A 248TH GARLAND OF BRITISH LIGHT MUSIC COMPOSERS
We start with a Victorian all-rounder, W.H. Jude
of Liverpool, known in his day as organist, speaker on music and composer
– of hymns, organ solos, piano pieces (Festival March was popular),
ballad-type songs (among them Consecration, Plymouth Sound, The Landlord’s
Daughter, The Skipper, The Young Brigade and, much the most popular
of all and still to be encountered sometimes even today, The Mighty
Deep). There was also a comic opera Innocents Abroad, or Going
Over to Rome (1882) which featured a variety of entertaining vocal
numbers: Bumps (about phrenology), Do As the Romans Do, The
Goblin Gingham (a song in music hall style), a tambourine nonsense
song, a patter song You’ve All Done St. Peter’s and Rushed Through
the Vatican and a chorus, Ave Maria, in which Jude no doubt
utilised his skill in writing hymn tunes. This was staged first in Liverpool
(where else?) and toured.
Also from the English musical stage and from roughly
the same period was F.W. Allwood, who made his living as a musical
director of a touring company but who also composed the scores of two
stage works with a wide time interval between their respective appearances.
First came the opera bouffe, Haymaking, or The Pleasures of Country
Life, toured in 1877, then in 1893 The Piper of Hamelin was
put on at the Vaudeville Theatre as a children’s Christmas entertainment.
For our modern-day writer for films and TV, I offer
the name Alison Taylor, most recently credited (in tandem with
Ian Lynn) with the music for the documentary Channel 4 series
Battle Stations (2002). Keith Hinchcliffe who lives in
Sheffield, also falls into this category, as his guitar Up the Crooked
Spire, a cheerful jig-like piece presumably inspired by Chesterfield,
has been adopted, in arrangement for a TV programme transmitted in the
West Country entitled The Ridge Riders! This enforced change
of title would be familiar to all those writers of mood music for the
recorded music libraries back in the 1940s, 1950s and later. Keith has
a varied musical outlook. He plays guitar, both classical and baroque,
the Renaissance cittern and sings folk-type ballads. He arranges pieces
for guitar from, for example, Scottish fiddle tunes and Irish traditional
harp music. His compositions, besides the Spire piece mentioned,
include a Cantilena, inspired by the Spanish Classical guitar
repertoire.
Philip L Scowcroft
January 2002
Philip's book 'British Light Music Composers' (ISBN 0903413 88 4) is
currently out of print.
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