firms, some of which is still in print. For much of his working life, he was Head of the Music Department at Brighton College of Education, now part of the University of Brighton. He was also a lecturer for the Open University. As a musicologist, his interests were wide-ranging and he published many articles on hymnology and folk music but his main interest was in English composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He published books on the music of Peter Warlock, Charles Wood, George Butterworth and Robin Milford besides many articles on associated subjects.

Peter Copley
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RONALD CORP (*1951)

Ronald Corp is a composer and conductor, and Founder and Artistic Director of the New London Orchestra and New London Children's Choir, and Musical Director of the London Chorus and Highgate Choral Society.

He began conducting full-time in 1988 when he founded the New London Orchestra which celebrated its 20th birthday on 19th March at Cadogan Hall in a concert featuring his Piano Concerto performed by Leon McCawley, and the rarely heard Music for Strings, Trumpets and Percussion by Grazyna Bacewicz. With the Orchestra he has appeared in all the main London venues and at major festivals around the country. Ronald Corp has made it his mission to breathe new life into a wealth of little known music from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the orchestra's excellent reputation in this area has led to numerous BBC broadcasts and 20 recordings on Hyperion, the latest of which, released in Spring 2008, features the theatre music of Lione Monckton. Ronald Corp's lively introductions from the stage are a key part of his mission to make music accessible, an aim also underlining the orchestra's education work in which he is often involved as a composer and workshop-leader.

Ronald Corp's engagements have included concerts and recordings with the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Ulster Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Orchestra, the Leipzig Philharmonic Orchestra, Brussels Radio and Television Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Bournemouth Sinfonietta. He has appeared many times at the BBC Proms and also works regularly with the BBC Singers, for whom he wrote a substantial choral work, Dover Beach, in 2005.

The New London Children's Choir is one of the busiest and most successful children's ensembles in the country. It also performs frequently abroad, throughout Europe and in the USA. Ronald Corp has conducted the choir in many concerts, recordings and a television workshop as part of the Young Musician of the Year. The choir has commissioned more than 40 new pieces and has premiéred numerous other works by the world's leading composers including its patrons Louis Andriessen and Michael Nyman. It has performed frequently at the Proms, made a number of film soundtrack and TV recordings, and been engaged for concerts and recordings with all the major London orchestras and opera companies.
Ronald Corp's first major choral work And all the Trumpets Sounded was premiéred in 1989 by Highgate Choral Society, who commissioned it, and published by Stainer and Bell. His cantata Laudamus was premiéred at St. John's Smith Square in 1994 by the London Choral Society to great critical acclaim; its third performance was given at a Gala concert in the Royal Festival Hall. Sainsbury's commissioned him to compose a piece for the Farnham Youth Choir, winners in their section of the Sainsbury Choir of the Year Competition. Corp has written extensively for children and upper voices, and a number of his works are published by OUP. His String Quartet No. 1 'The Bustard' received its premiere by the Maggini Quartet in February 2008 at the Wigmore Hall.

Other large-scale compositions include Cornucopia for children's choir and orchestra, commissioned by the National Association of Head Teachers and premiéred in Leicester in 1997. The premiére of the Piano Concerto was given by Julian Evans in a New London Orchestra concert in 1997 as part of its 'British Concertos' series, and the cantata A New Song was premièred in May 1999. Mary's Song was commissioned for the Beckenham Chorale, and Adonai Echad (The Lord is One) for the Highgate Choral Society's concert in the 2001 Hampstead and Highgate Festival. In May 2003 the Highgate Choral Society premièred the Missa San Marco in St Mark's, Venice. Corp also writes many works for community projects, such as the New London Orchestra's Urban Voices in Gospel Oak in 2003-04; and Waters of Time for Wells, Somerset in 2005-06. A CD of his choral music on the Dutton label ('Forever Child') was released to great critical acclaim in 2006, performed by Voces Cantabiles directed by the composer, and in concert at the Wigmore Hall in September 2007.

An expert in choral training and choral repertory, Ronald Corp's comprehensive reference book entitled 'The Choral Singer's Companion' has been recently republished in a third edition.

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MATTHEW CURTIS (*1959)

Matthew Curtis was born in Embleton, Cumbria in 1959. He began composing actively at about the age of fifteen, but it was as a student at Worcester College, Oxford (where he read classics) that his work first began to receive public performance. An introduction in 1981 to fellow composer Alan Langford, then a BBC radio staff producer, led to numerous broadcasts of Matthew's work from 1982 onwards both in the UK and overseas. His music has also been played in concert by the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, I Musici de Montréal and the National Children's Orchestra of Great Britain.

Matthew has become best known for his short orchestral pieces in the British 'light music' tradition, such as the new work to be heard at this year's festival, but his output also includes more substantial works for orchestra, together with chamber music, songs and choral works. Campion Cameo has released four discs of his orchestral and chamber music, and he has contributed to the ASV White Line series of discs of British light music.

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FREDERICK DELIUS (1862–1934)

Frederick Delius is interesting for having made a name for himself as one of the main twentieth century English composers despite the fact that his music is totally infused with continental colours. He was born in Yorkshire, the second son of a wealthy wool merchant who desperately wanted young Frederick to follow in his footsteps. However Delius proved himself as unreliable as his father's agent abroad, and at the age of 22, persuaded his father to buy him an orange plantation in Florida instead.

In the peace and quiet of his orange plantation, he took up composing seriously and decided to pursue it as his career. Self-taught up to that point, he managed to procure himself a proper composition teacher in a most unusual manner. On a trip to Jacksonsville to buy medicine for a poorly friend, he was unable to resist the allure of a piano shop, and went in to try the instruments out. A passing organist of a Jesuit church in Brooklyn, Thomas Ward, was arrested by the unusual chords he heard emanating from the shop, and when he went in to investigate, Delius persuaded him to return to his orange plantation as his teacher. When Delius' father discovered that his son was not really that bothered with growing oranges, he handed the plantation over to Frederick's elder brother, and Frederick, fearing his father's fury, fled. The father, although enraged, was nevertheless concerned about his youngest son and sent a private detective to track him down. He was impressed to hear from the successful detective that his son had made himself a good reputation as a musician and teacher in Danville, and eventually agreed to give in to his son's greatest wish and request, sending Delius on an 18-month course at the Leipzig Konservatorium.

However, Delius did not take to the strict formal lessons he received in Leipzig, and continued to rely far more on his own musical intuition than what his teachers told him. On leaving the Konservatorium, he spent a number of years number of years travelling, assimilating various styles and influences, and visiting Grieg in Norway and Ravel in Paris, where he lived for several years. In France he met his wife-to-be, Jelka, and later settled with her in their 'dream home', a picturesque but fairly substantial cottage in the village Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainbleu, where Delius continued work on his compositions - some of which Beecham then premiered in London.

During the war, the couple returned to England, although Delius was soon confined to a wheelchair, in which he remained for the last fourteen years of his life. By the time they got back to their beloved Grez at the end of the war, Delius was becoming blind and paralysed. When he was on longer able to compose, the young music enthusiast Eric Fenby helped Delius to complete numerous pieces by working on sketches together and taking down music dictated to him by the ailing composer.

In 1929 Delius was made a Companion of Honour, and Beecham and Philip Heseltine – another Delius fan and supporter from an early age, and later to become known as the brilliant English song composer Peter Warlock – put on a Delius Festival in England, which was a huge success. Like two of the other great twentieth century composers, Holst and Elgar, Delius died in 1934, only shortly before his wife also passed away.
For a major name in English music, curiously few of Delius's works are actually well-known. Many may recognise the opening of Hearing the first Cuckoo in Spring, Brigg Fair, or Summer – or even La Calinda from Koanga, but few are aware of his gorgeous violin concerto, his numerous operas, or his Mass of Life. Delius is one of many English composers – along with Holst, Britten, Vaughan Williams, Quilter and Warlock – who truly has a voice of his own, one that could not possibly be mistaken for any other composer. His harmonies are incredibly rich – luscious, opulent and exotic, with brilliantly original and colourfully sliding, shifting chords. Often full of joy, it is exhilarating, vivacious, and always deeply moving music.

Em Marshall
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SIR GEORGE DYSON (1883–1964)

Dyson was born in Halifax, where his father was a blacksmith and his mother was a weaver. His father also acted as organist and choirmaster in a local church, and his parents fostered the young Dyson's outstanding musical talent, which soon became evident. Dyson himself became a church organist at thirteen, becoming a fellow of the Royal College of Organists only three years later. He studied composition under Stanford at the RCM on an open scholarship from 1900, being awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1904, enabling him to visit Italy, Austria and Germany for further studies.

Dyson's humble origins and the professional engagements he was obliged to take on after his studies, at the Royal Naval College, Osborne, and Marlborough College, imparted to Dyson a keen sense of the importance of professionalism in his activities as a musician (and as an educator). After a stint as brigade grenadier officer and active service in the war (during which he drew up a training manual on grenade warfare, illustrating his inclination towards methodical investigation and instruction), Dyson was sent home with shell-shock. Appointments as director of music, first at Wellington College, then at Winchester, followed a brief period with the RAF, consolidating his standing as an administrator. In 1924 Dyson produced a book, The New Music, a landmark study of musical modernism. While Dyson was unable to recognise the merits of the more extreme features and implications of modernism, a highly personal adaptation of progressive aspects of favourite impressionist and expressionist composers soon led to a strikingly characteristic musical language. A further book, The Progress of Music, followed in 1932, signalling his awareness and understanding of musical tradition and its workings. However, Dyson had produced little music of consequence since his student days, and it was not until 1928 that he began to produce the large-scale choral and orchestral works for which he is chiefly remembered, beginning with In Honour of the City. The delightful Canterbury Pilgrims followed in 1931, and Dyson produced works for the Three Choirs festivals of 1933 (St Paul's Voyage to Melita), 1934 (The Blacksmiths), 1935 (Nebuchadnezzar), and 1936 (Prelude, Fantasy and Chaconne for cello and orchestra).

Dyson's reputation as a composer of attractive and approachable music was now firmly established. His appointment in 1937 as director of the RCM tested his abilities as an administrator, and Dyson steered the college successfully through the war years. During his time there (he retired in 1952), he produced a number of important works, including his masterpiece, the vast choral suite Quo Vadis, as well as a symphony, a violin concerto, an overture for The Canterbury Pilgrims (At the Tabard Inn) and three concertos for strings (the Concerto da Camera, Concerto da Chiesa and the Concerto Leggiero for piano and strings). Despite his advanced years, Dyson's produced another series of substantial choral works after his retirement, including Sweet Thames, run softly (1955), Agincourt and Hierusalem (both 1956), as well as various shorter works.

