John Douglas Louis Veale (15 June 1922 – 16 November 2006) was an

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

classical composer This is a list of classical music composers by era. With the exception of the overview, the Modernist era has been combined with the Postmodern. Overview Preset = TimeHorizontal_AutoPlaceBars_UnitYear ImageSize = width:1100 height:auto bari ...

Early career

He was born in

Shortlands Shortlands is a suburb of South East London, England, within the London Borough of Bromley. It has been part of Greater London since 1965, and was previously part of the historic county of Kent. It is located between Beckenham and Bromley, to t ...

Bromley Bromley is a large town in Greater London, England, within the London Borough of Bromley. It is south-east of Charing Cross, and had an estimated population of 87,889 as of 2011. Originally part of Kent, Bromley became a market town, char ...

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

; his father, the civil servant

Douglas Veale Sir Douglas Veale CBE (2 April 1891 – 27 September 1973) was a British civil servant and university administrator, who served as Registrar of the University of Oxford from 1930 to 1958. Life Douglas Veale was the youngest of three sons of a Bri ...

, later served as

Registrar of the University of Oxford The Registrar of the University of Oxford is one of the senior officials of the university. According to its statutes, the Registrar acts as the "head of the central administrative services", with responsibility for "the management and professio ...

(1930–1958) and received a knighthood. John Veale was educated at

Repton Repton is a village and civil parish in the South Derbyshire district of Derbyshire, England, located on the edge of the River Trent floodplain, about north of Swadlincote. The population taken at the 2001 Census was 2,707, increasing to 2,8 ...

and studied modern history at

Corpus Christi College, Oxford Corpus Christi College (formally, Corpus Christi College in the University of Oxford; informally abbreviated as Corpus or CCC) is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1517, it is the 12th ...

(his father's old college).Guardian Obituary
Guardian. 18 January 2007
The Independent. 20 November 2006. Lewis Foreman. Retrieved: 04/05/18 Discovering

Sibelius Jean Sibelius ( ; ; born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius; 8 December 186520 September 1957) was a Finnish composer of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely regarded as his country's greatest composer, and his music is often ...

and

Shostakovich Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, , group=n (9 August 1975) was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and was regarded throughout his life as a major compo ...

, and receiving encouragement from

William Walton Sir William Turner Walton (29 March 19028 March 1983) was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include ''Façade'', the cantat ...

, Sir Hugh Allen and

Humphrey Searle Humphrey Searle (26 August 1915 – 12 May 1982) was an English composer and writer on music. His music combines aspects of late Romanticism and modernist serialism, particularly reminiscent of his primary influences, Franz Liszt, Arnold Schoen ...

, he decided to become a composer, taking some lessons from

Egon Wellesz Egon Joseph Wellesz CBE (21 October 1885 – 9 November 1974) was an Austrian, later British composer, teacher and musicologist, notable particularly in the field of Byzantine music. Early life and education in Vienna Egon Joseph Wellesz was ...

.Obituary, ''The Times'', 9 December 2006, p 77 Veale sketched out his first symphony during the war while serving in the Army's Education Corps. After demobilisation he returned to Corpus Christi for more composition lessons with Wellesz and counterpoint and harmony with Thomas Armstrong. While there he began composing incidental music for

Oxford University Dramatic Society The Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS) is the principal funding body and provider of theatrical services to the many independent student productions put on by students in Oxford, England. Not all student productions at Oxford University a ...

productions, in which

Kenneth Tynan Kenneth Peacock Tynan (2 April 1927 – 26 July 1980) was an English theatre critic and writer. Making his initial impact as a critic at ''The Observer'', he praised Osborne's ''Look Back in Anger'' (1956), and encouraged the emerging wave of ...

and

Lindsay Anderson Lindsay Gordon Anderson (17 April 1923 – 30 August 1994) was a British feature-film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading-light of the Free Cinema movement and of the British New Wave. He is most widely remembered for h ...

were involved. Between 1949 and 1951 he won a scholarship to study in California with

Roger Sessions Roger Huntington Sessions (December 28, 1896March 16, 1985) was an American composer, teacher and musicologist. He had initially started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved further towards more complex harmonies and ...

and

Roy Harris Roy Ellsworth Harris (February 12, 1898 – October 1, 1979) was an American composer. He wrote music on American subjects, and is best known for his Symphony No. 3. Life Harris was born in Chandler, Oklahoma on February 12, 1898. His ancestry ...

