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Loveliest Of Trees, The Cherry Now
"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" is a lyric poem by the English Latin scholar and poet A. E. Housman. Originally written in 1895, it was first published as the second poem in his collection ''A Shropshire Lad'', where it appeared under the Roman numeral II, but without other title. It is usually referred to by its first line. Its theme, voiced by a young man contemplating cherry blossom, is the transitoriness of life and beauty, and the need to enjoy them while they last. It is probably Housman's best-known poem, and one of the most anthologized of English lyrics. Its opening line has become a part of the language, "inextricably lodged in the public mind and vocabulary". In a 1995 poll it was chosen as one of the British people's 100 favourite poems. It has been set to music over 60 times. Text Composition The original draft of the poem, the manuscript of which still survives, has been dated to April or May 1895. This first version consists of only two stanzas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Shropshire Lad
''A Shropshire Lad'' is a collection of 63 poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman, published in 1896. Selling slowly at first, it then rapidly grew in popularity, particularly among young readers. Composers began setting the poems to music less than ten years after their first appearance, and many parodists have satirised Housman's themes and poetic style. A Shropshire rhapsody Housman is said originally to have titled his book ''The Poems of Terence Hearsay'', referring to a character there, but changed the title to ''A Shropshire Lad'' at the suggestion of a colleague in the British Museum. A friend of his remembered otherwise, however, and claimed that ''A Shropshire Lad'' was always Housman's choice of title. He had more than a year to think about it, since most of the poems he chose to include in his collection were written in 1895, while he was living at Byron Cottage in Highgate. The book was published the following year, partly at the author's expense, after ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Untermeyer
Louis Untermeyer (October 1, 1885 – December 18, 1977) was an American poet, anthologist, critic, and editor. He was appointed the fourteenth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1961. Life and career Untermeyer was born in New York City, the son of Emanuel, German-Jewish jewelry manufacturer, and Julia Michael Untermeyer. He initially joined his father's firm as a designer, rising to the rank of vice president, before resigning from the firm in 1923 to devote himself to literary pursuits. He was, for the most part, self-educated. He married Jean Starr in January 1907, and their son Richard was born in December of that year.Tillona, Francesca (March 20, 2009). Jean Starr Untermeyer" ''Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia''. Jewish Women's Archive. www.jwa.org. Retrieved 2016-07-05. (Richard Untermeyer died by suicide in January 1927 while studying at Yale, at the age of 19.) After a 1926 divorce, they were reunited in 1929, after which they adopte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1895 Poems
Events January * January 5 – Dreyfus affair: French officer Alfred Dreyfus is stripped of his army rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island (off French Guiana) on what is much later admitted to be a false charge of treason. * January 6 – The Wilcox rebellion, an attempt led by Robert Wilcox to overthrow the Republic of Hawaii and restore the Kingdom of Hawaii, begins with royalist troops landing at Waikiki Beach in O'ahu and clashing with republican defenders. The rebellion ends after three days and the remaining 190 royalists are taken prisoners of war. * January 12 – Britain's National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty is founded by Octavia Hill, Robert Hunter and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley. * January 13 – First Italo-Ethiopian War: Battle of Coatit – Italian forces defeat the Ethiopians. * January 15 – A warehouse fire and dynamite explosion kills 57 people, including 13 firefighters in Butte, Mon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Shropshire Lad (rhapsody)
George Butterworth's ''A Shropshire Lad: Rhapsody for Orchestra'', first performed in 1913, is a work in the English pastoral style based on two of Butterworth's own settings of poems by A. E. Housman. It is a frequently performed work, for many Butterworth's greatest, and has come to be seen as an elegy before the fact for the young men who, like the composer himself, died in the First World War. Instrumentation ''A Shropshire Lad'' is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 French horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, harp, and strings. Structure The work opens in A minor with a theme marked ''Moderato, molto tranquillo e senza rigore'', which alternates between violas and clarinets over muted strings before being taken up by a solo clarinet. It then moves into a passage for full orchestra in E flat major, varied at one point by a ''tranquillo'' section in B minor. It finally returns to the A minor theme, introducing a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Somervell
Sir Arthur Somervell (5 June 18632 May 1937) was an English composer and educationalist. After Hubert Parry, he was one of the most successful and influential writers of art song in the English music renaissance of the 1890s–1900s. According to Michael Hurd, his most important work is found in the five song cycles, particularly his settings of Tennyson in ''Maud'' (1898) and Housman in ''A Shropshire Lad'' (1904).Michael Hurd. 'Somervell, Sir Arthur', in ''Grove Music Online'' (2001) Career He was born in Windermere, Westmorland, the son of Robert Miller Somervell and his wife. His father was a shoe manufacturer who served as a JP, of "Hazelthwaite" at Windermere (1821-1899). The Somervell (originally Somerville) family came from Scotland, settling in London in the 1700s. Somervell's brother, Colin Somervell, became a shoe-manufacturer like their father and later served as High Sheriff of Westmorland in 1916. Colin's son, Maj. Arnold Colin Somervell, O.B.E., served in this ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Graham Peel
eraldGraham Peel (1877 – November 1937) was an English composer. Life Graham Peel's father was Gerald Peel, a millionaire Lancashire cotton spinner and magistrate of Pendlebury, near Manchester, England. During his life, Peel was one of the first persons 'to take parties inside prisons to entertain the inmates', and of unobtrusive character, was later remembered for his generosity. Clothes and jobs for prisoners were provided through Peel with his involvement in the Dorset and Bournemouth Discharged Prisoners' Aid Society. He was a resident of 'Marden Ash', Bournemouth on his death, after a year's illness. A philanthropist, he died leaving £191,499. Compositions Peel wrote more than 100 songs, many of them settings of A. E. Housman. Many settings were for folk songs and pianoforte solos, and performed as far abroad as Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (conti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ernest John Moeran
