William Wordsworth

William Brocklesby Wordsworth was born in London on 17th December 1908. He was a great great grandson of Christopher Wordsworth, brother of the famous poet William Wordsworth. With a similar love of nature, the composer was to find his home not in the poet’s Lake District but in the Scottish Highlands instead.

His musical talent was noticed as he became a teenager and he was to study under the composer and organist George Oldroyd in Croydon.

This led to Wordsworth’s first move to Scotland in 1934. He went to the capital to study under Donald Tovey at Edinburgh University. He studied there for 3 years but did not obtain a degree. Tovey was to make an impact on him and he dedicated his second symphony to him.

Before the Second World War he moved back to England. Wordsworth was a pacifist associated with the Peace Pledge Union and was secretary of the Hindhead Fellowship of Reconciliation Group. As the war drew nearer Wordsworth began work on the land, anticipating that he would be a conscientious objector. When his case came to trial this was made a condition of his exemption to military service.

He became concerned with the number of broadcasts his work was to receive by the BBC in London. He wrote to Richard Howgill, the Music Controller in 1957 : I am quite convinced that I have something to say, and an individual way of saying it which the ordinary music-lover is capable is responding to if he is given sufficient opportunities. I would not go through the labour of creation were I not so convinced.’

With the appointment of William Glock as Music Controller in 1959 the BBC changed direction again and began to champion avante garde composers instead. This did not further Wordsworth any more than before as his work was largely tonal and romantic in style.

In Spring 1961 he made the trip to the Soviet Union with the composer Thea Musgrave as a tour. Invited by Union of Soviet Composers of Moscow they were to meet Shostakovich and Khachaturian.

In the same year he moved to Scotland permanently, this time to Kincraig in Speyside. The stunning view to the mountains above Glen Feshie from his house was said to inspire him.

He was to suggest that the move to Scotland made his composing clearer and more direct : ‘I have always had joy in the grander aspects of Nature – mountains, storms, spacious views, and in the ever-changing colours of the Scottish Highlands. I cannot say if there has been any change in my style of writing since we came to live in Scotland, but I would like to think that it is becoming clearer and less complicated, more direct in its expression. In fact all the things it should not be, if one wants to be successful in the present musical fashions.’

In 1965 he was appointed representative of the Composer’s Guild in Scotland, and in 1966 with Robert Crawford he was helped found the Scottish Composers Guild. He was chairman of this body till 1970 and during this time became friends with many other Scottish composers.

He was to write 6 string quartets, many chamber works and 8 symphonies, the last No. 8 ‘Pax Hominibus’, Op.117 written in 1986. It was commissioned by BBC Scotland and dedicated to his friend and fellow composer Martin Dalby for helping him recover after a heart attack. It was premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Stirling on the 28th October of that year.

It was to be his last completed work. He died on the 10th March 1988 at Kingussie.

Selected works :-
Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3 :
Piano Sonata :
Cello Sonata :

Iain Hamilton

Iain Ellis Hamilton was born on 6th June 1922 in Glasgow.

After growing up in the city, his family moved to London when Iain was 7 years old. He was to become an apprentice engineer but began to study music in his spare time. He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in 1947 and won the 1950 Dove Prize on graduation. He was also to graduate as a Bachelor of Music from the University of London in the same year.

His first chamber works were to win various prizes :- First String Quartet (Clements Memorial Prize, 1950); Nocturnes for Clarinet and Piano (Edwin Evans Prize, 1951); Clarinet Concerto (Royal Philharmonic Society Prize, 1951). His Second Symphony (Koussevitzky Foundation Award, 1951) was also recognised.

By 1952, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra was performing his First Symphony (1948) under Trevor Harvey. His Second Symphony is one of Hamilton’s best known works, last broadcast on Radio 3 by (again) the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Jerzy Maksymiuk in 1996. Hamilton was to complete another 2 symphonies in 1980-1, the last commissioned by the SNO and performed by them in 1983.

His Scottish Dances of 1956 were commissioned by the BBC and received their first performance on St. Andrews Day that year. They were based on well known Scottish tunes that Robert Burns had used for his poetry.

