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1931 In British Music
This is a summary of 1931 in music in the United Kingdom. Events *24 January – Mary Garden makes her last appearance with the Chicago Civic Opera company. She retires to her native Scotland. *22 July, 22–28 July – The ninth annual International Society for Contemporary Music, ISCM Festival of Contemporary Music takes place in London and Oxford, with concerts of orchestral, choral, and chamber music. *''date unknown'' – Gustav Holst appears as an extra in a crowd scene in the film ''The Bells (1931 film), The Bells''. Popular music *"Close Your Eyes (1931 song), Close Your Eyes", by D. Carter and H. M. Tennent *"Lady Of Spain"; music by Tolchard Evans, lyrics by Erell Reaves *"Mad Dogs and Englishmen (song), Mad Dogs and Englishmen", by Noël Coward Classical music: new works *Havergal Brian – ''Symphony No. 2 in E minor'' *Frank Bridge – ''Phantasm'', for piano and orchestra *Benjamin Britten – **''Christ's Nativity, Christmas Suite'', for SATB choir **''Plymouth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands within the British Isles. Northern Ireland shares a land border with the Republic of Ireland; otherwise, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel, the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea. The total area of the United Kingdom is , with an estimated 2020 population of more than 67 million people. The United Kingdom has evolved from a series of annexations, unions and separations of constituent countries over several hundred years. The Treaty of Union between the Kingdom of England (which included Wales, annexed in 1542) and the Kingdom of Scotland in 170 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
String Quartet In D Major (Britten)
String Quartet in D major (with neither an official number or an opus number) by English composer Benjamin Britten was written in 1931. He revised it during his final illness, and it was first published in 1974. History The quartet was completed during Britten's second year of study at the Royal College of Music. Britten showed the score to his mentor Frank Bridge, who called its counterpoint "too vocal". John Ireland, his official teacher, disagreed. It was played through privately by the Stratton Quartet in 1932. Britten was "v. pleased" with the result, "it sounds more or less as I intended it". In 1974, the composer revised it for publication, at the urging of Donald Mitchell. The revisions seem to have been fairly small. Structure and analysis The quartet is in three movements: # ''Allegro maestoso'' # ''Lento ed espressivo'' # ''Allegro giocoso'' A complete performance takes about 19 minutes. Musicologist Peter Evans considered it an immediate background to, and to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Tippett
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett (2 January 1905 – 8 January 1998) was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime he was sometimes ranked with his contemporary Benjamin Britten as one of the leading British composers of the 20th century. Among his best-known works are the oratorio ''A Child of Our Time'', the orchestral '' Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli'', and the opera ''The Midsummer Marriage''. Tippett's talent developed slowly. He withdrew or destroyed his earliest compositions, and was 30 before any of his works were published. Until the mid-to-late 1950s his music was broadly lyrical in character, before changing to a more astringent and experimental style. New influences, including those of jazz and blues after his first visit to America in 1965, became increasingly evident in his compositions. While Tippett's stature with the public continued to grow, not all critics approved of these changes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Herbert Sumsion
Herbert Whitton Sumsion (14 January 1899 – 11 August 1995) was an English musician who was organist of Gloucester Cathedral from 1928 to 1967. Through his leadership role with the Three Choirs Festival, Sumsion maintained close associations with major figures in England's 20th-century musical renaissance, including Edward Elgar, Herbert Howells, Gerald Finzi, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although Sumsion is known primarily as a cathedral musician, his professional career spanned more than 60 years and encompassed composing, conducting, performing, accompanying, and teaching. His compositions include works for choir and organ, as well as lesser-known chamber and orchestral works. Biography Training and early career Sumsion was born in Gloucester, a cathedral city on the River Severn. In 1908, at the age of nine, Sumsion became a probationer in the cathedral choir in Gloucester, which was then under the direction of Herbert Brewer. After two years Sumsion became a full ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cyril Scott
Cyril Meir Scott (27 September 1879 – 31 December 1970) was an English composer, writer, poet, and occultist. He created around four hundred musical compositions including piano, violin, cello concertos, symphonies, and operas. He also wrote around 20 pamphlets and books on occult topics and natural health. Biography Scott was born in Oxton, Cheshire to Henry Scott (1843-1918), shipper and scholar of Greek and Hebrew, and Mary (née Griffiths), an amateur pianist of Welsh origin. He showed a talent for music from an early age and was sent to the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany to study piano in 1892 at age 12. He studied with Iwan Knorr and belonged to the Frankfurt Group, a circle of composers who studied at the Hoch Conservatory in the late 1890s. At 20, the German poet Stefan George helped Scott organize a performance of Scott's first symphony. He played his Piano Quartet with Fritz Kreisler, Emil Kreuz, and Ludwig Lebell in St. James' Hall in 1903. In 1902 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elizabeth Maconchy