(the latter's only English pupil). He composed ''Panorama'' as an orchestral tribute to San Francisco. Veale had married Diana Taylor in August 1944. In September 1951 came the death of their four-year-old daughter Jane. The Elegy for flute, harp and strings was written in her memory, and was adopted and recorded by the

Boyd Neel Orchestra Louis Boyd Neel O.C. (19 July 190530 September 1981) was an English, and later Canadian conductor and academic. He was Dean of the Royal Conservatory of Music at the University of Toronto. Neel founded and conducted chamber orchestras, and contr ...

the following year, with soloists

Richard Adeney Richard Gilford Adeney (25 January 1920 – 16 December 2010) was a British flautist who played principal flute with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the English Chamber Orchestra, was a soloist and a founding member of the Melos Ensemble. ...

and

Maria Korchinska Maria Korchinska (16 February 189517 April 1979) was a distinguished 20th-century Russian harpist and one of the leading 20th-century harpists in Great Britain. Early life Korchinska entered the Moscow Conservatory to study both piano and harp in ...

Composer (1950s-60s)

In the first half of the 1950s Veale's music was widely performed. ''Panorama'' was premiered by Sir

Adrian Boult Sir Adrian Cedric Boult, CH (; 8 April 1889 – 22 February 1983) was an English conductor. Brought up in a prosperous mercantile family, he followed musical studies in England and at Leipzig, Germany, with early conducting work in London ...

at the Elgar Festival,

Malvern Malvern or Malverne may refer to: Places Australia * Malvern, South Australia, a suburb of Adelaide * Malvern, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne * City of Malvern, a former local government area near Melbourne * Electoral district of Malvern, an e ...

in 1951, and later at the

BBC Proms The BBC Proms or Proms, formally named the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts Presented by the BBC, is an eight-week summer season of daily orchestral classical music concerts and other events held annually, predominantly in the Royal Albert Hal ...

in 1955. The Symphony No. 1 was premiered by Sir

John Barbirolli Sir John Barbirolli ( Giovanni Battista Barbirolli; 2 December 189929 July 1970) was a British conductor and cellist. He is remembered above all as conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he helped save from dissolution in 194 ...

at the

Cheltenham Music Festival The Cheltenham Music Festival is a British music festival, held annually in Cheltenham in the summer months (June, July) since 1945. The festival is renowned for premieres of contemporary music, hosting over 250 music premieres as of July 200 ...

in 1952. The Clarinet Concerto had its premiere at the

Royal Festival Hall The Royal Festival Hall is a 2,700-seat concert, dance and talks venue within Southbank Centre in London. It is situated on the South Bank of the River Thames, not far from Hungerford Bridge, in the London Borough of Lambeth. It is a Grade I l ...

in 1954, conducted by Sir

Malcolm Sargent Sir Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent (29 April 1895 – 3 October 1967) was an English conductor, organist and composer widely regarded as Britain's leading conductor of choral works. The musical ensembles with which he was associated include ...

. The ''Metropolis'' concert overture was also premiered in 1955 by Sir

Charles Groves Sir Charles Barnard Groves CBE (10 March 191520 June 1992) was an English conductor. He was known for the breadth of his repertoire and for encouraging contemporary composers and young conductors. After accompanying positions and conducting ...

). From 1954 film scores took up most of his time, ''

The Purple Plain ''The Purple Plain'' is a 1954 British war film directed by Robert Parrish, with Gregory Peck playing a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot serving in the Royal Air Force in the Burma campaign in the closing months of the Second World War, who is b ...

'' being the first. From that score he derived his choral work ''

Kubla Khan ''Kubla Khan'' () is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. It is sometimes given the subtitles "A Vision in a Dream" and "A Fragment." According to Coleridge's preface to ''Kubla Khan'', the poem ...

