The Sackbut was a British music journal published from 1920 to 1934 by the Curwen Press. It published general articles on mainly contemporary, both British and foreign, music as well as reports on performances and records. It was founded by the composer critics Cecil Gray and Philip Heseltine (aka Peter Warlock). The singer and composer Ursula Greville was an editor from July 1921 to 1934. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
The journal's editions ran from May 1920 (Vol. 1, no. 1) to February 1934 (Vol. 14, no. 7) and was published roughly speaking as a monthly, with exceptions in the first two years and last few years. Noted contributors included Harry Farjeon, William G. Whittaker, Aylmer Maude, Rutland Boughton, Upton Sinclair and Owen Rutter. [8]
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
Sir William Turner Walton was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar's Feast, the Viola Concerto, the First Symphony, and the British coronation marches Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre.
Sir Arnold Edward Trevor Bax, KCVO was an English composer, poet, and author. His prolific output includes songs, choral music, chamber pieces, and solo piano works, but he is best known for his orchestral music. In addition to a series of symphonic poems he wrote seven symphonies and was for a time widely regarded as the leading British symphonist.
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 theory of music. Earlier editions were published under the titles A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians; the work has gone through several editions since the 19th century and is widely used. In recent years it has been made available as an electronic resource called Grove Music Online, which is now an important part of Oxford Music Online.
Ernest John Smeed Moeran was an English composer of part-Irish extraction, whose work was strongly influenced by English and Irish folk music of which he was an assiduous collector. His output includes orchestral pieces, concertos, chamber and keyboard works, and a number of choral and song cycles as well as individual songs.
Philip Arnold Heseltine, known by the pseudonym Peter Warlock, was a British composer and music critic. The Warlock name, which reflects Heseltine's interest in occult practices, was used for all his published musical works. He is best known as a composer of songs and other vocal music; he also achieved notoriety in his lifetime through his unconventional and often scandalous lifestyle.
Classical music of the United Kingdom is taken in this article to mean classical music in the sense elsewhere defined, of formally composed and written music of chamber, concert and church type as distinct from popular, traditional, or folk music. The term in this sense emerged in the early 19th century, not long after the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into existence in 1801. Composed music in these islands can be traced in musical notation back to the 13th century, with earlier origins. It has never existed in isolation from European music, but has often developed in distinctively insular ways within an international framework. Inheriting the European classical forms of the 18th century, patronage and the academy and university establishment of musical performance and training in the United Kingdom during the 19th century saw a great expansion. Similar developments occurred in the other expanding states of Europe and their empires. Within this international growth the traditions of composition and performance centred in the United Kingdom, including the various cultural strands drawn from its different provinces, have continued to evolve in distinctive ways through the work of many famous composers.
Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 3, published as Pastoral Symphony and not numbered until later, was completed in 1922. Vaughan Williams's initial inspiration to write this symphony came during World War I after hearing a bugler practising and accidentally playing an interval of a seventh instead of an octave; this ultimately led to the trumpet cadenza in the second movement.
In the Fen Country is an orchestral tone poem written by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Vaughan Williams had completed the first version of the work in April 1904. He subsequently revised the work in 1905 and 1907. It is Vaughan Williams' earliest composition not to be withdrawn.
Martin Edward Fallas Shaw was an English composer, conductor, and theatre producer. His over 300 published works include songs, hymns, carols, oratorios, several instrumental works, a congregational mass setting, and four operas including a ballad opera.
Bernard Hélène Joseph van Dieren was a Dutch composer, critic, author, and writer on music, much of whose working life was spent in England.
Sir James Steuart Wilson was an English singer, known for tenor roles in oratorios and concerts in the first half of the 20th century. After the Second World War he was an administrator for several organisations including the Arts Council of Great Britain, the BBC and the Royal Opera House.
Cecil William Turpie Gray was a Scottish music critic, author and composer.
Hubert James Foss was an English pianist, composer, and first Musical Editor (1923–1941) for Oxford University Press (OUP) at Amen House in London. His work at the Press was a major factor in promoting music and musicians in England between the world wars, most notably Ralph Vaughan Williams, through publishing and encouraging performance of their works. In doing this work, he made the Music Department of OUP a major publisher of music in the early- and mid-twentieth century.
This is a summary of 1930 in music in the United Kingdom.
Francis William Galpin was an English cleric and antiquarian musicologist. He was known as a collector of old musical instruments.
Ursula Greville was a British soprano and folksong singer, songwriter, writer and editor of The Sackbut. She has been credited as the first woman recording engineer.
George Norman Peterkin, known to all as Norman, was an English composer and music publisher. He is perhaps best known today for his brief song “I heard a piper piping”.
Harold Rutland was a British pianist, music critic and composer. He began studying at the Guildhall School of Music, became organ scholar at Queen's College, Cambridge, and completed his studies at the Royal College of Music with Herbert Fryer, Arthur Bliss and Adrian Boult. A contemporary at the RCM in the early 1920s was Constant Lambert. Earning his living as an organist, choirmaster and pianist, he lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea during the late 1920s.