Ralph Vaughan Williams composed these choral essays, somewhat reluctantly, as test pieces for the 1951 National Competition Festival of the British Federation of Music. Ralph Vaughan Williams Three Shakespeare Songs But the keen ear might detect in this miniature inspiration for Britten’s Ballad of Green Broom. The bee is a fanciful scherzo, complete with buzzing effects. Music, when soft voices die begins in the soundworld of earlier English madrigals, yet there is the unmistakable homage in the writing to his own teacher, Stanford. Certainly his style was quintessentially English-retrospective and an attempt at richer and later, more ambitious techniques appears to have gained little attention. Frank Bridge is remembered largely through his most successful student, Benjamin Britten, although he did not have a great following as a teacher of composition. Moments such as a somewhat stunning ‘Weep’ at the close of Come away, death possess a Gallic richesse and there is a hint of a Walton-esque blues flavour in this example.Īutumn, composed in 1903, sets words by Shelley and is in essence a dirge for the passing of summer and nature’s blossoming. Whilst Murrill shares a free, homophonic word-setting with many of this era, where the speech-flow has an effortless precedence over the tyrannies of conventional bar-groupings, the slightly tortuous chromatic lines tend towards the multi-tonal. The final cadence has a remarkable eyebrowraiser for the upper sopranos, just when all seemed plain sailing, whereas the harmonic language of Come away, death comes as quite a surprise. The normality of O mistress mine echoes the conventions of Gerald Finzi. The two settings: O mistress mine and Come away, death are from Twelfth Night, the former being words of Feste, the jester. It is now known that he served in the war effort as a sergeant at Bletchley Park where his musical skills were additionally put to good use. His formation was conservative-but he strayed from a predictable course with commissions for incidental music for film documentaries and for the Group Theatre Company.
Following his time at Oxford he held a succession of London organist posts, became a professor of composition at the RAM in his early twenties and rose to head of music at the BBC in 1936. Herbert Murrill (1909-1952) fits the quintessential image of a British organist-composer with another ‘proper job’ in education and broadcasting.
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