William Alwyn

WILLIAM ALWYN flourished in the most turbulent and rich of artistic ideas period of the twentieth century – between the 1940s and 1970s. Within this period, he wrote five symphonies, four operas, instrumental concertos, chamber and film music. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Music in London in flute and composition, he later joined the London Symphony Orchestra as flutist. Until 1955, Alwyn served as professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music. He was actively involved in the foundation of the Composers' Guild of Great Britain, which subsequently merged into the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, and functioned as its chairman in 1949, 1950 and 1954. He has also served as Director of the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, a Vice-President of the Society for the Promotion of New Music (S.P.N.M.) and Director of the Performing Right Society. For many years, he has collaborated with the BBC as an expert score-assessor in the selection of works for broadcast. Between 1941 and 1962, Alwyn wrote the music scores for over seventy feature films. Some of his scores and sketches are now in the William Alwyn Archive at Cambridge University Library. Alwyn describes his approach to composition as dissonant and alternative to dodecaphony and serialism, citing as an example his Third Symphony (1956, with premiere under the baton of Sir Thomas Beecham), where he uses eight notes of the possible twelve in the first movement, adding to them the remaining in the subsequent movements until the semitone scale is completed. Alwyn's concerto for harp and string orchestra was popularized when the American figure skater Michelle Kwan performed to it at the 1998 Winter Olympics. Alwyn wrote the symphonic prelude The Magic Island between his first two symphonies, commissioned by Sir John Barbiroli, who conducted the premiere of the work with the Hallé Orchestra.