Raymond Warren

Last updated

Raymond Henry Charles Warren [1] (born 7 November 1928) is a British composer and university teacher.

Contents

He studied at Cambridge, and taught at Queen's University Belfast, where he was the first person in the UK to be given a personal chair in composition in 1966, before becoming Hamilton Harty Professor of Music in 1969. He was Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Bristol from 1972 until his retirement in 1994. [2] [3]

His works include a choral Passion, a Violin Concerto, three Symphonies, a Requiem, the oratorio Continuing Cities and an extensive amount of music for children, young people and community music making. He has also written six operas. [4] He currently lives at Clifton in Bristol.

Biography

Raymond Warren was born in 1928 and studied at Cambridge University (1949–52) reading mathematics at first and then changing to music under Boris Ord and Robin Orr. Later he studied privately with Michael Tippett (1952–60), Lennox Berkeley (1958) and Benjamin Britten (1961). From 1955 to 1972 he taught at Queen's University, Belfast, where from 1966 he held a personal Chair in composition. While in Belfast, an association with the Lyric Players theatre company involved writing music for many of the plays of W. B. Yeats.

For the years 1966–72 he was Resident Composer to the Ulster Orchestra, writing for them a number of orchestral works and also conducting the Orchestra in a series of Sunday afternoon concerts of contemporary music. [5] In 1972 he was appointed Professor of Music at the University of Bristol, a post from which he retired in 1994. Since then he has composed to commission for a wide variety of performers notably the Brunel Ensemble (Symphony No.3, In My Childhood) and the London Children's Ballet (Ballet Shoes, 2001).

He has collaborated with many other artists of note including the poets John Reed, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Charles Tomlinson, the choreographer Helen Lewis and the founders of the Lyric Theatre, Belfast and written for performers including Peter Pears, Julian Bream, Eric Gruenberg, Cecil Aronowitz, Janet Price, Christopher Austin, Jeremy Huw Williams, David Ogden and the Dartington String Quartet.

As a teacher, Warren's students include a number of composers and musicians who have gone on to have significant careers including: Christopher Austin, Eibhlis Farrell, Philip Hammond, David Byers and Will Todd.

Music

Major works include the oratorio The Passion (1962), Symphony No.1 (1964) the Violin Concerto (1966), Songs of Old Age (1968), Symphony No.2 (1969), the oratorio Continuing Cities (1989), Symphony No.3 (1995), In My Childhood (1998) and Cello Requiem (2018) as well as his six operas.

Chamber music includes two Piano sonatas, a Violin sonata, three String quartets and the Piano trio Burnt Norton Sketches (1985), which were later orchestrated by Christopher Austin (1999). Peter Jacobs has recorded the Monody movement from Warren's Second Piano Sonata (1977), which consists of a single line of melody with decoration. [6] Song cycles include Spring 1948 (1956), The Pity of Love (1966), Songs of Old Age (1968), the orchestral song cycle In My Childhood (1998), Another Spring (2008) and The Coming (2010). Music for children and young people includes the opera Finn and the Black Hag (1959), Songs of Unity (1968) written for Methodist College, Belfast and several pieces written for youth orchestras including Ring of Light (2005), A Star Danced (2009) and Variations on a Gloucester Chime (2012).

His shorter choral works include the cantata The Death of Orpheus (1953 revised 2009), the motet Salvator Mundi (1976), The Starlight Night (1990), the evening canticles written for Bristol Cathedral: The Bristol Service (1991) and Celtic Blessings (1996). Music for dance includes two notable collaborations with Helen Lewis, There is a Time (1970) and the London Children's Ballet, Ballet Shoes (2001).

Warren has worked closely with several poets, providing instrumental music to complement spoken words, including Lares (1972) with Michael Longley and The Sound of Time (1984) with Charles Tomlinson. The first of these was with his contemporary Seamus Heaney, A Lough Neagh Sequence (1970). Warren wrote:

"I knew Seamus Heaney quite well – we were both young lecturers at the Queen’s University of Belfast – and I thought of him then, before his coming to international fame, as essentially a deep-rooted Irish country poet. He didn’t want his poetry to lose its own “music” by being sung, and I was happy with this because, as an outsider to his tradition I felt I could not readily penetrate it with my music so closely. Hence the decision not to set his sequence as song but instead to have the poems read and to bring out their almost ritualistic long term structures with the use of overlaid piano interludes."

Heaney made a recording of this version of his poetry with Warren's music in 2011. [7] [8]

Many of his shorter works are among his most powerful including the solo cantata for flute, piano and mezzo soprano, Drop, Drop Slow Tears (1960) and the Song for St. Cecilia’s Day (1967) scored for tenor, flute, viola, guitar and first performed by Peter Pears, Richard Adeney, Cecil Aronowitz and Julian Bream. His best selling work as a recording is the orchestral suite Wexford Bells (1970). [9]

Selected works

(Impulse Music has a complete list) [10]

Opera

Oratorios

Orchestral

Ballet

Chamber

Piano

Organ

Cantatas

Songs and choral

Church music

Theatre Music

Discography

Publications

Related Research Articles

John Harris Harbison is an American composer and academic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Boris Blacher</span> German composer (1903–1975)

Boris Blacher was a German composer and librettist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sándor Veress</span> Swiss composer (1907 - 1992)

Sándor Veress was a Swiss composer of Hungarian origin. He was born in Kolozsvár/Klausenburg, Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire, nowadays called Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and died in Bern. The first half of his life was spent in Hungary; the second, from 1949 until his death, in Switzerland, of which he became a citizen in the last months of his life.

Arnold Atkinson Cooke was a British composer, a pupil of Paul Hindemith. He wrote a considerable amount of chamber music, including five string quartets and many instrumental sonatas, much of which is only now becoming accessible through modern recordings. Cooke also composed two operas, six symphonies and several concertos.

Marcel Mihalovici was a French composer born in Romania. He was discovered by George Enescu in Bucharest. He moved to Paris in 1919 to study under Vincent d'Indy. His works include his Sonata number 1 for violin and piano (1920), Mélusine opera, his 1st string quartet (1923), 2nd string quartet (1931), Sonata number 2 for violin and piano (1941), Sonata for violin and cello (1944), Phèdre Opera (1949), Étude in two parts for piano and instrumental ensemble (1951) and Esercizio per archi (1960). Many of his piano works were first performed by his wife, the concert pianist Monique Haas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dmitri Smirnov (composer)</span> Russian composer

Dmitri Nikolaevich Smirnov was a Russian-British composer and academic teacher, who also published as Dmitri N. Smirnov and D. Smirnov-Sadovsky. He wrote operas, symphonies, string quartets and other chamber music, and vocal music from song to oratorio. Many of his works were inspired by the art of William Blake.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pavel Bořkovec</span> Czech composer

Pavel Bořkovec was a Czech composer and music teacher.

Boris Ivanovich Tishchenko was a Russian and Soviet composer and pianist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Gál</span> Austrian composer, musicologist and pianist (1890–1987)

Hans Gál OBE was an Austrian composer, pedagogue, musicologist, and author, who emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1938.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eduard Hayrapetyan</span> Armenian composer

Eduard Hayrapetyan is an Armenian composer of contemporary classical music and educator.

Vladimír Soukup was a Czech post-romantic composer.

Graham Whettam was an English post-romantic composer.

References

Academic offices
Preceded by Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music,
University of Bristol
1972–1994		Succeeded by
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.