Dame Elizabeth Violet Maconchy LeFanu (; 19 March 1907 – 11 November 1994) was an Irish-English composer. She is considered to be one of the finest composers Great Britain and Ireland have produced. Biography Elizabeth Violet Maconchy was born in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, of Irish parents, and grew up in England and Ireland. Her family moved to Ireland in 1917, where they lived in Howth, on the east coast. The adolescent Maconchy began her musical studies in Dublin, studying piano with Edith Boxhill, and harmony and counterpoint with Dr John Larchet. Those formative years in Ireland were important for Maconchy, who considered herself Irish. Throughout her career she was identified as an Irish composer, or as an English composer with 'Celtic' influences, by reviewers and commentators. In 1923, at the age of sixteen, she moved to London to enrol at the Royal College of Music. At the RCM Maconchy studied under Charles Wood and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Her contemporaries at the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gordon Jacob
Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob CBE (5 July 18958 June 1984) was an English composer and teacher. He was a professor at the Royal College of Music in London from 1924 until his retirement in 1966, and published four books and many articles about music. As a composer he was prolific: the list of his works totals more than 700, mostly compositions of his own, but a substantial minority of orchestrations and arrangements of other composers' works. Those whose music he orchestrated range from William Byrd to Edward Elgar to Noël Coward. Life and career Jacob was born in Upper Norwood, London, the seventh son and youngest of ten children of Stephen Jacob, and his wife, Clara Laura, ''née'' Forlong. Stephen Jacob, an official of the Indian Civil Service based in Calcutta, died when Gordon was three.Wetherell, Eric"Jacob, Gordon Percival Septimus (1895–1984), composer" ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 30 October 2018 Jacob was e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Herbert Howells
Herbert Norman Howells (17 October 1892 – 23 February 1983) was an English composer, organist, and teacher, most famous for his large output of Anglican church music. Life Background and early education Howells was born in Lydney, Gloucestershire, the youngest of the six children of Oliver Howells, a plumber, painter, decorator and builder, and his wife Elizabeth. His father played the organ at the local Baptist church, and Herbert himself showed early musical promise, first deputising for his father, and then moving at the age of eleven to the local Church of England parish church as choirboy and unofficial deputy organist. The Howells family's risky financial situation came to a head when Oliver filed for bankruptcy in September 1904, when Herbert was nearly 12. This was a deep humiliation in a small community at the time and one from which Howells never fully recovered. Financially assisted by a member of the family of Charles Bathurst, 1st Viscount Bledisloe, who had ta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patrick Hadley
Patrick Arthur Sheldon Hadley (5 March 1899 – 17 December 1973) was a British composer. Biography Patrick Sheldon Hadley was born on 5 March 1899 in Cambridge. His father, William Sheldon Hadley, was at that time a fellow of Pembroke College. His mother, Edith Jane, was the daughter of the Revd Robert Foster, chaplain to the Royal Hibernian Military School in Dublin. Patrick attended St Ronan's Preparatory School at Worthing, Sussex and Winchester College in Hampshire. However the First World War interrupted his education. He enlisted in the army and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery. He managed to survive unscathed until the last weeks of the war, when he received an injury necessitating the below-knee amputation of his right leg. This profoundly damaged his confidence and also caused him to perhaps drink more than was wise; he was in constant pain, for which alcohol provided some relief. Patrick's elder brother Peyton Sheldon Hadley ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gerald Finzi
Gerald Raphael Finzi (14 July 1901 – 27 September 1956) was a British composer. Finzi is best known as a choral composer, but also wrote in other genres. Large-scale compositions by Finzi include the cantata '' Dies natalis'' for solo voice and string orchestra, and his concertos for cello and clarinet. Life Gerald Finzi was born in London, the son of John Abraham (Jack) Finzi and Eliza Emma (Lizzie) Leverson. Finzi became one of the most characteristically "English" composers of his generation. Despite his being an agnostic of Jewish descent, several of his choral works incorporate Christian texts. Finzi's father, a successful shipbroker, died a fortnight short of his son's eighth birthday. Finzi was educated privately. During World War I the family settled in Harrogate, and Finzi began to study music at Christ Church, High Harrogate, under Ernest Farrar from 1915.McVeagh, p. 9 Farrar, a former pupil of Stanford, was then aged thirty and he described Finzi as "very shy, but f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, (; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the ''Enigma Variations'', the ''Pomp and Circumstance Marches'', concertos for Violin Concerto (Elgar), violin and Cello Concerto (Elgar), cello, and two symphony, symphonies. He also composed choral works, including ''The Dream of Gerontius'', chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-consci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for ''The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific ''A Treatise on the Astrolabe'' for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament. Among Chaucer's many other works are ''The Book of the Duchess'', ''The House of Fame'', ''The Legend of Good Women'', and ''Troilus and Criseyde''. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin. Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him as "the firste fyndere of our ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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