'', effectively evoking the atmosphere of the East. Eight film scores followed, ending with ''Clash by Night'' in 1963. The following year he composed the Symphony No. 2, his largest purely orchestral work. Unable to support himself and his family through composition work, Veale joined the ''

Oxford Mail ''Oxford Mail'' is a daily tabloid newspaper in Oxford, England, owned by Newsquest. It is published six days a week. It is a sister paper to the weekly tabloid ''The Oxford Times''. History The ''Oxford Mail'' was founded in 1928 as a success ...

'' as film correspondent and sometimes music critic between 1966 and 1980, and also worked as copy editor at

Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...

(1968–1987). From 1965 until he began work on the Violin Concerto in the early 1980s he stopped composing altogether, and even stopped listening to music.''John Veale: The Man and His Music: 1960s and 70s'', composer's website
/ref>

Later career

After 15 years of silence, Veale returned to composition with the Violin Concerto, which was broadcast by the

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...

in 1986 with soloist

Erich Gruenberg Erich Gruenberg (12 October 19247 August 2020) was an Austrian-born British violinist and teacher. Following studies in Israel, he was a principal violinist of major orchestras, including the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the London ...

and the

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra The BBC Philharmonic is a national British broadcasting symphony orchestra and is one of five radio orchestras maintained by the British Broadcasting Corporation. The Philharmonic is a department of the BBC North Group division based at MediaC ...

, conducted by

Edward Downes Sir Edward Thomas ("Ted") Downes, CBE (17 June 1924 – 10 July 2009) was an English conductor, specialising in opera. He was associated with the Royal Opera House from 1952, and with Opera Australia from 1970. He was also well known for his ...

. There followed (among other scores) the massive choral and orchestral work ''Apocalypse'' (which remains unperformed) and the Symphony No. 3, completed in 2003, which received its broadcast premiere in the year of his death. The Chandos recording of the Violin Concerto with soloist

Lydia Mordkovitch Lydia Mordkovitch (née Shtimerman; 30 April 1944 – 9 December 2014) was a Russian violinist. Lydia was born in Saratov, Russia, on 30 April 1944. She returned with her parents to Kishinev after the war. In 1960, she moved to Odessa, where ...

, issued in 2001, resulted in a further revival of interest in his music. Veale wrote in a tonal idiom and felt that his early work suffered neglect in the 1960s and 1970s under the avant garde musical regime at the BBC and its Director of Music

William Glock Sir William Frederick Glock, CBE (3 May 190828 June 2000) was a British music critic and musical administrator who was instrumental in introducing the Continental avant-garde, notably promoting the career of Pierre Boulez. Biography Glock was bor ...

. He died in

, (a south-eastern suburb of

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

) on 16 November 2006 after a struggle with prostate cancer.

Recordings

* Paul Dean recorded the Clarinet Concerto with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in 1999. * The Violin Concerto is available on the Chandos CD label, played by Lydia Mordkovitch with

Richard Hickox Richard Sidney Hickox (5 March 1948 – 23 November 2008) was an English conductor of choral, orchestral and operatic music. Early life Hickox was born in Stokenchurch in Buckinghamshire into a musical family. After attending the Royal Gram ...

conducting the

BBC Symphony Orchestra The BBC Symphony Orchestra (BBC SO) is a British orchestra based in London. Founded in 1930, it was the first permanent salaried orchestra in London, and is the only one of the city's five major symphony orchestras not to be self-governing. T ...

. * The Symphony No. 2 has been recorded by the

Royal Scottish National Orchestra The Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO) ( gd, Orcastra Nàiseanta Rìoghail na h-Alba) is a British orchestra, based in Glasgow, Scotland. It is one of the five National performing arts companies of Scotland, national performing arts compa ...

, conducted by

Martin Yates Martin Yates (born 1 July 1958, London) is a British conductor. After attending Kimbolton School (1969–1974), he studied at the Royal College of Music and Trinity College of Music, London, where his teachers included Bernard Keeffe (conducti ...

