Frederick May (9 June 1911 – 8 September 1985) was an Irish composer and arranger. His musical career was seriously hindered by a lifelong hearing problem and he produced relatively few compositions.

Early years

Frederick May was born into a Dublin Protestant family who lived in the suburb of

Donnybrook Donnybrook may refer to: Places Australia * Donnybrook, Queensland, Australia * Donnybrook, Western Australia * Donnybrook, Victoria, Australia ** Donnybrook railway station, Victoria, Australia Canada * Donnybrook, Ontario, a former village in ...

. His father, also named Frederick, was employed at the Guinness Brewery. May pursued his musical studies at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he was taught composition by John Larchet. In 1930, McCullough Pigott and Co. published his ''Irish Love Song''. The same year he was awarded the Esposito Cup at the Feis Ceoil and as a result of this he was nominated as the first recipient of a new scholarship prize worth £100 to be spent on the further study of piano. In July he took his preliminary examination for the BMus at Trinity College Dublin before departing Dublin to utilise his scholarship in London. In September he enrolled at the Royal College of Music where his teachers included Charles Kitson,

Ralph Vaughan Williams Ralph Vaughan Williams, (; 12 October 1872– 26 August 1958) was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over ...

R. O. Morris Reginald Owen Morris (3 March 1886 – 15 December 1948), known professionally and by his friends by his initials, as R.O. Morris, was a British composer and teacher. Teacher and author Morris was born in York, son of Army officer Reginald ...

and Gordon Jacob. He took his final TCD examination in December 1931 submitting a string quartet and on 10 December his degree was conferred. During 1932 May's study was funded by the RCM's Foli Scholarship and in October May was awarded the Octavia Travelling Scholarship. On 17 March 1933 there was a first orchestral run through of May's Scherzo for orchestra, and it received its first public performance on 1 December when it was heard as part of the Patron's Concert. Between the months of May and October May composed his ''Four Romantic Songs'', which received their premiere in London at a Macnaghten-Lemare concert on 22 January 1934. At some point, probably in the second half of 1933, May followed in the footsteps of other Octavia Scholarship winners and travelled to Vienna to study with Egon Wellesz.

Life and career

On 1 January 1936, he took up the position of Director of Music at the Abbey Theatre Dublin, a position he retained until he was fired in 1948. His duties mainly consisted of leading the piano trio which bore the title "The Abbey Orchestra" in music during the intervals of productions. In 1936 he composed what is today his best known composition, the String Quartet in C Minor, but it was not premiered until 1948 when it was performed by the Martin Quartet in the Wigmore Hall, London. This was followed by the ''Symphonic Ballad'' (1937), the Suite of Irish Airs (1937), ''Spring Nocturne'' (1938), ''Songs from Prison'' (1941) and the Lyric Movement for Strings (1942). May effectively ceased original composition at this point, the major exception being his late orchestral work ''Sunlight and Shadow'', which was premiered in January 1956. Later work was confined to arrangements and the revision of earlier compositions. Throughout his life May suffered from significant mental health issues which resulted in hospitalisation. He also experienced otosclerosis, as a result of which May was gradually to become increasingly deaf. In addition he suffered from severe tinnitus with constant ringing noises in his head. In later life he became homeless for a time due to alcoholism and slept at night in Grangegorman Asylum, Dublin. He was rescued by some friends led by Garech Browne whose record company Claddagh recorded the String Quartet in 1974. Throughout his career May was an advocate of better musical education in Ireland and expressed his views on this and other musical matters through the medium of '' The Bell'', a monthly journal dealing with the arts. He was a co-founder, along with

Brian Boydell Brian Patrick Boydell (17 March 1917 – 8 November 2000) was an Irish composer whose works include orchestral pieces, chamber music, and songs. He was Professor of Music at Trinity College Dublin for 20 years, founder of the Dowland Consort, con ...

and Aloys Fleischmann, of the

Music Association of Ireland The Music Association of Ireland (MAI) was set up in 1948 to improve the position of classical music within the cultural life of Ireland. It was instrumental in setting up the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland and played a leading role in the lo ...

(now "Friends of Classical Music"), set up in 1948 to promote art music as an integral part of the cultural life of Ireland. Later he became a member of Aosdána. He lived for the last years of his life at Clontarf orthopaedic hospital, Dublin. He died at the age of 74 and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.

Music

May's compositions are few in number and he produced most of his small output in the 1930s and early 1940s.The Contemporary Music Centre Ireland
retrieved 6 December 2010. May's first significant work was the ''Scherzo for Orchestra'', written while he was still a student in London. In 1936 he composed his ''String Quartet in C Minor'', described in the ''

Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theo ...