Ernest John Smeed Moeran (; 31 December 1894 – 1 December 1950) was an English composer whose work was strongly influenced by English and Irish folk music of which he was an assiduous collector. His output includes orchestral pieces, concertos, chamber and keyboard works, and a number of choral and song cycles as well as individual songs. The son of a clergyman, Moeran studied at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford before service in the army during the First World War, in which he was wounded. After the war he was a pupil of John Ireland, and quickly established a reputation as a composer of promise with a number of well-received works. From 1925 to 1928 he shared a cottage with the composer Peter Warlock; the bohemian lifestyle and heavy drinking during this period interrupted his creativity for a while, and sowed the seeds of the alcoholism that would blight his later life. He resumed composing in the 1930s, and re-established his reputation with a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Matthews (composer)
David Matthews (born 9 March 1943) is an English composer of mainly orchestral, chamber, vocal and piano works. Life Matthews was born in London into a family that was musical, though not formally trained; the desire to compose did not manifest itself until he was sixteen, and for a time he and his younger brother Colin Matthews, also a composer, were each other's only teachers. The start of the 'Mahler boom' in the early 1960s, when the works of Gustav Mahler began to enter the regular British repertoire for the first time, provided a tremendous creative impetus for both of them; but although they have sometimes since collaborated as arrangers (in orchestrating seven early Mahler songs, for instance) and as editors (in the published version of Deryck Cooke's 'performing version' of the draft of Mahler's Tenth Symphony), as composers they have very much gone their separate ways. David Matthews read Classics at Nottingham University and afterwards, feeling himself still t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ivor Gurney
Ivor Bertie Gurney (28 August 1890 – 26 December 1937) was an English poet and composer, particularly of songs. He was born and raised in Gloucester. He suffered from bipolar disorder through much of his life and spent his last 15 years in psychiatric hospitals. Critical evaluation of Gurney has been complicated by this, and also by the need to assess both his poetry and his music. Gurney himself thought of music as his true vocation: "The brighter visions brought music; the fainter verse". Life Ivor Gurney was born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester, in 1890, as the second of four surviving children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress. He showed musical ability at an early age. He sang as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral from 1900 to 1906, when he became an articled clerk, articled pupil of Herbert Brewer at the cathedral. There he met fellow composer Herbert Howells, who became a lifelong friend. Alongside Gurney and Howells, Brewer's third pupil at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henryk Górecki
Henryk Mikołaj Górecki ( , ; 6 December 1933 – 12 November 2010) was a Polish composer of contemporary classical music. According to critic Alex Ross, no recent classical composer has had as much commercial success as Górecki. He became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during the post-Stalin cultural thaw. His Anton Webern-influenced serialist works of the 1950s and 1960s were characterized by adherence to dissonant modernism and influenced by Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki and Kazimierz Serocki. He continued in this direction throughout the 1960s, but by the mid-1970s had changed to a less complex sacred minimalist sound, exemplified by the transitional Symphony No. 2 and the Symphony No. 3 (''Symphony of Sorrowful Songs''). This later style developed through several other distinct phases, from such works as his 1979 ''Beatus Vir'', to the 1981 choral hymn '' Miserere'', the 1993 '' Kleines Requiem für eine Polka'' and his requiem ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Six Songs From A Shropshire Lad
''Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad'' is a song cycle for baritone and piano composed in 1911 by George Butterworth (18851916). It consists of settings of six poems from A. E. Housman's 1896 collection ''A Shropshire Lad''. Butterworth set another five poems from ''A Shropshire Lad'' in '' Bredon Hill and Other Songs'' (1912). Nine of the eleven songs were premiered at Oxford on 16 May 1911, by James Campbell McInnes (baritone) and the composer (piano). The following month, the six songs which make up the present cycle were performed in London, with McInnes as singer and Hamilton Harty as accompanist. A performance typically takes 14 minutes. The songs are as follows; the Roman numerals are from ''A Shropshire Lad'': # II " Loveliest of Trees" # XIII " When I Was One-and-Twenty" # XV "Look Not In My eyes" # XLIX "Think No More, Lad" # XXIII "The Lads in Their Hundreds" # XXVII " Is My Team Ploughing?" According to the music historian A. V. Butcher, Butterworth "was intimately c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Butterworth
George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, MC (12 July 18855 August 1916) was an English composer who was best known for the orchestral idyll '' The Banks of Green Willow'' and his song settings of A. E. Housman's poems from '' A Shropshire Lad''. He was awarded the Military Cross for his gallantry during the fighting at Pozières in the First World War, and died in the Battle of the Somme. Early years Butterworth was born in Paddington, London. Soon after his birth, his family moved to York so that his father Sir Alexander Kaye Butterworth could take up an appointment as general manager of the North Eastern Railway, which was based there. Their home was at Riseholme, a house on Driffield Terrace, which later became part of the Mount School. In 2016, the centenary year of his death on the Somme, biographer Anthony Murphy unveiled on behalf of the York Civic Trust a blue plaque to his memory at College House, Driffield Terrace, part of the Mount School. George received his first mus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