If Dyson's accessible style and various academic and administrative appointments earned him a reputation as a musical conservative, this view distracts from the intensely personal aspects of his musical language while making light of his considerable technical accomplishment and flair for vivid word setting. These elements unite to define the output of a composer whose worth is only gradually being realised, accounting for the growing audience that the profoundly joyful beauty of Dyson's music has attracted over the past decade.

F.G. Huss
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JOHN ECCLES (1668–1735)

John Eccles is thought to have been born in London around 1668, the only son of Henry Eccles, a court violinist. The first definite fact known about him is that several of his songs were published in 1691. Shortly after this he became a regular composer at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. There he composed music for the singing debut of the popular actress Anne Bracegirdle (1671-1748); in her very successful ensuing musical career she would allow only Eccles to write for her. This led to other musical engagements and he soon became one of London's most popular theatre composers, writing music for over 60 plays.

In 1694 Eccles became a musician-in-ordinary without fee in the King's Band – which two years later became a salaried position. In 1695 actors from Drury Lane set up a new company at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Eccles followed Mrs. Bracegirdle to the new theatre and he became its musical director. Here he continued to supply a steady stream of songs for various plays, as well as two masques The Loves of Mars and Venus and Acis and Galatea plus a dramatic opera Rinaldo and Armida.

In 1700 he became master of the King's Music earning £300 a year and providing music for each New Year, birthday and for other royal occasions. In the same year he entered a competition for the best musical setting of William Congreve's masque The Judgment of Paris, coming second to John Weldon (1676–1736). Eccles's setting, however, was easily the most popular, and so he and Congreve decided to continue their collaboration and created the St. Cecilia's Day Ode for 1701.

Eccles went on to write two operas: The British Enchanters and Semele. The architect and dramatist John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) built a theatre in the Haymarket as a new home for the Lincoln's Inn Fields company – in all probability, Congreve (librettist) and Eccles planned Semele to be performed at the opening of the new theatre in 1705. Unfortunately, Eccles did not finish his masterpiece until 1707, by which time the fashion for Italian opera had taken over in London and so Semele was never staged. Probably due to this disappointment as well as the deaths of colleagues and friends in the music world, Eccles decided to retire. He moved to Hampton Wick where he keenly pursued his favourite hobby of fishing. He remained a court composer and produced annual New Year's Day and birthday odes until his death in 1735.

Roger Slade
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SIR EDWARD ELGAR (1857–1934)

Elgar was born on 2nd June 1857 at Broadheath, near Worcester. His father had a music shop and tuned pianos, and the young Elgar taught himself to play a wide variety of instruments; in fact, he was very largely self-taught as a composer. He gained experience through conducting and composing for local musical organisations. He also taught the violin and played the organ at St. George's Roman Catholic Church in Worcester. In 1889 he married his pupil Caroline Alice Roberts. Her family considered that in marrying the son of a mere tradesman – a music teacher without prospects – she was marrying beneath herself. Yet Alice's dogged faith in Edward's emerging genius played a vital part in the development of his career.

Through such early works as Froissart (1890), the Imperial March (1897) and the cantatas King Olaf (1896) and Caractacus (1898) his reputation began to spread beyond the Worcestershire area. His first big success came with the Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma) in 1899 – dedicated to 'my friends pictured within', this masterpiece showed Elgar's technical accomplishment and sheer force of musical personality. After Sea Pictures – a song cycle for contralto and orchestra (1899) – came The Dream of Gerontius, based on Cardinal Newman's poem about a soul's journey through to its judgement and beyond. An inadequately-prepared first performance in 1900 was a failure, but the majority of the critics recognised the work's greatness.

Elgar overcame the initial disappointment of Gerontius with the successful premiere of the concert overture Cockaigne (In London Town) in 1901. In the same year came the first two Pomp and Circumstance Marches. An all-Elgar festival at Covent Garden was held in 1904, including the new overture In the South. He was knighted in July of that year, his works at this stage being performed both in Europe and the USA.

In 1905 came the Introduction and Allegro for Strings, and in 1906 he was working on his oratorio The Kingdom, a sequel to The Apostles of 1903. A planned third oratorio to make a trilogy was never completed. Elgar next began to concentrate on symphonic work. The Symphony No. 1 in A flat was first performed in Manchester in 1908. Its dedicatee and conductor Hans Richter described it as the 'greatest symphony of modern times'. It received tremendous enthusiasm and over a hundred performances in Britain, Europe, America, Australia and Russia in just over a year.

The Violin Concerto in B minor followed in 1910 and then, in 1911, another symphony. The concerto is a virtuoso piece – similar in scale to the Brahms concerto but more richly orchestrated. The Symphony No. 2 in E flat is prefaced with Shelley's words: 'Rarely, rarely comest thou, Spirit of Delight'. Elgar dedicated the work to the memory of the late King Edward VII, but it is much more than an expression of national mourning. He admitted to friends that it symbolised everything that had happened to him between April 1909 and February 1911.

From the Second Symphony to the First World War in 1914 only two major works appeared – The Music Makers, an ode for contralto, chorus and orchestra (1912), and a symphonic study based on Shakespeare's Falstaff (1913). The war depressed Elgar deeply, and it was not until 1918-9 that his final great period produced the Violin Sonata and the String Quartet, both in E minor, the Piano Quintet in A minor and the Cello Concerto in E minor – his last great masterpiece. Audiences were quick to note the loss of the pomp and swagger of earlier days.

In 1920 Lady Elgar died, and throughout the 1920s Elgar lived in virtual retirement, outwardly content as a country gentleman in his beloved Worcestershire, but saddened by his bereavement and by the social and musical changes of the war. Honours continued to be conferred on him: in 1928 he was created Knight Commander of the Victorian Order. However, at about this time he began work on a number of large projects including an opera The Spanish Lady and a Third Symphony. In 1933 he conducted his Violin Concerto with the young Yehudi Menuhin. However, in October Elgar was found to be suffering from a malignant tumour which pressed on the sciatic nerve. Further composition became impossible and he died on 23rd February, 1934.

Ian Lace
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GERALD FINZI (1901–1956)

Gerald Raphael Finzi was born into a fairly prosperous family of Italian Jewish descent on 14th July 1901. He was educated privately. However during the First World War his mother moved the family to Yorkshire. There Finzi studied with the young composer Ernest Farrar and later with Dr. Edward Bairstow at York Minster. It was during his early years that Finzi first became aware of the transience of life – one of the major themes of his music. In the space of a few years his father and three brothers died and Ernest Farrar was killed on the Western Front. This sudden realisation of the harshness of the world recommended to him the poetry of Thomas Traherne – the great Platonist poet who dwelt on the innocence of the soul of a child – and of course William Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality.

In 1922 he moved to the Cotswolds and lived in the village of Painswick. This was part of the landscape beloved by Elgar, Howells, Gurney and Ralph Vaughan Williams. It was to have a profound effect on his life and music. The works of this early period include the withdrawn song cycle By Footpath and Style, a somewhat neoclassical Violin Concerto, and the Severn Rhapsody. He also worked on a Requiem da Camera that was dedicated to Farrar, his deceased composition teacher. In 1925 he was advised by the conductor Adrian Boult to move to London and take counterpoint lessons with R.O. Morris. It would also put Finzi in the centre of musical activities. He taught for a period in the Royal Academy of Music. He became friends with many of the leading composers of the day, including Edmund Rubbra, Gustav Holst, Arthur Bliss and Ralph Vaughan Williams. It was during this period that Finzi began to compose some of his best song cycles.

There was the literary side to Finzi's life. He loved much of the heritage of English literature, especially Thomas Hardy, Thomas Traherne and William Wordsworth. These interests are well represented in his settings for choir and songs, including a number of important song cycles. Certainly more than half of his songs are to words by Hardy; however he did show a liking for Robert Bridges and Edmund Blunden. The fine choral works In Terra Pax and For St Cecilia are settings of words by these two great English poets.

After the Second World War Gerald Finzi wrote some of his most adventurous orchestral works, including the ever-popular Clarinet Concerto of 1948/9 and the Grand Fantasia and Toccata for Piano and Orchestra based on earlier sketches for a piano concerto. The last major work was the Cello Concerto in which Finzi was pushing the barriers: not only was it considerably longer than anything he had previously written (apart from the Intimations), it was more passionate and intense. There were new harmonies and part writing not yet heard in his music.

Gerald Finzi was diagnosed as having Hodgkinson's Disease in 1951. In 1956 he and Ralph Vaughan Williams went on a walking trip up Chosen Hill in Gloucester. They visited the local sexton's cottage for tea. Unfortunately there was a child with chickenpox in the house, and Finzi contracted the disease. Due to his weakened state it caused severe brain inflammation. He died on 27 September 1956, aged 55 years.

It is difficult to sum up Finzi's achievement in a few words. He seems to have been at his best writing small-scale works. However, his two masterpieces are in fact his two longest. He certainly had no problem in developing ideas. His general style is elegiac. His music is frankly sad and autumnal: there is little that is light hearted or joyous. He was not afraid to write in a basically tonal style, however, in later works there is a considerable use of mild and occasionally even harsh dissonance – especially in the Cello Concerto. But perhaps his greatest legacy is his ability to set words to music. Few composers have equaled his achievement in any century. It is perhaps his songs that remain the most perfect of his creations.

John France
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JOHN FOULDS (1881–1939)

The son of a bassoonist in the Hallé Orchestra, John Herbert Foulds was born in Hulme, Manchester in 1880. Largely self-taught as a composer, he was one of the most remarkable and unjustly forgotten figures of the 'British Musical Renaissance'. Though prolific from childhood, Foulds himself joined the Hallé as a cellist in 1900, having run away from home and already served an apprenticeship in theatre and promenade orchestras in England and abroad. Hans Richter gave him conducting experience; Henry Wood took up some of his works, starting with Epithalamium at the 1906 Proms.

In some respects ahead of his time (he started using quarter-tones as early as the 1890s, while some of his later works anticipate Messiaen and Minimalism) Foulds was in others an intensely practical musician. He became a successful composer of light music (his Keltic Lament was once a popular favourite) and wrote many effective theatre scores, notably for his friends Lewis Casson and Sybil Thorndike. Perhaps the best known was the music for the first production of Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan (Foulds conducted a Suite from it at the Proms in 1925). However his principal creative energies went into more ambitious and exploratory works, often coloured by his interest in the music of the East, especially India.

