(b Northampton, 7 Nov 1905; d Southwold, 11 Sept 1985). English composer. He studied with McEwen at the RAM (1920-23) and later taught there (1926-55); in 1961 he retired to Suffolk to compose. He disowned everything he wrote before the Divertimento for flute (1939), which opened a neo-classical phase, followed in the 1950 by a personal vein of English Romanticism. His music is characterized by precise workmanship. It includes five symphonies (1949, 1953, 1956, 1959, 1973) and two string quartets, opera (Miss Julie, 1976) and songs (often to his own words: he also published poems and essays); he wrote over 60 film scores.
Born in 1905, William Alwyn was among the large group of post-Romantic English composers who gained popularity in the wake of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. A prolific composer, as well as a flautist and teacher, he worked successfully in various forms and idioms.
Alwyn was educated at the Northampton Grammar School, where he proved a promising student in both music and art. He attended the Royal Academy of Music from 1920 to 1923, by which time he had settled on composition as his main interest in life. His studies were interrupted by the death of his father when he was eighteen, and he was forced to go to work. He taught in a preparatory school and made the rounds of theater orchestras as a flautist before returning to the Academy three years later as a composition teacher. Alwyn's own breakthrough as a composer took place in 1927, when Sir Henry Wood conducted the premiere of his Five Preludes for Orchestra at a promenade concert in London. His Piano Concerto was finished in 1930, and his oratorio, a setting of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake, was completed in 1936. Despite many honors and awards, Alwyn abruptly abandoned all of his early works in 1939, regarding his technique as inadequate.
Alwyn turned to neo-classicism in the 1940s, and found inspiration for a resumption of his career. His later work included four symphonies, the first dating from 1949, two concerti grossi, a series of four Scottish Dances, and several programmatic orchestral works including the symphonic prelude The Magic Island, the gorgeous and haunting Lyra Angelica for harp and strings, and Autumn Legend, as well as a pair of string quartets and other chamber pieces, and the operas The Libertine and Miss Julie. His seventy film scores include Penn of Pennsylvania (1941), Green For Danger (1946), Odd Man Out (1946), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Rocking Horse Winner (1950), as well as many documentaries. He was made a Fellow of the British Film Academy. In 1955, Alwyn gave up his teaching position, and from 1961 onward pursued composition virtually exclusively. In 1978, he was knighted. Alwyn died in 1985.
There was something of an Alwyn renaissance in the 1970s, both in performance and a series of landmark recordings by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the composer himself, for the Lyrita label. In the 1980s and 1990s, younger conductors on other labels -- most notably Chandos -- began recording the symphonies and other orchestral works.
Alwyn's music is melodic and eminently accessible, if not always as adventurous as modern listeners might expect. His tunecraft could be both subtle and profound, as in The Magic Island (inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest and the Lyra Angelica, both compelling visions of beauty and mystery that rank among the finest pieces of program music of their era. His symphonies are plainer and dryer, but only slightly less attractive, with beautiful scoring and great technical vitality. All of these pieces were often regarded as out-of-date in the relentlessly avant-garde world of contemporary music at the time they were published, and they were largely ignored outside of England at the time. With the rebirth of interest in twentieth-century English music, however, Alwyn's work has gradually been finding a wider audience since the 1980s.
Career Highlights: A Night to Remember, Condemned to Life, The Swiss Family Robinson
First Major Screen Credit: The Future's in the Air (1937)
Biography
British composer William Alwyn studied at the Royal Academy of Music. Beginning in 1936 with documentary films, Alwyn switched to scoring feature films in 1945. During his long career, he wrote over 100 film scores. In addition to movie scores, Alwyn has also composed many symphonic works. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
William Alwyn was born in Northampton where he showed an early interest in music and began to learn to play the piccolo. At age 15 he entered the Royal Academy of Music in London where he studied flute and composition. He was a virtuoso flautist and for a time was the principal flautist of the London Symphony Orchestra.[citation needed] Alwyn served as professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1926 to 1955.[2]
William Alwyn had a remarkable range of talents. He was a distinguished polyglot, poet, and artist, as well as musician.[2]
His compositional output was varied and large and included five symphonies, four operas, several concertos and string quartets.
Alwyn could be considered a late Romantic composer whose style is not dissimilar to, for example, William Walton.[citation needed] He relished dissonance, and devised his own alternative to twelve-tone serialism, explained in his own programme note to his Third Symphony (1956): "the twelve notes used in a different way – in a tonal manner".[cite this quote] Eight notes of the possible twelve are used in the first movement, with the remaining four (D, E, F, and A-flat) constituting the middle movement, and all twelve being combined for the finale. (The composer adds "This all sounds very complicated, but I don’t think you will find it a difficult work to listen to."[cite this quote])
William Alwyn lived at 'Larkrise", Dunwich Road, Blythburgh, Suffolk[citation needed] and died in Southwold, Suffolk, England in 1985. He was survived by his second wife, the composer Doreen Carwithen.
Selected Works
The Fairy Fiddler, opera (1922)
Piano Concerto No. 1 (1930)
Tragic interlude for 2 horns, timpani and string orchestra (1936)
Violin Concerto (1938)
Pastoral fantasia for viola and string orchestra (1939)
Concerto grosso No. 1 in B flat major (1943)
Concerto for oboe, harp and strings (1945)
Symphony No. 1 (1949)
The Magic Island, symphonic prelude (1952)
Symphony No. 2 (1953)
Autumn legend for cor anglais and string orchestra (1954)
Lyra angelica, concerto for harp and string orchestra (1954)
Farewell Companions, radio opera (1955)
Symphony No. 3 (1956)
Elizabethan Dances (1957)
Symphony No. 4 (1959)
Derby Day, overture (1960)
Piano Concerto No. 2 (1960)
Concerto grosso No. 3 (1964)
Sinfonietta for strings (1970)
Juan, or The Libertine, opera (1971)
Symphony No. 5 'Hydriotaphia' (1973)
Miss Julie, opera (1977)
References
^ Ian Johnson, William Alwyn: The Art of Film Music (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), ISBN 1-84383159-7.
^ ab Mervyn Cooke, "Alwyn, William", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (New York: Grove's Dictionaries, 2001).
