Composer

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1858–1944 British composer A determined and talented composer, Smyth studied in Germany and returned to England in the 1890s to well-received performances of her orchestral works and her dynamic Mass in D (1891). Although she wrote compelling songs and chamber music, her main musical attention was devoted to six operas, the most successful of which was The Wreckers (1902–04), a powerful tragedy in which two lovers defy their close-knit Cornish community. In ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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1913–76 English composer The finest English composer of his generation, Britten reacted against the folksong-derived pastoralism of his elder compatriots, finding inspiration in Purcell and influences as various as Mahler and Stravinsky. The international success of his opera Peter Grimes (1945) brought financial security, but he continued to appear as a pianist, accompanying his partner and outstanding interpreter, the tenor Peter Pears, and as conductor. He both founded and actively directed the ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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b. 1948 English composer and producer Lloyd Webber met the lyricist Tim Rice in 1965 and within three years they had written Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (1968), which displays a strong lyricism and a close affinity to pop. His most successful musical was Cats, based on the poems by T. S. Eliot, which was one of the longest-running shows in London and on Broadway. Lloyd Webber’s musicals are essentially episodic, ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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1883–1953 English composer Bax was strongly affected by Richard Strauss, Debussy and Ravel, but the formative influence on him was a Romantic image of Ireland, first encountered through the poetry of W. B. Yeats and reflected in such tone-poems as The Garden of Fand (Fand was the goddess of the Western Sea). His music is passionate (the tone-poem Tintagel was partly inspired by a love affair), subtle and richly coloured, marked by ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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1842–1900 English composer Sullivan was a Chapel Royal chorister, the first-ever Mendelssohn scholar and a student of William Sterndale Bennett. He was already a composer of distinction when, in 1867, he collaborated with the playwright W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) in Cox and Box (1866). Their Trial by Jury (1875) set the seal on a historic partnership that spawned a string of gems culminating with The Gondoliers (1889). Produced by the impresario Richard ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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1848–1918 English composer Parry’s precocious musical talents earned him an Oxford music degree while still a schoolboy at Eton. From 1867 he studied with Sterndale Bennett and Macfarren at Oxford, where he became Professor of Music (1900–08); he then succeeded Sir George Grove as director of the Royal College of Music. Although he produced four symphonies and chamber music, Parry excelled in vocal genres: the opera Guinevere (1885–86), several oratorios including Job ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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1852–1924 British composer Born in Dublin where he studied the organ, Stanford moved to London at the age of 10 to study the piano with Ernst Pauer. At Cambridge he was organist of Trinity College (1873–92) and founder-conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society, where he gave the premieres of many of Brahms’ works. He also studied in Leipzig and Berlin. From the 1880s onwards he taught at the RCM, where his ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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1857–1934 English composer Elgar was born at Broadheath, near Worcester. His father ran a music shop in Worcester, where Elgar embarked on a course of self-instruction that made him total master of music’s craft and one of the world’s greatest orchestrators. Brought up a Roman Catholic in a Protestant community and a tradesman’s son, Elgar never felt socially at ease. His early fame was in Worcester, spreading only gradually to the other Three ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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b. 1934 English composer Birtwistle, member as a student of the Manchester New Music Group, says his juvenilia are pastiche Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). Study with Richard Hall opened his ears to Stravinsky, Webern and Varèse, altering his musical style radically. In many ways his music is utterly individual; Birtwistle has said that he was driven to compose in order to try to create the music which existed only in his head. ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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1944–2013 English composer Tavener first had his music performed while studying at the Royal Academy of Music, but came to wider attention with the premiere of his dramatic cantata The Whale at the London Sinfonietta’s inaugural concert in 1968. The Beatles’ Apple label recorded both it and Tavener’s next work, the Celtic Requiem – an often unsettling blend of the Mass for the Dead with children’s rhymes, and of rudimentary note-rows with ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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1905–98 English composer Tippett’s open receptivity to a myriad of cultures and musical styles made him one of the most profoundly communicative composers of the twentieth century. His left-wing politics were to surface many times in his music and were of central importance in his life. His first acknowledged works were Piano Sonata No. 1 (1936–37) and Concerto for Double String Orchestra (1938–39). He has retained a firm belief in the formal ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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b. 1942 English composer and singer Most famous for his contribution to The Beatles, McCartney broke away from the group in 1970 with the album McCartney. He then formed his own group, Wings, with whom he created a number of successful albums, notably Band on the Run (1973). McCartney pays much attention to detail in his songwriting. He is acutely aware of the nuances of his lyrics and forms clear structures to ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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b. 1934 English composer Early use of serialism (Trumpet Sonata, 1955) led Davies to a less systematic method of composing with smaller sets of pitches (Prolation, 1958). Alongside this grew a fascination for the pre-Baroque. Davies makes particular use of plainsong themes, which he then subjects to quasi-serial transformations. A peculiar leaning towards parody was central to Davies’s early work. In Eight Songs for a Mad King (1968) the ravings of George ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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1816–75 English composer Bennett was a leading figure of the ‘London Piano School’, a significant group of pianist-composers that included Muzio Clementi (1752–1832), Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870) and Johann Baptist Cramer (1771–1858). A boy chorister at King’s College, Cambridge, he began studies aged 10 at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), where his teachers included Cipriani Potter. Close friends included Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, who wrote enthusiastically about him in the Neue Zeitschrift ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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1902–83 English composer After singing in the choir at Christ Church, Oxford, Walton became an undergraduate there, his talent attracting the attention of the Sitwell family (the poets Edith and Osbert and their writer brother Sacheverell). They supported him for 10 years, enabling him to write music at leisure until he earned enough to become independent. At first he was something of an enfant terrible, epitomized in a Schoenberg-influenced string quartet, later ...

Source: Classical Music Encyclopedia, founding editor Stanley Sadie
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