Welcome

Welcome to a new blog celebrating the life and work of the British composer, William Alwyn. 

Alwyn (1905-1985) was born in Northampton, the son of a shopkeeper. His father owned the Shakspere [sic] grocery stores - a store where each flour bag was engraved with a quote from Shakespeare. This stayed firmly in the young composer's mind, and when many years later his diary, which charted the progress of his 3rd symphony was published, the book was entitled From Ariel to Miranda. Hence the name of this blog.

The "Miranda" of the title of the published diary was Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003), Alwyn's former pupil, who later became his wife. Doreen was also a talented composer, and this blog will celebrate the life and work of both of them. 

The William Alwyn Archive is now held at Cambridge University Library (for more information email music@lib.cam.ac.uk), and contains a vast amount of Alwynabilia. This ranges from film scores to art music, photographs, drawings and poetry, and an amazing amount of ephemera collected throughout Alwyn's long life. There's more about this, on the library's webpages.

William around the time he received his
first piccolo. 

William Alwyn was born William Alwyn Smith in 1905. At the age of eight his family bought him a second-hand piccolo as a birthday present. William quickly became proficient on the instrument and started to compose. Sadly his first piece Sparkling cascades is lost, but several manuscript books of pieces composed between the ages of 10 and 13 survive, including one with a carefully prepared index and list of opus numbers. 

Aged 15 he entered the Royal Academy of Music, studying flute with Daniel Wood (I wonder if William wasn't inspired at least a little by Wood's work as a composer too), taking piano as his second subject; but by the summer of 1922 he had become a member of the Academy orchestra, and was starting to compose seriously. It was at this point that he decided to change to composition as his second study, and was fortunate to have as a composition teacher, John Blackwood McEwen, who was to be a great influence on him, and a lifelong friend. Alwyn won the Ross scholarship for the flute, and the Sir Michael Costa scholarship for his first foray into opera: The fairy fiddler, most of which is now lost, although the overture, the libretto, and an abridged vocal score survive.

While at the Royal Academy, Alwyn met his future wife, Olive Pull, a fellow student, who would later become a sub-professor at the Academy. The happy life as a student was to come to an abrupt end when Alwyn's father died suddenly. William was unable to support himself at the Academy without his father's help and had to become a jobbing musician to earn a living.

Throughout the time he was moving around the country whether playing with seaside orchestras for the summer season, or taking part in the Three Choirs Festival under Elgar's baton, he maintained a correspondence with Olive. Although the Archive only has her side of the correspondence it paints a vivid picture of life on the road. Late in the correspondence, William becomes a successful composer when Oxford University Press accepted some short pieces for publication. Then there was the decision familiar to many musicians, should he stay in a secure job (he was teaching at a private school), or should he strike out as an independent composer?

He decided to take the latter path, and was to be rewarded for this decision when he was invited by J.B. McEwen, now Principal of the Royal Academy, to return there to teach composition. 

With love from a koala bear. Alwyn about to return home to the UK after a teaching expedition to Australia.
From a letter written to his infant son.

In the following years, when William wasn't teaching at the Royal Academy or playing first flute in the London Symphony Orchestra, he went on several exotic expeditions as an Associated Board examiner to Australia and Canada. His letters to his wife and young son demonstrate what a tough life it could be being an examiner:- The vast distances covered, the relentless timetable, and the expectations of parents and teachers of examinees; one school belonging to a religious order refused to send their pupils to be examined by 'Mr. Alwyn' after being told by another order that he was a 'hard examiner'. These letters provide a fascinating insight into life as an examiner in the Empire in the early 1930's.

Upon William's return to England, through a lucky break, he became drawn into the British film industry. He describes the incident in his autobiography Winged chariot

“In 1936 an opportunity arose which I grasped eagerly. I had already played for a number of film sessions with small chamber groups (especially wind and percussion, for strings, in those experimental days, did not record well) and then the chance absence of the original composer going abroad before it was discovered that his recording had, through a mechanical fault, failed to register, led the director of the film with whom I had had a casual drink after the session, to call on me to compose in the shortest possible time a new score. So, by an odd piece of luck, I entered the British Documentary Movement as a pioneer of film music, two years after the young and brilliant Benjamin Britten had scored his first success with Night mail." [1]

Alwyn was to write an enormous number of film scores (86 features, 107 documentary films) ranging from short documentary films, a police serial, classic films of the British cinema, such as Odd man out and The history of Mr. Polly, and Disney hits like The Swiss family Robinson and In search of the castaways. Although there were opportunities for William to go to Hollywood, he always refused, preferring to stay in Britain, even the scores for the Disney films were composed and recorded here.

Odd man out, which won the BAFTA for best British film in 1947, was one of his greatest film scores. Alwyn would subsequently work with the director, Carol Reed, many times. They had a great respect for each other, as Reed valued the importance of music in setting the mood of a film. The plot follows the last hours in the life of an Irish gunman, Johnny, played by James Mason, who, badly wounded during a bank raid, tries to evade the police through the back streets of Belfast. When looking at the rushes of the film Reed quickly realized that there was a problem: James Mason's wounded walk actually looked as though he was drunk. Carol Reed conferred with Alwyn, who provided some new music to represent Johnny's walk, a composition that completely changed the atmosphere of the scene.