Foulds moved to London before World War I, during which he met the violinist and singer Maud McCarthy, one of the leading Western authorities on Indian music, who became his second wife. Foulds's gigantic World Requiem (1919–21), in memory of the dead of all nations, was performed annually on Armistice Night in the Royal Albert Hall from 1923 to 1926 under the auspices of the British Legion by up to 1,200 singers and instrumentalists: performances which constituted the first Festivals of Remembrance. When interest in the work lapsed Foulds spent the later 1920s in Paris, working as an accompanist for silent films, and in the early 1930s published an immensely stimulating book on contemporary musical developments, Music To-day. In 1935 he travelled to India, where he collected folk music, became Director of European Music for All-India Radio in Delhi, created an orchestra from scratch, and began to work towards his dream of a musical synthesis of East and West, actually composing pieces for ensembles of traditional Indian instruments. He died suddenly of cholera in Calcutta in 1939.

Foulds's most substantial compositions include symphonic poems, concertos, orchestral suites, string quartets, piano pieces and a huge 'concert opera' on Dante's Divine Comedy (1905–08), as well as a series of Music-Pictures exploring the affinities between music and styles of painting. (Henry Wood introduced one of them at the 1913 Proms.) Few of these works were performed and fewer published in his lifetime, and several – especially from his last period in India – are lost. It is difficult to assess his achievement, or even to classify a composer who was master of a bewildering variety of styles. But he was clearly an adventurous figure of great innate musicality and superb technical skill. Such pieces as the astonishing Three Mantras for large orchestra, the Essays in the Modes for piano (1920–27), his ninth string quartet Quartetto Intimo (1931–2) and the piano concerto Dynamic Triptych (1927–29) represent a powerful and individual contribution to the music of their time.

Malcolm MacDonald
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PERCY GRAINGER (1882–1961)

George Percy Grainger was born on 8 July 1882 at Brighton, Melbourne, only child of John Harry Grainger, architect, and his wife Rosa (Rose) Annie, née Aldridge, of Adelaide. At the age of 12 he gave his first public recital and a year later, following a benefit concert in the Melbourne Town Hall, Grainger left with his mother to study at Dr Hoch's Conservatorium in Frankfurt-am-Main. Over the next four and a half years he studied piano with James Kwast, taking counterpoint and composition classes with Iwan Knorr. A solo recital given in Frankfurt on 6 December 1900 marked the end of Grainger's student years and the beginning of a long and arduous concert career which took him first to London, where he lived with his mother from May 1901 to August 1914.

Various landmarks highlight the growth of his pianistic career through these London years, including many tours of the English provinces, Australasia and South Africa as well as his studies in Berlin with Ferruccio Busoni in 1903. His career as a virtuoso was enhanced by the admiration of Grieg, who selected Grainger to play his concerto under his baton at the Leeds Festival in 1907. Though Grieg died before the festival, Grainger's reputation as 'the greatest living exponent' of Grieg's piano music was established. That year, he also began a close friendship with Frederick Delius.

In October 1911 he took the professional name of 'Percy Aldridge Grainger' after securing a publishing agreement with Schott & Co. His music was performed to great acclaim at the 1912 and 1913 Balfour Gardiner Concerts. The Graingers' sudden departure for the United States of America in 1914 cost them the goodwill of many of their British friends. This hostility was to some extent ameliorated when Grainger joined the U.S. Army as a bandsman in June 1917. He became a naturalized American citizen on 3 June 1918.

On being discharged from the army on 7 January 1919, Grainger embarked on what was perhaps the most flamboyant decade of his career. Lionized as a pianist and fêted as a composer, he was acclaimed as 'a latter-day Siegfried' and a worthy successor to Paderewski. Financial security came gradually: in 1921 he bought the house at White Plains, New York, in which he lived until he died. His record-breaking piano piece Country Gardens was published by Schirmer's in 1919.

In 1926, returning home from Australia to the United States he met on board ship a Swedish-born poet and painter, Ella Viola Ström. They were married on 9 August 1928 at a public ceremony at the conclusion of a concert in the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles. In 1934/35 he established the 'Grainger Museum' in the grounds of the University of Melbourne.

In the latter part of his life, Grainger's surplus energy and time were directed into two large-scale projects: the completion and arrangement of his museum in Melbourne, and his White Plains-based experiments in what he called 'free music'. The last decade of Grainger's life was shadowed by illness, but despite this he continued his work, visiting Australia and his museum for the last time in 1955–56 and giving his last public concert performance on 29 April 1960. He died of cancer in the White Plains hospital on 20 February 1961.

The Percy Grainger Society
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WILLIAM HARRIS (1883–1973)

Although he was never to gain the popular reputation of some of his better-known contemporaries, William Harris was a central figure in English choral music during the first half of the twentieth century. His output of anthems, organ works and hymn tunes have a quiet craftsmanly dignity and, as a choral trainer, he worked with some of the finest choirs in the land and was central to the organisation of some of the great ceremonial festivals and services at Windsor. Amongst his works, his masterpiece is undoubtedly the double choir motet Faire is the Heaven (1925) which stands out as a high point in English choral music, on a par with comparable works by Parry, Elgar and Walton.

Harris was born in Fulham and, by the age of fourteen, his musical gifts were sufficiently recognized for him to be sent to St David's Cathedral in west Wales where he was both a chorister and deputized for its organist. At sixteen he entered the Royal College of Music, before taking up his first post as assistant at Lichfield Cathedral in 1911. In 1919 he succeeded the irascible Hugh Allen at New College Oxford (later moving to Christ Church Cathedral) where, with Jack Westrup, he was responsible for the first British performance of Monteverdi's Orfeo in 1925. He took over the London Bach Choir in 1926, but the appointment by which he is best remembered came in 1933 when he became organist at St George's Chapel, Windsor. During his time there he acted as sub-conductor at both the 1937 and 1953 coronations and tutored both the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. He held the post at Windsor until 1961 and his period there undoubtedly formed the happiest years of his career. He retired to Petersfield where he passed away at the age of ninety in September 1973.

Peter Reynolds
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JOSEPH HOLBROOKE (1878–1958)

Joseph Holbrooke was born in Croydon in 1878. He came from a poor family background and had to struggle to make his living as a composer and pianist, despite making his debut at the age of 12. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music under Corder. It took a while for him to make his mark as a composer, noted perspicaciously by the Daily Telegraph in 1903, which said: 'That acknowledgement of his talent has only come thus far from the few is quite in accordance with the established rule in this country. But Mr Holbrooke need not despair. If England is also to appreciate her musical sons when their purpose is an earnest one, appreciation may be all the warmer when it does come.'

Holbrooke gradually established himself as one of the most prolific and popular composers of the day, and became known as the 'Cockney Wagner'. He wrote at least 8 operas, including the trilogy Cauldron of Anwyn, as well as scores of other works ranging from solo song through to chamber works and symphonic poems. As the titles of his works suggest (The Raven, The Viking, Apollo and the Seaman, The Children of Don, Ulalume, The Bells, Queen Mab), he was an ardent admirer of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as all things Celtic, epic, mystical or mysterious, and he invested his works with great romanticism, lushness, magic and imagination. A fairly controversial and very anti-establishment figure, he was a great supporter of his contemporary composers and began a series of chamber concerts to promote his music and theirs. Yet towards the conclusion of his life he began to fade from public recognition and ended up an embittered eccentric. There is no doubt whatsoever about the quality of a great deal of his output, however. The composer and conductor Sir Hamilton Harty put his finger on this perfectly, when he pointed out in a letter about The Raven that 'there is beautiful and impressive music in that work, and, as I told the orchestra, it is so infinitely superior to the foreign muck with which we are deluged nowadays'.

Em Marshal
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GUSTAV HOLST (1874–1934)

Ralph Vaughan Williams once said of his friend Gustav Holst, 'Holst was a visionary but, at the same time, in all essentials, a very practical man... It is the blend of the visionary with the realist that gives Holst's music its distinctive character'.

Holst is one of the most delightfully original and idiosyncratic of British composers, with an immediately recognisable characteristic voice. Following his own advice that one should 'never compose anything unless the not-composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you', all his mature works have something valuable to say. Mystical, often austere, brilliantly orchestrated with exquisite economy of instrumentation, his works combine clarity of vision with hauntingly beautiful and sometimes desolate lyricism. Extremely strong driving rhythms permeate his music, and he was fond of the use of ostinato patterns. Always discerning and erudite, his breadth of knowledge shines ever through, from poetry and literature to Sanskrit spiritual classics and even gnosticism (in the Hymn of Jesus). Yet he had a fantastic sense of humour, too, as seen in his comic ballet A Golden Goose and operas The Perfect Fool, and At the Boar's Head. Indeed, his friends said he 'set a terrifically high standard of being companionable and always surpassed it'.

Born in Cheltenham in 1874, Holst began composing whilst still at school. His father, a piano teacher, disapproved, wanting his son to become a pianist. This was rendered impossible due to neuritis in Holst's arm, and at the age of 17 Holst was sent to study counterpoint at Oxford, although this was short-lived, and he ended up at the Royal of College of Music (RCM) with a composition scholarship under Stanford two years later. Holst's first forays into professional life were as the organist and choral director in his local Cotswolds villages. Throughout his life he related strongly to amateur musicians and valued their musical input greatly.

Whilst still a student Holst was invited to conduct the socialist choir at William Morris' house, where he both met his future wife, and discovered the treasures of Ancient Indian literature. Dissatisfied with the stilted translations available at the time, he set himself the formidable task of learning Sanskrit to produce better translations. Later on he learnt Ancient Greek to enable himself to read the Apocryphal Acts of St John in the original, which he was setting in the Hymn of Jesus.

Attempting to make ends meet, first as a trombone player in various bands, then later solely as a composer, Holst took up various teaching jobs, primarily at St. Paul's Girls' School in 1905 (the only teaching post he held until his death). Unable to sign up in the war due to his neuritis and poor sight, he was sent to Macedonia in 1918 to organise music for the troops in the Middle East, conducting British music in Salonica and Constantinople.

Returning to England, Holst found himself faced with fame and success, which he hated. Performances of the Hymn of Jesus and Planets Suite (which he had been inspired to write following astrological discussions with the composer Arnold Bax and his brother Clifford whilst on holiday in Spain with their musical patron, Balfour Gardiner), had provoked great excitement and interest in the musical world. (The only time the Queens Hall was sold out twice in one week was when Holst conducted his own works there.) Naturally a fairly shy, quiet man, he deeply disliked the attention of the press and longed instead for a quiet recognition amongst musicians alone. He was pleased when his popularity later declined because his works were too obscure, esoteric and exacting for the audiences of the time. He died in the same year as Elgar and Delius, 1934, two days after a major operation.

