Music Webmaster Len Mullenger

A SEVENTY-NINTH GARLAND OF BRITISH LIGHT MUSIC COMPOSERS

We start with three figures who conducted and composed for the BBC's light music transmissions in the decades after 1930. PASQUAL TROISE (1895-1957), known simply as Troise, was born in Italy but settled in this country in the 1920s. Hw will be remembered especially for the performances by Troise and His Mandoliers (or, alternatively, Troise & His Banjoliers, with the same players performing on banjos) from around 1930. Troise and His Serenaders, which had a wider range of instrumentation, a later creation, also broadcast frequently. He applied his gifts as arranger and composer principally to those groups; his original compositions included Festive Romance, Jolly Archers, Here They Come and, possibly best known at the time, the tarantella Napolitara.

LOUIS MORDISH (1908-96) was a versatile musician, cinema organist, pianist, conductor arranger and composer. His broadcasts were as organist and conductor. Apart from a number of songs, his compositions were primarily orchestral: the suites New York, Legend of the Words and This Happy Health and individual genre movements such as the Can an Polka, Toy Shop Polka, Madrilena, Calling All Notes, Spectre on the Spree, Pattern in Rhythm, Mexican Devil Dance, Mexican Promenade, A Cuban Romance, A Spook Goes A-Swinging, described as a "rhythmic absurdity", and, featuring a solo for piano or xylophone Phantom Phingers.

FELIX KING (1912-82), orchestral director and regular broadcaster, also wrote many songs, plus the signature tune for this Orchestra at the Nightingale Club in Berkeley Square - not A Nightingale Sang, etc., written by another hand, of course, but The Night and the Nightingale.

W. PARTRIDGE composed a number of orchestral miniatures during the 1930s among which we can cite the march, Coronation Belles (1936) and Bells of Auld (Old) Lang Syne.

ADELA VERNE (1877-1953) was a professional pianist, who travelled widely from around 1898. In 1941 she published (for piano) H.M. Queen Elizabeth's March, a wartime tribute to the lady who is now the Queen Mother - at around the same time Eric Coates was assembling his better-known tribute to her, the middle movement of the Three Elizabeths Suite.

Finally, NELLIE SIMPSON was a ballad composer who was active around the time of the previous war and two of her better-known titles, Your England and Mine and The Beat of the Drum, appear to reflect this.

Philip L. Scowcroft

E-mail enquiries (but NOT orders) can be directed to Rob Barnett at rob.barnett1@btinternet.com

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