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Music composition
I wrote my first work when I was five. It was for chime bars and Mrs Distin called it “William’s Tune”. This was 1963 and I think she was very surprised that a five year old would be able to come up with an original tune. I had played all the ones she had given…
Piano Sonata No. 3
Written as a memorial to my piano teacher Eleanor Purce a great devotee of Schubert and a pupil of Alfred Cortot.
Jan Sibelius
Nielsen and Sibelius This course involved comparing and contrasting the careers and music of two great Scandinavian contemporaries. Both were born in 1865, Sibelius gave up composing in 1931, the year of Nielsen’s death. The course was based round their magnificent symphonies but explored their whole contribution to C20th music. I ran this course at…
Franz Schubert
Schubert’s Finale The last 18 months of Schubert’s tragically short life saw the completion of a majority of his finest works including Winterreise, the Impromptus and Moments Musicals, the last three piano sonatas, the Piano Trios, the E flat Mass, the Great C major Symphony, the Shepherd on the Rock and the String Quintet. Like…
Johannes Brahms
Brahms and Bruch This was a comparative study of the two greatest German instrumental and choral composers of their day whose reputations have not fared equally well. Johannes Brahms and Max Bruch were two of the most celebrated composers in late nineteenth century Germany. Bruch predicted that his fame would fade as Brahms’s grew. Although…
Mrs Eleanor Purce
From 1976 to 1980 I had piano lessons from Eleanor Purce at Keele University. She had been a pupil of the great Alfred Cortot and as his writing on music did not include his method she decided to write her own version of how she taught based on the wisdom he passed on to her. …