Holst's huge output includes everything from solo song to opera, and short piano pieces to choral symphonies. One might imagine that the music of such a major composer as Holst would be in the repertoire or at least recorded. Not so. A number of his works remain unpublished, unperformed and unrecorded, including major orchestral pieces and opera. Furthermore, the only piece that has achieved recognition world-wide is his Planets Suite, which Holst himself considered far from his best work – and when one knows the rest of his accomplished corpus music, one can see why.

Em Marshall
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HERBERT HOWELLS (1892–1983)

In 1910, at the impressionable age of 18, Herbert Howells and his friend Ivor Gurney heard a performance of Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival. They were so deeply struck by what they heard that, unable to sleep that night, they wandered the streets of Gloucester in excitement and awe. Howells later commented that 'If I had to isolate from the rest any one impression of a purely musical sort that mattered more to me in the whole of my life as a musician, it would be the hearing of that work.' At the time, Howells was an articled pupil of Herbert Brewer at Gloucester Cathedral, and had been thoroughly immersed in the English church music tradition throughout his childhood.

He went on to study at the Royal College of Music (RCM) under Stanford, where he swiftly established himself as a leading pupil despite being an impoverished, fairly reticent and inexperienced country lad. Indeed in 1917 he was the youngest of the first set of composers to be chosen for publication by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, along with Vaughan Williams (A London Symphony), Rutland Boughton (The Immortal Hour) and Granville Bantock (Hebridean Symphony). Stanford certainly favoured Howells, calling him 'my Son in Music' and even trying to ensure that Howells was exempted from military service, but Howells was subsequently diagnosed with Graves disease and given only six months to live. In the event, Howells thankfully lasted into his nineties. He led a busy life as a composer, adjudicator and teacher – primarily at St Paul's Girls' School, where from 1936-1962 he succeeded Ralph Vaughan Williams as Director of Music (Vaughan Williams had taken over briefly after Gustav Holst's death in 1934), and as a teacher of composition at the RCM for over fifty years.

It remains a mystery as to why Howells is so little known or regarded. His musical output is large and varied – from solo songs to works for full orchestra, concerti and great choral masterpieces. Vaughan Williams, Elgar and Stanford were perhaps the seminal influences on him, but he swiftly established his own very individual, often deeply moving and brilliant, voice. Contributing factors may include a crisis of confidence after a mixed reception to his second Piano Concerto, the fact that he was perhaps too ambivalent towards his own music – especially the orchestral pieces, and his son Michael's sudden death at the tender age of 9, from which tragedy Howells never fully recovered. After a period of reduced productivity, Howells went on to produce such mature works as the Concerto for Strings, Hymnus Paradisi (using material from his earlier unaccompanied Requiem), which is widely considered to be his masterpiece, and further choral works of particular distinction. Howells continued to work and teach into old age, dying in 1983.

Em Marshall
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JOHN IRELAND (1897–1962)

John Ireland was once asked if he was a great composer. Ireland considered for a moment, then replied: 'No, but I think I'm a significant one.' This typically self-deprecating comment belies the fact that, in a composing career spanning nearly half a century, he produced a body of work which for many years was ranked second only to that of Vaughan Williams.

Ireland was born in Bowden, Cheshire, in 1879 (in the same year as Bridge, Scott, Norman O'Neill, Harty and Beecham.) In later life, he spoke little of his childhood: born to an elderly father and a semi-invalid mother, his upbringing was largely undertaken by his elder brother and sisters, who, according to the composer's guarded comments, carried out their duties in loco parentis in an extraordinarily harsh and severe manner, leaving permanent emotional scars. At the age of 14 he entered the Royal College of Music, to study the piano under Frederick Cliffe, the organ under Sir Walter Parratt, and later composition with Stanford. After leaving the College, he divided his time between composing and teaching (he returned to the College as professor of composition: future composers who studied with him included E.J. Moeran and Alan Bush); he also occasionally conducted, and performed on the piano. He spent some years living in the Channel Islands, particularly Guernsey (his escape in the nick of time, just before the German occupation, is probably the most outwardly exciting incident of his life.) Later, he bought a converted windmill in Sussex and lived there until his death in 1962.

Although he maintained a number of close friendships throughout his life (mainly with other musicians), Ireland evidently found relationships with women difficult. An unlikely marriage to a teenage piano pupil proved disastrous, and was quickly annulled. Later, a better-starred relationship developed with Helen Perkin, a student at the RCM, and a fine pianist and composer in her own right. The Piano Concerto was inspired by this relationship, and Helen gave the first performance. However, she eventually married George Adie, a disciple of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff: Ireland was bereft, and eventually refused to have any further communication with her.

Ireland composed slowly, fastidiously, and with inflexible self-criticism (he destroyed virtually everything he wrote before 1900.) Like his contemporaries, his musical grounding was in the German tradition, particularly Brahms. However, he was enormously influenced by the French impressionists, and by the energy and harmonic acerbity of Stravinsky and Bartok. The peculiar glory of Ireland's mature idiom is his haunting harmonic style, rich in bitter-sweet false relations; once known, it is as instantly recognizable as that of Delius. His melodies often have a modal flavour, hinting at folksong derivation (but less literally than in Vaughan Williams). Much of his music (particularly in the shorter works) has a delicate, introspective refinement, recalling that of Ravel; however, there is also frequently a rugged, exhilarating energy, rising to powerful climaxes.

His piano music forms the core of his output, forming a vital contribution to the repertoire for the instrument: it ranges from exquisite miniatures such as Soliloquy to large-scale virtuoso works such as the Rhapsody, the Sonata, and the suite Sarnia. He also produced a large number of songs, including fine settings of Hardy and other contemporary English poets; several orchestral works which showed him a skilful orchestrator and fully capable of working convincingly on a large canvas (his Piano Concerto was a fixture at the Proms for many years); and a number of chamber works, including two sonatas for violin and piano, one for cello and piano, three piano trios, and a Fantasy-Sonata for clarinet and piano. Aspects of the English countryside formed a major source of his inspiration, as did the seascapes around Guernsey and Jersey (The Island Spell, one of his most popular piano pieces, flashed into his mind whilst bathing at a beach there). He also had an intense, almost mystical, awareness of the ancient past ('things long hidden', as he himself put it) and a fascination with barrows, stone circles and other archaeological sites. This surfaces in many of his works, including the orchestral rhapsody Mai-Dun (inspired by Maiden Castle in Dorset) and the Legend for piano and orchestra.

Peter Duffy
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CONSTANT LAMBERT (1903–1951)

Constant Lambert contrived to pack an extraordinary amount of creative activity into his short life, as composer, conductor and critic. Born in London, the son of an Australian painter, he was precociously gifted, and at the age of nineteen was the first British composer from whom Diaghilev commissioned a ballet. A striking and combative personality, with an unusually wide taste in the arts, he was at the centre of a social circle that included William Walton, Frederick Ashton, the Sitwells, Anthony Powell, Cecil Beaton, Lord Berners and Peter Warlock. He became one of the hardest-working British conductors of ballet, a principal founder of the Sadler's Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet), and one of the BBC's most valued exponents of contemporary music – and this despite almost continuous ill-health. He died at the age of forty-five from a combination of overwork and alcoholism, aggravated by the anticlimactic reception of his last ballet, Tiresias.

Nowadays Lambert may be best remembered by his brilliant and stimulating survey of the musical world of the thirties, Music Ho! – a highly influential book in its time, which engagingly enshrines the virtues and shortcomings of its era with true journalistic flair. But he was a highly gifted composer, and his output – though comparatively small – has a strongly defined personality, often characterised by austerely black humour and Dionysiac energy, which set it apart from that of his contemporaries such as Walton, with whom he shared an interest in musical satire and in jazz idioms. His mature works included four original ballet scores including the astrologically-based Horoscope (as well as many arrangements), the film score for the 1947 Anna Karenina with Vivien Leigh, the boldly constructivist Music for Orchestra, a concerto for piano and small orchestra, and two major choral works: the perennially popular The Rio Grande and the huge choral-orchestral fresco of Elizabethan plague-time, Summer's Last Will and Testament.

Malcolm MacDonald
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PHILIP LANE (*1950)

Philip Lane was born in Cheltenham. He read Music with John Joubert and Peter Dickinson at Birmingham University, although he was excused orchestration class when it was discovered he was already having his orchestral works played by the BBC Midland Light Orchestra just half a mile away at the BBC Studios at Pebble Mill!

After Philip graduated, he worked freelance for London publishers and taught. From 1975, for the next 23 years, he was on the music staff of the Cheltenham Ladies' College. The musical legacy of these years is the body of works for upper voices which have established themselves in the repertoire of countless choirs around the world.

By chance, in 1993, Philip was invited to look after the musical interests in the estate of Richard Addinsell (1904-77), of Warsaw Concerto fame. One of his first enterprises was to write a radio documentary on the subject, linked to a CD recording (Marco Polo 8.223732) which had to include one of Addinsell's most famous film scores, Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939). Given that the only surviving material was a voice and piano version of the 'School Song', he set to work to take down the 'Main Titles' from the video by ear. The success of this disc led to his being asked to do similar work on the early British films of Sir Alfred Hitchcock – The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Lady Vanishes and others. Since then he has supervised the reconstruction of numerous scores, most recently, single composer compilation albums of Arnold, Alwyn, Auric, Bliss, and two more of Addinsell, including one almost complete score, Victor Young's for The Quiet Man.

In recent years, much of Philip's work has been in the commercial field, library music, music for BBC plays, including The Merchant of Venice and Sir Thomas More, and TV animation, including the immortal Captain Pugwash, but he has not deserted the world of live music-making, with choral commissions to mark the centenary of the death of Lewis Carroll, one from the winners of the Sainsbury Choir of the Year, and a ballet, Hansel and Gretel, for the National Youth Ballet. His setting of Clement Clark Moore's Night Before Christmas was released on Naxos last Christmas. Narrated by Stephen Fry, it was a bestseller and has continued to receive performances all over Britain and abroad, from the States to Macau.

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THOMAS LINLEY (1756–1778)

Thomas Linley the younger (the 'English Mozart') was born at the Abbey Green, Bath, on 7th May 1756. He was the third child and second son of the composer, harpsichordist and singing teacher Thomas Linley (1733-1795) and his wife Mary.

