Arnold Bax: A great composer

Sir Arnold Bax was born on the 8^th of November, 1883 in Streatham, London, into an upper-class family. He was largely an impressionist composer, but often included elements of romanticism in his compositions, particularly in his earlier works. Bax was recognised early on as a great musical talent, especially on the keyboard where he was said to be a brilliant sight-reader, often playing Wagner operas in his spare time. He studied music when he was 16 at the Hampstead Conservatory and was accepted into the prestigious Royal Academy of Music in 1900 where he stayed up until 1905. He won the Battison-Haynes prize and the Charles Lucas medal, both highly competitive awards in composition.

Bax quickly connected with Ireland and its culture and his compositions often show a strong Celtic influence. He used the works of William Butler Yeats as a basis for many of his early evocative tone poems. In the 1920s to 1930s his main works became symphonies, writing seven contrasting symphonies from 1922 to 1939. In the last ten years of his life, Bax felt that his compositions were becoming out of fashion as he had distanced himself from modernist composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and serialism, which was becoming increasingly popular world wide. He stated that he was musically tired and his creativity was dimming. Sir Arnold Bax died on the 3^rd of October, 1953 at 69 years of age. He still wrote some wonderful movie music in his last ten years and continued to write expressively for his lover Harriet Cohen.

Bax’s output includes some 250 works, which are listed at the following address:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Arnold_Bax

Now you are probably thinking “ok. Here we have some ordinary composer who got the attention he deserved, and that Shostakovich, Mahler, Beethoven, and Dvorak are great composers who became famous because they were really great composers”. Now, I’m not going to deny that these composers I have listed are great composers. But I think that Arnold Bax deserves a place amongst those names. His music is more emotionally involving than Shostakovich, more intellectual than Mahler, more interesting, sincere, passionate and melodious than Dvorak, and was created using an astounding compositional technique comparable to Beethoven’s. People who dismiss his music as luscious, vague, dissonant or rhapsodic have missed his language.

Here is what British conductor Vernon Handley pointed out:

“I find it very annoying that Bax’s comprehensive musical technique is not recognised. His eye and his ear were so superbly developed. His gifts are astonishing; he releases us into an entirely different world, for nobody, in the whole of music, approaches the range of Bax’s moods, or their type. He has given us something that is very different from that of all other composers. That this is not recognised find extraordinary. So one has to go on trying to do something about it”.

When I purchased his cycle off Amazon (costing $55 all up with postage), I decided I would listen to the symphonies straight through in order. I will begin posting the separate symphony articles shortly for you to enjoy!