Around this time Hamilton was getting more and more influenced by serialism, marking a period which lasted till 1966. His First Cello Sonata from 1958 was commissioned by Glasgow University.

His most important work from this time Sinfonia for Two Orchestras from 1959 was performed at the Edinburgh Festival marking the 200th anniversary of Robert Burns birth. The Burns loving audience was shocked by its serialism however; the President of the Burns Federation called the piece “rotten and ghastly”. However Alexander Gibson believed in it and recorded it with the Scottish National Orchestra for EMI.

In 2007 The Scotsman detailed the event in its Top 20 Scottish Classical Music Events of all time, and although it said there was no Stravinsky Rite of Spring style riot involved, it invoked the comparison. It remarked that the Festival performance was one of the very few and rare times that a classical music story ever hit the front pages of the popular press in the UK.

In 1961, Hamilton moved to the United States teaching at Duke University, North Carolina; and was resident composer at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. He was to stay in the US till 1981. Several trips to the West Indies in the 1960s seemed to influence his compositional style back to tonality.

He was not forgotten by Glasgow University in this time. They awarded him a honorary Doctorate of Music in 1970 and gave him the Cramb Lectureship from 1971, from which point he divided his time between Scotland and the U.S.

Hamilton was to write several operas, the first The Catiline Conspiracy (1973) was premièred by Scottish Opera in Stirling, 1974 . It was hailed by The Scotsman as a ‘masterpiece’ and the Glasgow Herald noted its similarity to the Watergate scandal in the U.S. It is another of Hamilton’s works to appear in The Scotsman’s Top 20 Scottish Classical Events of all time, an extraordinary achievement for such a neglected composer!

Hamilton was also hailed in England too. In 1974, the same year, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and given the Vaughan Williams Award. The BBC commissioned Tamburlaine in 1976, and English National opera commissioned the opera Anna Karenina in 1978. Back in the UK permanently in 1981, Hamilton then stayed in London.

He was to compose the orchestral work The Transit of Jupiter in 1995. It was performed by the BBC SSO under Martyn Brabbins in that same year. His composition rate was slowing down and last piece London for piano and orchestra was finished in the year of his death. He died on July 21st 2000 in London.

Available works are scarce:-
Piano Sonata :
His Spring Days :
Concerto for jazz trumpet :
Scottish Dances :
Sonata Notturna :
String Quartet No. 3 and Le Jardin de Monet for Piano :
From time to time, a few of his LPs also crop up on Ebay, particularly from sellers from the U.S. and Canada.
The LLC Book on Scottish Composers profiles Hamilton :

Robin Orr

Robert Kelmsley (Robin) Orr was born in Brechin on the 2 June 1909. His father was an organist and built an organ for his home, and the young Orr began his musical career on that.

He attended Loretto school in Musselburgh, and from there was accepted into the Royal Academy of Music in London. From there he moved to Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1929. In 1938 he had a brief period of tuition under Nadia Boulanger. After the war he became a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music in 1950.

In 1956 he became Gardiner Professor of Music at Glasgow University, and in 1962 became the first chairman of Scottish Opera, a position he held till 1976. He was given both a CBE by the Queen and an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University in 1972 . He was to oversee Scottish Opera’s move to the Theatre Royal in 1975.

His Symphony in One Movement was performed at the Proms by Alexander Gibson in 1966 and later recorded by the Scottish National Orchestra. Two more symphonies followed in 1971 and 1978.

Orr’s first opera Full Circle was written to a libretto in the Scots language by Sydney Goodsir Smith in 1968. Hermiston (1975, Edinburgh festival) with a libretto based on Robert Louis Stevenson by the Greenock screenwriter Bill Dryden and On the Razzle (1988 , RSAMD) followed.

Other works include the song-cycle The Book of Philip Sparrow in 1969 commissioned by New Glasgow Concerts and performed by the Scottish National Orchestra. He wrote Journeys and Places in 1971, a McEwan commission setting poems by Edwin Muir.