As a boy he was frequently asked to play the violin at public concerts. Although it was fashionable for musically gifted children to be brought to the public's attention in this way, Linley was, by any standards, one of the most prodigiously musically talented individuals ever to have been seen in England. The young composer was taught by local soloist and orchestral leader John Richards and at the age of eight played a violin concerto at a public concert in Bath. He soon afterwards commenced musical studies with the composer William Boyce (1711-1779)
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At the age of 12 Linley left England for Italy to study under the famous violinist Pietro Nardini (1722-1793). Three years later whilst still in Italy Linley met Mozart. They were exact contemporises and became firm friends, later regularly corresponding with one another. After this first meeting Mozart's father Leopold wrote to his wife:

'In Florence we found a young Englishman who is a pupil of the famous violinist Nardini. This boy, who plays absolutely beautifully … came to the house … The two boys took turns performing all evening … The next day, the little Englishman, a most charming boy, brought his violin to where we stayed and played all afternoon with Wolfgang accompanying him on the piano.'

The musical historian Charles Burney reported that, “The 'Tommasino', as he is called, and the little Mozart, are talked of all over Italy, as the most promising geniuses of this age”. In 1784 Mozart was to describe Linley as, 'a true genius'.

At the age of 15 Linley returned to England where he became leader of orchestras at Bath and also at Drury Lane, where he often played concertos between the acts of oratorios. He returned to his studies with Boyce and continued to compose.

On 8th September 1773 Linley's first large-scale work, Let God Arise, was performed at the Worcester Festival. Matthew Cooke reported that, '… his industry and perseverance made him indefatigable. He was One of the most eminent Violin Performers of the age; between the years 1771 and 1776 he composed no less than Twenty Concertos for the violin … Many of these were performed by him … at Drury Lane … and were received with the most unbounded applause.” It was around this time that he wrote such remarkable works as The Song of Moses and incidental music for The Tempest and Sheridan's The Duenna.

In 1776 Linley composed his magnificent Shakespeare Ode. The Morning Chronicle of 21 March 1776 reported, 'The composition must be allowed to be an extraordinary effort of genius in so young a man … the fugue of the overture is masterly … the song There in old Arden's inmost shade … would not disgrace a Sacchini or Bach.'

In July 1778 Linley went with his sisters to Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire, as guests of the Duke of Ancaster and his family. On 5 August Linley went boating on the castle lake with two friends but during a storm the boat overturned and, whilst attempting to swim ashore, the 22 year old Linley tragically drowned.

Roger Slade
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SIR GEORGE MACFARREN (1813–1887)

Sir George MacFarren most probably suffers for being associated with that period in history when Great Britain was almost universally regarded as a 'land without music'. Of course few people nowadays would insist that there were no good composers between Purcell and Elgar, but the fact remains that the impression has stuck. The Victorian years are still regarded as a byway: they are still seen as an era when performance was perhaps more important than composition.

Yet this was not always the received view. For example, William Sterndale Bennett was regarded by contemporaries as one of the great composers of Western music rivalling Mendelssohn himself. Vincent Wallace's operas were highly rated – both at home and abroad. And, more pertinently, the musicologist Ernest Walker could write that “MacFarren was one of the most industrious musicians of his time”. Of course industry does not necessarily lead to the creation of masterpieces, but it is important to note that in spite of the fact that Wagner felt 'MacFarrinc' was a 'pompous, melancholy Scotsman', there were many others in the contemporary musical world who regarded him highly. Some even suggested that he was the 'British Beethoven'. In fact, even if he did not quite rival the great master, he was one of the few British composers of his day to have their works performed at the Gewandhaus Concerts in Leipzig and at other German venues.

George Alexander MacFarren was born in London on 2 March 1813. His father, who was a dancing-master and playwright, apparently taught the young George the rudiments of music. After a period of study with Charles Lucas, he entered the Royal Academy of Music at the precocious age of sixteen. He studied the piano, the trombone and composition with Cipriani Potter. Five years later, in 1834, he was appointed a professor of the Academy. In the same year, his Fourth Symphony in F minor was first performed. From this time on, his life was a succession of professional appointments. In 1843 he was the secretary of the important Handel Society. In 1875 he succeeded the great Sterndale Bennett as Professor of Music at Cambridge University. And, finally, in 1876 he was appointed principal of the Royal Academy of Music. He received his knighthood from Queen Victoria in 1883. He died in London on 31 October 1887.

It is well reported by contemporaries that MacFarren was one of the most industrious musician of his age, and this was in spite of virtual blindness, which he suffered for a large part of his life. A brief look at his catalogue reveals a huge number of works in virtually every genre – oratorios, operas, cantatas, nine symphonies, concertos for piano and for violin, a number of overtures, a huge amount of chamber music, ecclesiastical works and vocal music. But composition was not the whole story. MacFarren was one of the most prolific writers about music of his day. He edited much early music including scores by Purcell and Handel. He wrote a series of articles for the first edition of Grove's Dictionary and completed a number of theoretical treatises.

It is difficult to estimate MacFarren's potential for the concert hall of the present day. His Overture: Chevy Chase should be heard regularly. Perhaps his symphonies should be revived occasionally. There may also be a place for a concert version of the opera Don Quixote or his great oratorio St. John the Baptist. Yet I fear the reality is that it will be the lighter pieces, the part songs, the odd anthem and a few songs that will keep his name in the repertoire.

John France
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SIR ALEXANDER CAMPBELL MACKENZIE (1847–1935)

Mackenzie is today one of the lesser known figures who contributed to the roots of the so-called English musical renaissance, perhaps remembered mainly for his role as director of the Royal Academy of Music, which flourished under his directorship. He was also a composer of some distinction, achieving considerable success in his lifetime, although his music is now rarely heard. He is however a major figure in English music, W.H. Hadow commenting: 'There is no aspect of our musical life which has not benefited by his influence and example.'

Born in Edinburgh into a musical family, Mackenzie's father sent him to Germany aged ten, where he received musical tuition and experience playing in the ducal orchestra in Sondershausen. Mackenzie later remembered this early exposure to the most modern music of the day:

'At the Loh concerts on Sundays people attended them from all parts of Germany in order to hear this modern music … For instance, we were the second town in Germany to perform Lohengrin, and we played the Tristan Prelude before the opera was brought out.'

After his return to England, Mackenzie studied at the RAM, later returning to Edinburgh where he taught and played the violin. However, his busy schedule led to health problems, and he spent a number of years in Italy, where he began to concentrate exclusively on composition, producing choral works such as The Bride and The Rose of Sharon, the Violin Concerto, and the operas Colomba and The Troubadour.

When Mackenzie eventually returned to England he was offered the directorship of the RAM in 1888, a post he retained until 1924. Inevitably, his administrative and teaching duties took up much of his time, and his output became increasingly slight. He also produced books on Verdi and Liszt, both of whom were important influences, and an autobiography, A Musician's Narrative.

F.G. Huss
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CECILIA McDOWALL (*1951)

Cecilia McDowall read music at Edinburgh and London universities, and at Trinity College of Music, and has studied under Joseph Horovitz, Robert Saxton, and Adam Gorb. The winner of several major composition awards, she has a distinctive style which speaks directly to listeners, instrumentalists and singers alike. Her choral output has been described as having a 'freshness, brightness and fidelity' about it, combining flowing melodic lines and occasionally astringent harmony with rhythmic vitality.

Cecilia McDowall's music has been widely performed throughout the United Kingdom and abroad, and at a variety of festivals including Aberystwyth MusicFest, Dartington International Summer School, Deal, Hampstead and Highgate, and Presteigne. Her music has been performed by leading choirs, including the BBC Singers, and the London Musici, London Mozart Players, Fibonacci Sequence, and Ensemble Lumière have all both commissioned and performed her music.

Three new choral pieces have been commissioned for the Spring of 2008, Laudate, a 12-minute cantata for choir and orchestra, for the St Albans Choral Society, and two shorter anthems. The Skies in their Magnificence was written for performance by Ronald Corp and The London Chorus at the English Music Festival, and for Cantate, the youth choir of Portsmouth Cathedral, she has recently completed Rise, heart, thy Lord is risen.

In 2006 she was selected from a large list of composers by the Bournemouth Sinfonietta Choir to compose a choral and instrumental work, Five Seasons, whose brief was to 'celebrate the organic landscape'. This exciting and unique project, which was premiered in Sherborne Abbey in November 2006, involved the composer and the novelist and poet, Christie Dickason, taking up mini residences at five organic farms (under the auspices of the Soil Association). Five Seasons was subsequently featured on Aled Jones' programme, The Choir, and BBC 4's Farming Today.
Other recent commissions include Stabat Mater for the St Albans Choral Society, Radnor Songs for the soprano Rachel Nicholls and Paul Plummer (piano) for the 2005 Presteigne Festival, Lonely Hearts, for equal voice choir for the Canterbury Chamber Choir, Deus, qui claro lumine for New College Choir, Oxford, for the Yoxford Festival, and Century Dances for The Thorne Trio.

In the 2005 British Composer Awards, Regina Caeli was shortlisted in the Liturgical section and Stabat Mater in the Making Music Award. Both works appear on her newest CD (CDLX 7197), recorded by The Joyful Company of Singers and Canterbury Chamber Choir, and released on the Dutton Epoch label in Autumn 2007. Autumn 2004 saw the release of her first choral CD (CDLX 7146) and autumn 2005 an orchestral and chamber music CD (CDLX 7159). In the past year, Oxford University Press has published the Christmas cantata, Christus natus est, and the Vesper hymn, Ave maris stella, and is anticipating the publication of Magnificat early this Summer. Her works are regularly broadcast; her St Martin's Service and Introit were broadcast on the BBC's Choral Evensong from Ely Cathedral, and on Christmas Day 2005 Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk broadcast her Christus natus est live from the Gewandhaus in Leipzig.


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E.J. MOERAN (1894–1950)

E.J. Moeran was born in Middlesex, but after some unsettled years the family moved to Bacton in Norfolk, where the foundations were laid for Moeran's interest in folk-song and his appreciation of natural beauty, both of which were to become important sources of inspiration. Moeran first encountered folksong as a source of material for serious composition when he heard some music by Vaughan Williams during a brief period of study at the Royal College of Music in London. His studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1914 – Moeran enlisted immediately and was severely injured in Bullecourt, France, in 1917. While recovering he was stationed in Ireland, and it was during this time that he encountered Irish folk music, which was to remain an important influence (already evident in his earliest published works).