Sadly Johnny's walk is one of the few surviving sketches from Odd man out. The film studios destroyed many great scores, and Odd man out appears to be one of the casualties.

During the war after a brief stay at a house in the Chilterns with Alan Bush's family, Alwyn returned to his home in London, William became an air raid warden. Along with this work, William continued to compose under increasingly difficult circumstances, and teach at the Royal Academy. It was there in 1941 that he first met the young Doreen Carwithen, who was one of his composition pupils. Some of Doreen's diaries from the early 1940s survive and are now in the Archive at Cambridge University Library. They paint an astonishingly vivid picture of life at the time: a mixture of concerts, practice, student gossip, and sudden and violent death. One unexpected document also in the Archive, is the scroll giving William the freedom of the City of London: this was awarded to him in 1941 as thanks for his work on wartime documentaries. He composed many documentary scores during this period; everything from army training films to films about life on the home front on subjects such as evacuees, farming, women in industry, and news footage. William was immensely proud to learn, after the war, that he had been placed on a Nazi blacklist of prominent people to be immediately executed following the invasion of Britain.

By the end of the war William had renounced most of his pre-war concert works, although thankfully he didn't destroy them, all but one of his early 13 string quartets, and many delightful short works survive. In 1948 under the patronage of Sir John Barbirolli, who was a great Alwyn enthusiast, William started on the first of a cycle of four symphonies. 

Literature was to become an increasing passion of William's. As a young man he had taught himself French so that he could read French poetry in the original language. He was to embark on a series of translations of French poems, and this was to encourage him to launch into a series of literary ventures, which would include writings about music, literary and artistic criticism, biography, poetry, and even a novel.

He also had a passionate interest in the visual arts, and in the 1950's accumulated a significant collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Among his treasures were an early Tissot, and sculptures by Gauguin and Rodin (many of which are now in Northampton Art Gallery). In November 1962 he sold most of his collection in an auction at Sotheby's. The sale catalogue and associated press cuttings make fascinating reading:

"Anyone who thought that the boom had gone out of art, that prices and markets had reached their peak, had only to look at last week's sale of Pre-Raphaelites at Sotheby's to see that here is a new market with new highs.

'An angel with cymbals' by Burne-Jones, which was bought in the fifties by William Alwyn, the composer, for eight guineas, put on a 4,000 per cent increase to fetch £500. And 'Sardanapalus and Myrrha' by Ford Madox Brown, bought for £25, leapt 1,360 per cent to £340.

It's said that Mr. Alwyn, who is a keen collector of Pre-Raphaelites, had concluded recently that Pre-Raphaelite prices were moving up, probably because of the increasing interest in Victoriana. Last week's sale proved it."[2]

Also included in the sale were works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Frith, and Holman Hunt.

In the early 1960s Alwyn moved to Blythburgh in Suffolk. His last major feature film score was The running man,with his old friend Carol Reed, in 1963, and after that date he dedicated himself to the concert music that he always considered to be his best work. Sadly from this period onwards his fame as a film composer and his overtly romantic style did not find favour with those with influence in the musical establishment. This is reflected in a number of letters, notably with the BBC, other composers (Elisabeth Lutyens and Ruth Gipps), and friends and fans. He was generally philosophical about this, although occasionally his correspondence betrays his disappointment. Nowhere does this become clearer than in the case of his opera Miss Julie.

 Alwyn was a passionate opera lover, being especially fond of Mascagni and Puccini. He wrote three full-length operas The fairy fiddler (1922), Juan (ca. 1967) with a libretto freely adapted by the composer from James Elroy Flecker's play Don Juan, and Miss Julie (1977), again with a libretto adapted by William, from Strindberg's play. There was also a ballad opera, Farewell companions (1955), commissioned and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. 

Self-portrait

During the last 15 years of his life, despite failing health, William produced a large number of high quality works, as well as continuing to write and to paint. Many of his best loved works come from this period, including Naiades for harp and flute, his last 2 string quartets, a concerto for flute and 8 wind instruments, Sinfonietta for strings, his last symphony Hydriotaphia, Miss Julie, and 5 song cycles. Also during this period, there was a resurgence of interest in his music, particularly in the United States. 

In 1978 William was awarded the CBE. He had been at the heart of British musical life, not just as a composer and musician, but as a teacher at the Royal Academy, an examiner with the Associated Board, Chairman or council member of the Performing Right Society, the Composers' Guild of Great Britain, and the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and as a Fellow of the British Film Institute, for 40 years. Both William and Doreen were founder members of the Composers' Guild, and William was also instrumental in the creation of the Society for the Promotion of New Music. 

William died near his home in Blythburgh in 1985 just short of his 80th birthday. Doreen worked tirelessly in the years that followed to promote her husband's work, and to establish the William Alwyn Foundation. Following Doreen's death in 2003, papers relating both to William and Doreen came to Cambridge University Library. The Foundation continues, and since 2011 there has been an annual William Alwyn Festival staged in and around Blythburgh, Suffolk. The Festival includes chamber music, at least one orchestral concert, a film show, and talks. There's even a resident artist.

So follow the blog, and come to the next festival in October 2018.

[1] William Alwyn, Winged chariot : An essay in autobiography (Southwold : Southwold Press, 1983 ; Blythburgh : The William Alwyn Foundation, 1997), p. 7-8

[2] The Observer (November 18th, 1962)

Margaret Jones