After marriage to his second wife who was Swiss, in his later years Orr moved to Switzerland. He composed his Sinfonietta Helvetica (1990) and became a dual Swiss national in 1995.

His autobiography Musical Chairs was published in 1998. He was also a keen rock climber and known gourmet; he had a column in the Glasgow Herald called Food and Drink. He died in April 9 2006.

Selected works :-
His Symphony in One Movement :
A Centenary Tribute featuring chamber works for strings :
Journey and Places and From the Book of Philip Sparrow :
His autobiography Musical Chairs :

Buxton Orr

Buxton Daeblitz Orr was born in Glasgow in 1924, 18th April. He was no relation to Scottish composer Robin Orr.

He came from a musical and theatrical background. His grandfather Richard Daeblitz led the second violins of the Scottish Orchestra and his mother Marie Daeblitz was a stalwart of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre Company.

Buxton trained as a doctor but gave it up to study music. He studied composition under Benjamin Frankel and was to follow Frankel’s lead in writing music for films. He used the serial technique in composition, using a form of the 12-note row.

In 1961 he composed an opera The Wager and a song-cycle The Echoing Green, but many of his best-known film scores also date from this period.

His film credits include : Grip of the Strangler (1958); Fiend Without a Face (1958); Corridors of Blood (1958); First Man Into Space (1959); Suddenly, Last Summer (1959); Doctor Blood’s Coffin (1961); Snake Woman (1961); The Eyes of Annie Jones (1964); and Walk a Tightrope (1965). Many of his film scores are for horror pictures. His incidental music has also been used in Doctor Who episodes.

His work often included Scottish themes too :- Canzona (1963) and Songs from a Childhood (1968) are based on various Scottish poets works; A Celtic Suite for string orchestra appeared in 1968; Highland Complaintes and Fancies (1976); and A Caledonian Suite (1980). He was to receive commissions from Glasgow University, BBC Radio Scotland and the Saltire Society.

In 1965 he joined the staff at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He founded the Guildhall New Music Ensemble in 1975 to encourage his students to play contemporary scores.

He gave up teaching in 1990 to devote himself fully to composition. His Narration for symphonic wind ensemble appeared in 1993, and a String Trio in 1996. He was to write operatic fantasies like Catfish Row and Tales from Windsor Forest in 1997.

He died in 1997, 27th December at his home in the Wye Valley.

Selected works :-
His Caledonian Suite :
His Piano Trios :
His A John Gay Suite :
Fanfare and Processional :
And a couple of his horror film soundtracks Corridors of Blood and Fiend without a Face can be found here :

Donald Tovey

Donald Francis Tovey was born in 17 July 1875 in Eton, England. His father was assistant master of classics at Eton college. The young Donald though was prevented from going to public school by his piano teacher.

He was awarded a scholarship to the ancient Balliol College – a college founded by the father of King John Balliol of Scotland – in Oxford gaining an third class degree in philosophy and ethics. (His was a joint degree in history and philosophy, the philosophy examiners felt he was a first class student, the historians weren’t at all impressed; the third was a compromise.)

His career developed under the tutelage of his piano teacher Miss Weisse, she even financed his Piano Concerto. Miss Weisse had a host of contacts, and before long Tovey was writing articles for The Times too. In 1911 he began writing articles for the Edinburgh based Encyclopedia Britannica mainly regarding 18th and 19th century music.

In 1914 he moved to Edinburgh and Scotland became his home from then on. He became the Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, taking over from Frederick Niecks, a post Tovey held until his death. In 1917 he founded the University’s Reid Orchestra which survived until the 1980s and taught many of Scotland’s up and coming composers of the time, Erik Chisholm, William Wordsworth and Robert Bruce among them.

He was knighted in 1935.

Tovey died in Edinburgh on 10 July 1940. He bequeathed to Edinburgh University his library of scores and music books. A portrait of him in concert at the piano by Morris Meredith Williams, art master of Fettes College in Edinburgh, is owned by the National Galleries of Scotland.

Today he is best known for his books on musical analysis, but he was also a noted composer.

