Arnold Bax
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. He is best known for his orchestral music. In addition to a series of symphonic poems he wrote seven symphonies.
About Arnold Bax in brief
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. Bax was born in the London suburb of Streatham to a prosperous family. He was encouraged by his parents to pursue a career in music, and his private income enabled him to follow his own path as a composer without regard for fashion or orthodoxy. In his last years he found his music regarded as old-fashioned, and after his death it was generally neglected. The Times considered that Bax’s independence and disinclination to heed his teachers damaged his art, because he did not develop the discipline to express his imagination to the greatest effect. After leaving the Academy he visited Dresden, where he saw the great effect of Richard Strauss’ music on the German people. He also discovered and privately studied the works of Debussy, like that of Strauss, which was frowned on by the largely conservative faculty of the Academy. In 1942 he was appointed Master of the King’s Music, but composed little in that capacity. He died in London in 1947, and was buried in Kensal Rise, London, in front of his wife, Charlotte Ellen, née Lea, who he had married in 1903.
He is survived by his son, Clifford Lea Bax, who was a playwright and essayist, and two daughters, Helen, a writer, and Charlotte, a pianist and a mother-of-three. Brix was awarded a Macfarren Scholarship for composition and other important works. He wrote Tintagel, his best-known work, between 1910 and 1920, which is about a man and a woman. He had a lifelong association with the pianist Harriet Cohen – at first an affair, then a friendship, and always a close professional relationship. In the years before the First World War he lived in Ireland and became a member of Dublin literary circles, writing fiction and verse under the pseudonym Dermot O’Byrne. Later, he developed an affinity with Nordic culture, which for atime superseded his Celtic influences in the years after the first World War. He later put into general circulation the saying, ‘You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.’ Bax attended the Hampstead Conservatoire during the 1890s, and studied composition with Frederick Corder and piano with Tobias Matthay. In 1900 Bax moved on to the Royal Academy of Music,where he remained until 1905, studying composition and piano. An enthusiasm for folk music was widespread among British composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Parry, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Holst; Sullivan and Elgar stood aloof.
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