Following his discharge Moeran soon returned to London, where he studied with John Ireland. The music written during this period is increasingly mature, including works such as the String Quartet No. 1 (1921), the two Rhapsodies for orchestra (1922 and 1924, the year of Moeran's first attempt at the Symphony in G minor) and the Violin Sonata in E minor (1923). During the same period Moeran's interest in folk-song intensified, and he became active as a collector. Moeran published several individual arrangements as well as three sets, one each from Norfolk (1923), Suffolk (1931) and Kerry (1950). Between 1925 and 1928, Moeran shared a cottage in Eynsford with Philip Heseltine (better known by his pseudonym 'Peter Warlock'). Heseltine encouraged Moeran's interest in Elizabethan music and the music of Delius, both of which were lasting influences on Moeran's style. During this time his output became increasingly slight, and it became apparent to Moeran that he needed solitude in order to work, leading eventually to his withdrawal to remote rural areas when composing. The years following his time at Eynsford marked a restoration of his creative powers and further stylistic maturation, producing works such as the Seven Poems of James Joyce (1929), the Songs of Springtime for choir (1930), the String Trio (1931) and the Nocturne for baritone, chorus and orchestra (1934).

In 1935 Moeran returned to Ireland, finding in Co. Kerry (particularly Kenmare and Valencia Island) a location ideally suited to his requirements as a composer; in addition to finding the necessary solitude and the wild landscapes which he found inspiring, Moeran felt at ease with the people and their way of life. Later Moeran was to find similar conditions in Radnorshire, where he worked on his masterful Sinfonietta. Moeran completed his Symphony in G minor in 1937, and his next large-scale work, the Violin Concerto (completed in 1941), was also written in Ireland. Moeran had begun gathering ideas for a second symphony while still working on the Violin Concerto, but his continued difficulties with the demands of symphonic form, which occasionally mar the overall success of the Symphony in G minor despite substantial amounts of attractive material, hampered his progress on the Second Symphony, and it remained unfinished. The Sinfonietta, with its textural and formal clarity and references to neo-classicism, represents a remarkable development of style and technique, the fruits of which could be integrated into the subsequent Concerto and Sonata for Cello. These were written for and dedicated to Moeran's wife Peers Coetmore. The Cello Sonata was Moeran's last large-scale work and, with its mature and integrated style, in many ways represents the peak of his musical development. During the last years of his life, Moeran worked intermittently on the Second Symphony, but a long process of mental disintegration, including periods of alcoholism (a problem that affected Moeran intermittently following the war) and a number of occasions on which he disappeared for prolonged periods of time, prevented its completion. Moeran died on 1 December 1950, falling from the pier at Kenmare during a gale. A coroner's inquest found no water in his lungs, concluding he died of cerebral haemorrhage before falling into the water. He is buried in Kenmare, near the Atlantic seascapes and 'mountain country' in which he felt most inspired and at ease.

F.G. Huss
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DAVID OWEN NORRIS (*1953)

David Owen Norris's international career as a pianist, intensified since 1991 when he became the first Gilmore Artist, has made it difficult for him to pursue composition, which was always his main interest.

He studied composition at the RAM with Eric Thiman and John Gardner, and at Oxford with Robert Sherlaw Johnson. His BA degree (he took a First) included a large portfolio of compositions, on the strength of which he was awarded a composition scholarship for postgraduate work. His iconoclastic view of the Second Viennese School (which he admired but regretted) led to friction with the examiners, especially his required dodecaphonic piece, which was so blatantly in E minor that he helpfully attached a serial analysis. Norris's views are now widely held by much younger composers, of course, and one of the guiltier pleasures of his long career in music has been observing the vanishing reputations of his examiners on that occasion. At the time, the fall-out led him to neglect composition in favour of performing opportunities at the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The first pieces that attracted attention were folksong settings. Their broadcast on Radio 3 (twice repeated within a year by popular demand) led to requests from American public radio. Original compositions included a commission from the Scottish Arts Council for soprano, clarinet and piano (A Small Dragon – frequently revived) to words by Brian Patten, who praised the cycle. Some Roger McGough settings led that poet to provide unpublished poems for musical setting.

As director of the Petworth Festival, Norris produced a community cantata Interruption at the Opera House (again to words by Patten) and a notable Benedicite for children which was broadcast in 1990 on Radio 4's Morning Service, leading to innumerable requests for the music, which, alas, has still not been written down. (It will be performed by 500 children in Winchester Cathedral in 2009, however.)

In 1991 the BBC commissioned a work for the Mozart-year. The result was a radio opera (a very definite new genre drawing on Norris's experience of speech broadcasting, which had filled most of his time for the preceding four years) entitled Die! Sober Flirter. This has had extraordinary success wherever it has been performed, from America to Norway. Three different productions of it have been broadcast. Its success on tour in 2006 led to Norris's latest piece, a second radio opera, Pugwash walks the plank, which will receive its premiere this autumn.

On reaching his fiftieth year Norris felt he had achieved most of what he wanted in the fields of performance, recording, teaching and broadcasting. And so he turned more of his attention to composition, producing a number of piano pieces including a set of variations ' … play on; … ' , a song-cycle for tenor, cello and piano, Think only this (premiered and recorded by Philip Langridge, performed in the Brussels Festival by Ian Partridge), and a song-cycle for tenor and piano to poems by John Donne, Tomorrow nor Yesterday (premiered in 2006 by Mark Wilde).

The fluency Norris discovered on thus re-immersing himself in composition meant that he could fulfil the 2006 commission of the English Music Festival with the 70-minute Prayerbook, an oratorio about tradition and change. It was premiered by the Oxford Bach Choir under Nicholas Cleobury. Performers and audience alike were delighted to find accessible music with serious import. The piece has just received its second performance.

Most of the Piano Concerto was sketched on a tour of Ireland in 2007, though parts of the slow movement date back to 1994. It has three movements and lasts about half an hour.


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NORMAN O'NEILL (1875–1934)

O'Neill is the third composer in this programme (along with Holst and Vaughan Williams), to have had links with St Paul's Girls' School. When the school was founded in 1903, Norman O'Neill's wife, Adine, was appointed Music Mistress, and it was she who advised the High Mistress, Frances Gray, to invite Gustav Holst onto the staff. Norman O'Neill took over the school orchestra from Holst during the latter's leave to do educational work in Salonica during the war.

Norman O'Neill was born in London and grew up in Kensington. He studied with Arthur Somervell before heading over to Frankfurt on the advice of the highly respected violinist Joachim. There, he met up with several other young composers – Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner, Percy Grainger and Cyril Scott, together known as the 'Frankfurt gang'.

He spent much of his working life in the theatre – he was Musical Director of the Haymarket Theatre for many years. As well as conducting, he composed incidental music, producing more than fifty scores, including the highly acclaimed music for J M Barrie's play Mary Rose. He was also on the teaching staff at the Royal Academy of Music, was active in the Royal Philharmonic Society and was an adjudicator for the Associated Board. His death, just before his sixtieth birthday, was caused by a motoring accident.

His output includes a few ballets, and a wide range of chamber, choral and orchestral and instrumental music. He produced well-crafted pieces, full of charm and an easy delight, which do not deserve the obscurity that they currently face.

Em Marshall
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SIR HUBERT PARRY (1848–1918)

C. Hubert H. Parry was born in 1848 in Bournemouth, the youngest of six children, three of whom had not survived infancy. His musical talent was nurtured while at school in Twyford, where he also met S.S. Wesley at Winchester Cathedral. He continued his training at Eton, and was the youngest ever successful candidate to take the Oxford BMus examination in 1866. The following year he enrolled at Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied law and history. Although he was developing as a composer, Parry became an underwriter at Lloyd's of London to appease his father and his future wife's family.

While working in London, Parry continued to study music, first with William Sterndale Bennett, then with Edward Dannreuther, who was probably the most important formative influence on Parry, exposing him to new music including Wagner and Brahms, and providing him with opportunities to have his own music performed. After composing much chamber music, and eventually giving up his post at Lloyd's to concentrate fully on music, Parry achieved success with an overture, Guillem de Cabestanh, and his first choral commission, Prometheus Unbound, which has since served commentators as a convenient landmark in tracing the roots of the English musical renaissance.

Commissions for orchestral and choral works followed, including the first two symphonies. He became acquainted with Grove, who engaged him as a sub-editor for his famous Dictionary, and later appointed him professor of music history at the new Royal College of Music. No doubt inspired by Wagner's music dramas (he visited Bayreuth several times, and met Wagner in London), Parry tried his hand at an opera, Guinever, which was unfortunately rejected by the Carl Rosa opera company, and Stanford was unsuccessful in securing a performance on the continent. Renewed success was, however, secured with Blest Pair of Sirens, which later inspired Vaughan Williams to write: “I hereby solemnly declare, keeping steadily in view the works of Byrd, Purcell, and Elgar, that “Blest Pair of Sirens” is my favourite piece of music written by an Englishman.”

A series of successful choral works, including Judith, the Ode on St Cecilia's Day, and Job, as well as two further symphonies and the Symphonic Variations, followed. In 1895 Parry was appointed director of the RCM, a post he retained until his death, and in 1900 he became professor of music at Oxford. Around this time Parry embarked on a series of so-called 'ethical oratorios' in which he sought to express a personal philosophy, but which were not received enthusiastically. After a period of doubt and ill-health, Parry experienced something of an Indian summer, producing a number of books, a fifth symphony, the Ode on the Nativity, a symphonic poem, From Death to Life, and the Songs of Farewell. The First World War caused Parry great distress, as he witnessed the collapse of the Teutonic culture which he fervently admired, and the tragic fates of many members of the promising new generation of English composers.

That Parry's contribution to English musical life is invaluable is commonly accepted, but the immense value of his music is only gradually being recognised.

F.G. Huss
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ROBERT LUCAS PEARSALL (1795–1856)

Pearsall is best known for two choral compositions: his arrangement of In dulci jubilo, and the eight-part madrigal, Lay a Garland. He is often, and probably quite rightly, regarded as the doyen of the nineteenth-century English madrigal movement, and it would seem only natural to assume that his works were the result of a lifelong study of harmony and composition. However, the truth is markedly different:

He was born in Clifton (in what was then Gloucestershire, and is now the City and County of Bristol) in 1795, and at the age of twenty embarked upon a legal career, leading him to be called to the Bar in 1821. Thereafter, he practiced as a barrister in Bristol until 1825, when he moved with his wife and three children to Mainz in Germany, abandoning his career, and setting out on a new path of exploration and discovery, becoming a translator of Schiller and Goethe into English, a collector of antiquarian artefacts, a poet, and a pupil of musical composition. He was so successful in his musical pursuits that within three years of arriving in Mainz, Schott & Co. were publishing his earliest compositions!