'' as "one of the most individual statements from an Irish composer in the first half of the 20th century"."May, Frederick", ''Grove Music Online''
retrieved 6 December 2010. May composed the quartet as his hearing was beginning to deteriorate and he later described it as "an appeal for release".''The Irish Times'', "Frederick May", 12 December 1974. The first performance of his ''Songs From Prison'', a setting for

baritone A baritone is a type of classical male singing voice whose vocal range lies between the bass and the tenor voice-types. The term originates from the Greek (), meaning "heavy sounding". Composers typically write music for this voice in the r ...

and orchestra of poems by Ernst Toller and Erich Stadlen, was broadcast on BBC Radio in December 1942. For fellow composer

Arthur Duff Arthur Knox Duff (13 March 1899 – 23 September 1956) was an Irish composer and conductor, best known for his short orchestral pieces such as the Handel-inspired ''Echoes of Georgian Dublin''. His career also encompassed senior positions in th ...

, the work demonstrated that May was "more a follower of Mahler and Berg than a successor to (Charles Villiers)

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

and (Hamilton)

Harty Harty is a small hamlet on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent consisting of a few cottages, a church and a public house, the Ferry Inn (a ). It is part of the civil parish of Leysdown. History The earliest recorded evidence of human occupation co ...

". Following a long break from composition, May produced what was to be his valedictory work in 1955. This was the nine-minute orchestral piece ''Sunlight and Shadows'', given its first performance on 22 January 1956 by the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra at Dublin's Gaiety Theatre. Although this was his last original work, May did not abandon music completely. He produced arrangements of Irish music for Radio Éireann, which while not perhaps rewarding artistically did help to alleviate his always precarious financial situation. May also composed a number of songs for voice and piano and a short piece entitled ''Idyll'' for violin and piano. The latter was chosen as a set work for the junior violin competition at the Feis Ceoil in 2017.

Recordings

*''Suite of Irish Airs'', Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra, Milan Horvat (cond.), on: Decca (USA) DL 9843, LP (1958). *''String Quartet in C Minor'', Aeolian Quartet, on: Claddagh Records CSM2, LP (1974); re-issued on CD in 2020 (CSM2CD). *''String Quartet in C Minor'', Vanbrugh Quartet, on
Marco Polo 8.223888
CD (1996). *''Sunlight and Shadow'', ''Scherzo'', ''Spring Nocturne'', ''Suite of Irish Airs'', ''Songs from Prison'', RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Owen Gilhooley (baritone), Robert Houlihan (cond.), on
RTÉ lyric fm CD 135
CD (2011). * ''Irish Love Song'', ''Hesperus'', ''Spring'', ''Drought'', ''The Little Black Boy'', ''I Sing of a Maiden'', ''Herdsman'', ''April'', ''Evening on Road, Dun Laoghaire'', ''By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame'', ''The Traveller'', ''The Finch'', ''Brimscombe'', ''Communion'', ''North Labrador'', ''Garden Abstract'', ''Dialogue'', ''Four Romantic Songs''; Owen Gilhooley (tenor), Catherina Lemoni O'Doherty (piano), Vanbrugh Quartet; on: DIT CMD 004 (CD accompanying the book edited by Mark Fitzgerald, see 'Bibliography', 2016).

Bibliography

* T.O.S. omás Ó Súilleabháin? "Spring Nocturne: A Profile of Frederick May", in: ''Counterpoint'' 2 (1970) November, pp. 14–18. * Kent Kay: ""Frederick May", in: ''The Irish Times'', 12 December 1974. * Fanny Feehan: " The Fiery Soul", in: ''Hibernia'', 10 January 1975. * Axel Klein: ''Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert'' (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1996). * Philip Graydon: ''Modernism in Ireland and its Cultural Context in the Music and Writings of Frederick May,

and Aloys Fleischmann'' (unpublished MA thesis, Maynooth University, 1999). * Mark Fitzgerald: "Inventing Identities: The Case of Frederick May", in: Mark Fitzgerald & John O'Flynn (eds.): ''Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond'' (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 83–101. * Mark Fitzgerald (ed.):
The Songs of Frederick May
' (Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2016) – with CD. * Mark Fitzgerald:
Retrieving the real Frederick May'
(Journal of the Society of Musicology Ireland, 2019) * Mark Fitzgerald:
Mogu and the Unicorn: Frederick May's music for the Gate Theatre
(in ''A Stage of Emancipation: Change and Progress at the Dublin Gate Theatre'', edited by Marguérite Corporaal and Ruud van den Beuken, 151–66. Liverpool University Press, 2021)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:May, Frederick 1911 births 1985 deaths 20th-century classical composers 20th-century male musicians Alumni of the Royal College of Music Alumni of Trinity College Dublin Aosdána members Burials at Mount Jerome Cemetery and Crematorium Deaf classical musicians Deaf people from Ireland Irish classical composers Irish male classical composers LGBT classical composers Musicians from Dublin (city) People from Donnybrook, Dublin Pupils of Ralph Vaughan Williams