Selected works :-

Sonata for 2 Cellos in G Major :
Piano Trios :
The opera The Bride of Dionysus :
Cello Concerto, Op. 24 :
Symphony in D :
Elegiac Variations, Cello Sonata Op. 4 :
Piano Concerto in A major, Op. 15 :
Cello Sonata, Op. 8 :
Variations on a theme of Gluck :
His book The Form of Music is still available :

Learmont Drysdale

George John Learmont Drysdale was born October 3, 1866 in Edinburgh. Through his mother’s side he was descended from Sir Thomas Learmont (c. 1220 – 1297) better known as Thomas the Rhymer. Drysdale would later compose a ballad in his honour.

As a child he took piano lessons from his teacher Miss Turnbull who also taught Alexander Mackenzie. At school he was fond of designing theatricals and composing their music. The design influence was seen when he left school and studied architecture but the composition influence won out in him instead.

He applied to the Edinburgh Royal College of Music in 1883 but was turned down due to lack of orchestration skills. His rejoinder was if he knew orchestration he wouldn’t have needed college in the first place! Instead he studied music theory privately under a Dr. Grieve and concentrated on his piano and organ playing.

In 1887 Learmont got a job in the All Saints Church in Kensington, London where he was de facto organist, choir master and concert organiser due to the ill health of the principal organist. He enrolled in the Royal Academy of Music in 1888.

He returned to Scotland in 1904, teaching for a short time at the Glasgow Athenaneum, but spent the rest of his short life composing.

In 1909 Learmont returned home to Edinburgh and tried to set up a Society for Scottish music. (It came to fruition after his death as the Dunedin Association.) He never married and was devoted to his mother. She was to die suddenly in May 1909 of pneumonia. He was just finishing off his opera Fionn and Tera when he suddenly developed the same illness a month later. He died aged only 42 on the 18th June 1909.

Like other Scottish composers of the time, his works are steeped in Scottish themes.

Examples include the overture Tam O’ Shanter (1890), the cantata The Kelpie (1891), the opera The Red Spider (1898), the tone poem A Border Romance (1904), and the cantata Tamlane (1905). Other works include the operas Fionn and Tera (finished by a David Stephen), Flora MacDonald, The Oracle, The Vikings and numerous songs and ballads.

There are currently no CDs of Drysdale’s music available, but it seems Chandos are currently considering it.

William Wallace

William Wallace, namesake of the Scottish freedom fighter and patriot, was born in Greenock in the 3rd July 1860. As a composer, he went on to write a symphonic poem about his more famous compatriot.

(There is also a American – Canadian composer, born 1933, of the same name. Confusingly there was also a William Vincent Wallace, an Irish composer, but he died 5 years after the Greenock Wallace was born. Quirkily, there is another Scottish composer named after another national hero :  Robert Bruce!)

This Greenock William Wallace was  a remarkable man. He was a doctor and eye surgeon, a classical scholar, a painter, a poet and dramatist and of course a composer.

After studying ophthalmology at Glasgow University, he then decided on music and went to London to study at the Royal Academy of Music at the age of 29. He lasted 2 terms there, but taught himself afterwards.

He was regarded as a rebel of his day, constantly challenging the staid nature of the music schools, calling on them to give  ’a chance to even the most bizarre and so-called eccentric compositions that are sent in’. To this end he also challenged the classical model and its composers: “If Haydn and Mozart were capable of profound expression in their work they certainly gave scanty indication of it.” he said in his 1908 book The Threshold of Music.

He was a pioneer of the Symphonic poem. In 1905, on the 600th anniversary of the national hero’s death, Wallace composed Sir William Wallace, based on the tune of Scots Wha Hae.

Along with other Scottish themes, Wallace also used works of many European poets. He was also to use numerology as a basis to his Creation Symphony.

In the First World War, he returned to his medical profession temporarily as as an Inspector of ophthalmic units in Eastern Command, tending to the injured and dying at the Front.  He was then in his fifties but treated around 19 000 cases and had only 3 weeks leave in the whole war!! Truly an exceptional man.

He died on the 16th December 1940.

Selected works :-
Symphonic Poems :
Creation Symphony :
His previously mentioned book The Threshold of Music :