. * There are also some chamber music recordings, including the String Quartet. * Panorama, the Metropolis Overture and the Symphony No. 1 were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2002 by the

BBC National Orchestra of Wales The BBC National Orchestra of Wales (BBC NOW) ( cy, Cerddorfa Genedlaethol Gymreig y BBC) is a Welsh symphony orchestra and one of the BBC's five professional radio orchestras. The BBC NOW is the only professional symphony orchestra organisatio ...

, conducted by

David Porcelijn David Porcelijn (born 7 January 1947 in Achtkarspelen) is a Dutch composer and conductor. David Porcelijn studied flute, composition and conducting at the Royal Conservatoire of Music in The Hague. He also studied the baroque flute, specialising ...

to mark the composer's 80th birthday. * The Symphony No. 3 was broadcast by the BBC in 2006 with the

BBC Concert Orchestra The BBC Concert Orchestra is a British concert orchestra based in London, one of the British Broadcasting Corporation's five radio orchestras. With around fifty players, it is the only one of the five BBC orchestras which is not a full-scale symp ...

, conducted by

Barry Wordsworth Barry Wordsworth (born 20 February 1948, Worcester Park, Surrey, U.K.) is a British conductor. Wordsworth is Principal Guest Conductor of the Royal Ballet and has had a long relationship with company. He was first appointed as Assistant Condu ...

Selected works

Concert music * Symphony No. 1 (1945-7, rev. 1951) * ''Panorama'' for orchestra (1949) * String Quartet (1950) * Elegy for Flute, Harp and Strings (1951) * Clarinet Concerto (1953) * ''The Metropolis'', concert overture (1954) * ''Kubla Khan'', for chorus, baritone and orchestra (1956) * Symphony No. 2 (1964) * ''The Song of Radha'' for soprano and orchestra (1966, rev. 1980) * Violin Concerto (1984) * ''Demos Variations'' (1986) * ''Apocalypse'' for chorus and orchestra (1987-9) * ''Triune'', for oboe, cor anglais and orchestra (1993) * ''Encounter'' for two guitars (1994) * ''Triptych'' for recorder and guitar (2000) * Symphony No. 3 (2003) Film music * ''

'' (1954) * ''

Portrait of Alison ''Portrait of Alison'' is a 1956 British atmospheric crime film directed by Guy Green. It was based on a BBC television series ''Portrait of Alison'' which aired the same year. In the United States the film was released as ''Postmark for Dange ...

'' (1955) * ''The Spanish Gardener'' (1956) * ''

High Tide at Noon ''High Tide at Noon'' is a 1957 British drama film directed by Philip Leacock. It was entered into the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. ''High Tide at Noon'' was based on the first of a series of novels by Elisabeth Ogilvie, set in Maine. Location wo ...

'' (1957) * ''

No Road Back ''No Road Back'' is a 1957 British crime film directed by Montgomery Tully.''No Road Back''
at the

'' (1957) * ''

The House in Marsh Road ''The House in Marsh Road'', known on American television as ''Invisible Creature'', is a 1960 British horror suspense film produced by Maurice J. Wilson, directed by Montgomery Tully and starring Tony Wright, Patricia Dainton and Sandra Dorne. ...

'' (1959) * ''

Freedom to Die ''Freedom to Die'' is a 1961 British second feature crime thriller film directed by Francis Searle, starring Paul Maxwell and Felicity Young. Plot Craig Owen is an incarcerated criminal whose cellmate Felix knows about a safety deposit box with ...

'' (1961) * ''Emergency'' (1962) * ''Clash by Night'' (1963) * ''A Gift for Sarah'' (1988)British Film Institute
/ref>

References

External links

Composer's website
*
Elegy for flute, harp and strings, Boyd Neel Orchestra
{{DEFAULTSORT:Veale, John 1922 births 2006 deaths Alumni of Corpus Christi College, Oxford English classical composers People from Shortlands People educated at Repton School 20th-century classical composers Deaths from cancer in England Oxford University Press people Musicians from Kent Pupils of Roger Sessions English film score composers English male film score composers English male classical composers 20th-century English composers 20th-century British male musicians