In 1830, the family moved to Karlsruhe in the Duchy of Baden, where they remained until 1842. In dulci jubilo was written for the choral society at Karlsruhe in 1834, and Pearsall was also producing large quantities of chamber and orchestral music, and was enjoying their successful continuing publication by Schott. In 1837, whilst on a return trip to England (which lasted no less than a year), Pearsall was present at the foundation of the Bristol Madrigal Society, and it was for that august body that he wrote most of his twenty-one madrigals, and also so many part songs in the ensuing four years.

In 1842 he bought the Schloss Wartensee, which stands above the shores of the Bodensee, dividing Bavaria from Switzerland. There he lived in baronial splendour, resuming his study and composition until his death in 1856. Pearsall's music is marked by its characteristics of strong contrapuntal technique and also his peculiar harmonic idiom – the use of preparation, dissonance and resolution punctuates every one of his compositions in a textbook-perfect way, but where any Renaissance composer could never have tread, Pearsall embraces the harmonies of the nineteenth century, producing music which sounds simultaneously both ancient and modern. As more and more academic research is made into the hitherto unsung heroes of the nineteenth century, so Pearsall is at last beginning to achieve the recognition that he richly deserves.

James Hobson
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JOSEPH PHIBBS (*1974)

Joseph Phibbs studied at The Purcell School, King's College London, and Cornell University, and his teachers have included Param Vir, Sir Harrison Birtwistle and Steven Stucky. His works have been performed by leading ensembles in the UK and beyond, including the London Sinfonietta, Britten Sinfonia, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra (Washington). Much of his output has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and he has received commissions for the Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, and Bath festivals. He has also written for the theatre, scoring for a number of productions at the Wolsey Theatre (Ipswich), Sadlers Wells, Setagaya Theatre (Tokyo), and The Globe.

Large-scale works include In Camera (BBC SO/Slatkin), Lumina (BBC SO/Slatkin, 2003 Last Night of the Proms), Tenebrae (St Albans Bach Choir/Andrew Lucas), Shruti (LSO/Petrenko), Rainland (in collaboration with Stephen Plaice), and The Spiralling Night, premiered by NYWE under Phillip Scott at the 2007 WASBE conference. His largest chamber work to date, The Canticle of the Rose, was premiered at Wigmore Hall by Lisa Milne and the Belcea Quartet, and shortlisted for the 2006 RPS Chamber Music Prize. Other chamber works include FLEX (a joint RPS/BBC commission, written for the 2007 City of London Festival), Personnages for Nicholas Daniel, Arc de Soleil for clarinet and piano, premiered by Sarah Williamson at Wigmore Hall in 2008, and The Silence at the Song's End, a song cycle for soprano and string quartet based on poems by Nicholas Heiney, written for the 2008 Burnham Market Festival.

Commissions for 2009 include a clarinet concerto for Sarah Williamson and the Orchestra of the Swan, a work for the English Piano Trio's 20th Anniversary Concert, a development commission for a chamber opera (Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre), and a setting of Psalm 98 for choir and orchestra, commissioned by the Bachakademie Stuttgart to mark the Mendelssohn bicentenary. A work combining school choirs with the Britten-Pears Chamber Choir has been commissioned for performance at Snape Maltings in the autumn of 2010, and he will be Composer-in-Residence at the Presteigne Festival in 2011, for which he is writing a new work for strings. Plans are currently underway to write a percussion concerto for Dame Evelyn Glennie for 2011-12, as well as a song-cycle for James Bowman and Andrew Plant. Since 2003 Phibbs has combined his composing career with the editing and promoting of Britten's music, and he is a director of the Britten Estate. He was appointed to teach composition at Wells Cathedral School in 2008. His works are published by Faber Music, Oxford University Press, and BMIC (British Music Information Centre).


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HENRY PURCELL (1659–1695)

Henry Purcell lived during a turbulent time in English history, through the plague, the fire of London, and national financial and political instability. He died early, aged thirty-six, almost exactly the same age at which Bach began his long and productive tenure as Kappelmeister at St. Thomas' in Leipzig. Yet in that brief lifespan Purcell composed some of the finest music of that or any other age and came to be most justly called 'the English Orpheus'.

Purcell was fortunate in having had a musical father (a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal). After the early death of his father, his uncle, Thomas Purcell, played an influential role in the boy's upbringing and musical education. Purcell became a Boy of the Chapel at the age of eight, where he sang as a choirboy under Captain Henry Cooke, by all accounts an excellent musician and choirmaster. Purcell was taught to play string and keyboard instruments, and learnt composition, music theory, Latin and the 'three r's'. On Cooke's death, Pelham Humphrey took over as Master of the Children of the Royal Chapel, and was later succeeded by John Blow, a friend and teacher of, and great musical influence on, the young Purcell. When Purcell's voice broke at the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to Hingeston as an assistant keeper, maker, repairer and tuner of the King's wind and keyboard instruments, and he also did some copying. On the death of Matthew Locke in 1677 he took over as composer for stringed instruments at the Chapel Royal, and two years later was made organist at Westminster Abbey in succession to Blow – a position that Purcell was to retain for the rest of his life. 1680 saw his marriage to Frances Peters, a marriage that produced two children to survive to adulthood, Frances and Edward. Between this year and 1685, he was primarily a court composer, writing for Charles II. In 1682 he replaced Edward Lowe as an organist at the Chapel Royal, and in 1683 he finally took the position of Keeper of the King's instruments after his teacher, Hingeston, passed away. Purcell kept his position in court when James II succeeded to the crown in 1685, yet when James was exiled in 1688 and William and Mary took the throne, his career as a court composer declined, although he continued to compose odes for Queen Mary. Instead, he turned to the theatre and composed a great deal of incidental music and semi-operas – he had been familiar with theatre music since a boy, when the choirboys participated in the music of theatrical performances. Indeed, Gustav Holst wrote of Purcell “in one way Purcell is a finer stage composer than Wagner – his music is full of movement, of dancing. His is the easiest music in all the world to act”. At this time he also taught, helping to edit and contributing to Playford's The Second part of Musick's Hand-Maid and then later revising and updating Playford's Introduction to the Skill of Musick.

Purcell died in 1695, probably from a cold that took a turn for the worse, which it is rumoured he caught whilst shut out of his house one night – his wife, angered at his typical visits to public houses and late returns, ordered the servants to lock the door at midnight and not allow him in after that hour! He was buried beneath the organ at Westminster Abbey.

Although he had been well appreciated throughout his lifetime – indeed, a contemporary said of him that Purcell 'was confessedly the Greatest Genius we ever had', and Dryden wrote that 'we have at length found an Englishman, equal with the best abroad' – he was unjustly forgotten and unrecognised until the bicentenary of his death in 1895. Unfortunately, he was quickly forgotten again until a more sustained revival began in the mid to late 20th century culminating in his tercentenary in 1995. The composer Peter Warlock suggests a reason for the neglect of his music, astutely commenting that 'the forms in which [Purcell's music] was cast were for the most part dictated by his age, and it is the unsatisfactory character of these forms that is largely responsible for the neglect of his music', adding also that 'the quality of his music reveals Purcell as man of genius far beyond his age'. Indeed, the fact that composers such as Gustav Holst, Peter Warlock, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Michael Tippett promoted his music, and that Benjamin Britten imitated and championed him is testimony also to his greatness. Purcell's music is rich and varied, original and captivating and his word setting knows no equal. He encapsulated his art thus: 'Music is the exaltation of poetry. Both of them may excel apart, but surely they are most excellent when joined, because nothing is then wanting to either of their proportions: for then they appear like wit and beauty in the same person'. Purcell was a very prolific composer, and wrote in just about every musical form of his day, contributing considerably to the development of musical style.

Em Marshall
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ROGER QUILTER (1877–1953)

When Roger Cuthbert Quilter was born on 1 November 1877, Elgar was 20, Ethel Smyth was 19, Delius was 15, Vaughan Williams had just turned 5, and the ill-fated National Training School for Music, from whose ashes arose the Royal College of Music, had opened the previous year. Quilter himself was born within the sound of the sea, right on the coast, in Hove, by Brighton in Sussex. The family was wealthy and upper class – his father, William Cuthbert Quilter, was a stockbroker about to start acquiring a substantial estate around Felixstowe, and he also built Bawdsey Manor, on the headland overlooking the river Deben; he was made a baronet in the Diamond Jubilee honours. Roger, the fifth of seven children, went off to prep school (which he loved) and later to Eton (which he hated); he was never a very healthy child, and was allowed to forgo sports there in favour of music. At a time when a musical career was out of the question for someone of his class, he nevertheless went on to study piano (with Ernst Engesser) at Dr. Hoch'sches Konservatorium in Frankfurt, and while there also took private composition lessons (as did many others) with Ivan Knorr; it was at Frankfurt that he wrote 'Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal', though he revised it before its publication in 1904. Frankfurt attracted many English-speaking students, including Percy Grainger, Cyril Scott, Norman O'Neill, and Balfour Gardiner; the five were known as the 'Frankfurt Gang', though they were united, not so much by a common musicality, as by a common dislike of Beethoven.

He set up home in London – anywhere to get away from his philistine father – and within a few years had published the songs that first brought him to public notice (the Four Songs of the Sea, sung by Denham Price at the Crystal Palace in March 1901), his first set of Shakespeare Songs (which were highly successful), and the immensely popular 'Love's Philosophy'. He was dangerously ill with a duodenal ulcer, and in 1911 he wrote the incidental music to the children's fairy play Where the Rainbow Ends, which was performed annually from then until 1959, and led directly to the establishment of the Italia Conti stage school. He had become a household name, and in later years said that he was the only one of the family who – at one stage, at any rate – could have lived on his earnings. His Children's Overture, first intended as the overture to Rainbow but discarded for that purpose, was first heard at a Prom in 1919; even Edward Dent, whose thoughts generally hovered over Scarlatti, Mozart, Busoni and the modern continental composers, wrote in his diary that it 'delighted me & really brought tears to my eyes'. In the late 1920s, Quilter collaborated with Rodney Bennett (Sir Richard's father) on a light opera, called The Blue Boar; it was performed in a one-act version in 1933, revamped as Julia and given at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1936 (conducted by Albert Coates), and revised again and published as Love at the Inn. The Blue Boar score is lost, but Julia could be reconstructed from remaining materials; the waltz theme 'Love Calls through the Summer Night' is utterly captivating.

Quilter was deeply distressed by the death of his favourite nephew Arnold during the Second World War; that, together with the consequences of a prostate operation late in 1945, triggered a mental breakdown and he was admitted to St. Andrew's Hospital, Northampton, for six months. His personality changed, and he became very indiscreet about his homosexuality; there are claims that he was blackmailed, and though these remain unproven, they are all too likely to be true.

He remains best known as a writer of songs, each one a finely crafted miniature, redolent of Edwardian nostalgia – even his large scale works are, to all intents and purposes, short pieces strung together as pearls on a necklace. Grateful to sing and to play, they are full of an unmatched, exquisite art.

Valerie Langfield
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ALAN RAWSTHORNE (1905–1971)

Alan Rawsthorne, a Lancastrian born in 1905, first made his mark in 1937 with the Theme and Variations for Two Violins, performed at the International Contemporary Music Festival in London the following year. This highly acclaimed work demonstrated his prowess in the field of instrumental music, which was built upon throughout the rest of his career, which ended with his death in 1971. During that creative span he composed nine concertos, three symphonies, other orchestral works, a handful of songs and choral works. One of his major achievements was to make a substantial contribution to British chamber music of the twentieth century.

John M. Belcher – The Rawsthorne Trust
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TOM ROSE (*1991)

Tom Rose began improvising on the piano and violin at the age of six and started composing seriously five years later. At the age of thirteen, his work for piano, violin and choir, Their Name Liveth for Evermore, won a national competition organised by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and was subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Since 2006 he has studied composition with Jeffery Wilson at the Junior Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in addition to conducting and jazz piano (he has his own trio). He is also a member of the Aldeburgh Young Musicians programme. In 2008 he won the Junior Section of The Guardian/BBC Proms Young Composers' Competition with Moth Lamp, for winds, strings, piano and percussion – a piece written initially for fellow Aldeburgh Young Musicians. Through AYM Tom was introduced to, and has studied with, another of the composers whose work is heard at this recital, Joseph Phibbs.

Tom's work also includes orchestral and choral pieces, but he especially enjoys writing for smaller ensembles to bring out the quality of the individual instruments. Current items in progress are a song cycle for mezzo and piano and a BBC commission for this year's Young Composers' Prom concert: a micro-concerto for electric guitar and small ensemble. He says: “I am particularly aware of what Benjamin Britten said about composing: that it should be “of use to the living”. So of course Britten is an influence on my work, but many others, particularly twentieth century and contemporary composers, artists and writers, are too. I try to set something down on paper every day.”


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SIR CHARLES VILLIERS STANFORD (1852–1924)

For many years, Charles Villiers Stanford was remembered more as a teacher of composition than as a composer. Many of the most prominent composers of the British music renaissance studied with him, and stories of his curt dismissal of the efforts of many of his pupils as, 'All rot, me bhoy' are legion. Vaughan Williams later attributed his greatness as a teacher to his intolerance and narrow-mindedness – “if a thing was right it was right; if it was wrong it was wrong, and there was no question about it.” But Stanford was also a superb technician. “He could use the technique of any composer and use it better”, recalled Vaughan Williams.

Stanford was born in Dublin during the same decade as two other brilliant Irishmen who found their way to England, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. As a young man he quickly emerged as one of the most gifted musicians of his generation, studying in the then fashionable Leipzig and attaining early academic recognition through the appointment of Professor of Composition at the newly established Royal College of Music. Operas, orchestral, choral, chamber and instrumental music poured from his pen but, like his contemporary Parry, an obscure self-taught musician from Worcestershire eclipsed his star. There can be no doubt that Elgar had an element of genius denied to Stanford, but the neglect into which his works fell was unwarranted. However, his church music never fell from favour and the last twenty years has seen renewal of interest in Stanford's music, including his symphonies and other orchestral works, which has allowed the musical world to make an evaluation of his true worth as a composer.

Peter Reynolds
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SIR ARTHUR SULLIVAN (1842–1900)

Sir Arthur Sullivan is at once one of the best known and one of the most mysterious of English composers. He dominated British musical life for a generation (to an extent matched later only by Elgar and Britten), yet soon after his death he had become something of a footnote, an embarrassment even.

Of all the unsung aspects to his career, perhaps the greatest was Sullivan's role as a composer of English music and as a tireless campaigner for English music and musicians. His devotion to the concept of furthering an English school straddled the whole of his career, and the Savoy Operas were not an exception, but a part of it. His adoption of, and association with, Shakespeare, from very early on (not least with his ground-breaking music to The Tempest and some of his earliest songs) was part of the process. While many of Sullivan's non-English works acquired a unique quality from the 'local colour' that he loved to employ, it was a succession of English pieces that dominated his career at the height of his powers – not least The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), Ivanhoe (1891) and Haddon Hall (1892), in which English history was central. The Sorcerer (1877), HMS Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Patience (1881), Iolanthe (1882) and Ruddigore (1887) are – in their different ways – just as important in terms of their English settings, their echoes of older English composers, and their use of English dance and song styles.

Sullivan was seldom a political animal, and on the few occasions when he spoke out, it was in defence of the English musician. It was neither xenophobia nor self-promotion that led to him voicing concerns about the promotion of foreign conductors, or of foreign music predominating at state occasions. One anecdote records Sullivan as conductor of the Leeds Festival being praised for the outstanding quality of his orchestra, the assumption being that many of its members were foreign; Sullivan replied with his trademark sparkle, 'Not one.'

Sullivan was keen to see English music promoted in all its spheres; it was what led him to take on (in 1876) the principalship of the National Training School for Music, and to devote five years of his life to it (the School later mutated into the RCM). There are many testimonies to his support for other younger English musicians – Elgar and Ethel Smyth were just two who held him in deep affection. Even at the end of his life, Sullivan was instrumental in the development of the National Brass Band competition (to be held at the Crystal Palace): he saw it as a way of fostering wider involvement in music among the general population, and was typical of his proselytising attitude towards the art which he once described as his 'mistress”.

Sullivan contributed much more to English music than is often remembered. His first compositions – notably The Tempest (1861) and the Symphony (1866) – created enormous excitement and marked a critical stage for music in this country. Sullivan should certainly be accorded a leading role in the 19th century English Musical Renaissance, and all that it achieved for the later flowering of our musical life.

William Parry
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SIR MICHAEL TIPPETT (1905–1998)

At the time of his death in January 1998, Sir Michael Tippett was widely regarded as the greatest living British composer. His reputation however was not easily achieved. Unlike his effortlessly fluent contemporary Benjamin Britten, Tippett's music often seemed to emerge from a sense of struggle, something that he himself acknowledged, quoting Nietzsche: 'One must have a chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star.' During his earlier years, performers, critics and listeners often encountered difficulties with his music and it was not until the 1960s that Tippett's importance became generally accepted. Despite the warmth and generosity of his music, it was hard in the making and can make considerable intellectual demands on the listener. Whilst Tippett himself was always profoundly concerned with contemporary developments, his music has steadfastly refused to yield to the most contemporary of demands: that of instant comprehension and gratification.

As a young man Tippett studied at the Royal College of Music. For many years he lived frugally in the small Surrey village of Oxted, gradually developing an individual musical voice of his own. During the 1930s he conducted the South London Orchestra for unemployed musicians, was profoundly involved with left-wing politics and became an active pacifist. Indeed his uncompromising stance as a conscientious objector led to his imprisonment in 1943. During the war years he found his own personal voice, and his first masterpieces such as the Concerto for Double String Orchestra and the oratorio A Child of our Time received their first performances. Through to the very last years of his life, Tippett's music constantly strove to break new ground, to explore new ideas and possibilities. Even in his 80s his energy remained phenomenal, producing an opera, orchestral works and a string quartet. The epigraph that he chose for his opera The Knot Garden, might well have served him: 'simply the thing I am shall make me live.'

Peter Reynolds
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RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872–1958)

“The art of music above all other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation” said Ralph Vaughan Williams, and how truly he spoke. Almost all English composers of the early twentieth century exude Englishness in their works – and by this I don't mean that they all depict cows looking over gates, but that their music has captured something of the spirit of this country, and is recognisably English in style – and Vaughan Williams is most certainly not an exception. One need only listen to his exquisite Linden Lea or Oxford Elegy to find England personified therein! Yet he can be said to have had a healthy mix of both the English and the continental in his musical education. He studied under two of the musical 'greats' of their time, Parry and Stanford, at the Royal College of Music (RCM), as well as with Charles Wood at Trinity College, Cambridge. Abroad, he had a few lessons with Ravel (in Paris) and studied with Bruch (in Berlin). His own music, however, stands firmly rooted in all that is best in English music – indeed, Ravel is said to have called him 'my only pupil who does not write my music'. RVW himself said that “We pupils of Parry, if we have been wise, inherited the great English choral tradition which Tallis passed onto Byrd, Byrd Gibbons, Gibbons to Purcell, Purcell to Batishill and Greene, and they in turn through the Wesleys to Parry. He has passed on the torch to us and it is our duty to keep it alight”.

This love of Englishness and awareness of the importance of the English choral tradition manifested itself in many ways discernable throughout his works. Like his close friend, Gustav Holst, RVW was fascinated with folk song and this shines through in lilting, singing melodies and dancing rhythms in a great deal of his output. Another way was through his work editing the new English Hymnal. Originally intended as a fairly swift task to be completed in a couple of months, he stretched it out for two years, in which time he made extensive use of his passion for collecting folk songs. He set out to return the hymns to their original state, reducing the Victorian distortions of the simple melodies. He composed a number of hymn tunes himself for the Hymnal and commissioned further tunes from his contemporaries.

At the start of the war he enlisted in the medical corps and was posted to France, although aged 41. He lasted the war period well, making the most of his mixture of experiences, which would later add to the rich fabric of his compositions. After the war he returned to his former college, the RCM, as a teacher and spent some time re-working earlier compositions before turning his pen to what are considered to be his more mature and distinctive works.

He is one of only a handful of composers who continued developing musically well into old age, writing original and exciting works right until the end of his life. His oeuvre includes operas, nine symphonies, concerti, songs, ballet music, film scores, chamber and choral works, all of them innovative, evocative, moving and characterful, with an ability to surprise – sometimes shock (his fourth and sixth symphonies for example) – and delight.

He lived to the ripe age of 86, composing, writing film scores, attending concerts, and supporting other composes, always remaining the unselfish, affectionate, eccentric character that his many close friends knew and dearly loved.

Em Marshall
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