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First name: Richard
Last name: Arnell
Dates: 1917-2009
Category: Quartet
Nationality: english
Opus name: Piano Quartet Opus 25
Publisher:
Peculiarities: See:http://www.richardarnell.com/worklistr.html; http://www.worldcat.org/title/piano-quartet-op-25/oclc/35187968&referer=brief_results
Information: www.richardarnel.com Richard Anthony Sayer Arnell was born in London on 15th September 1917, during an air-raid. It is a remarkably sad irony that his mother actually died in an air-raid during the Blitz of WWII, while Arnell was in America. Having been educated at the Hall School, Hampstead, and University College School, Arnell entered the Royal College of Music in 1935, where he studied composition with John Ireland and piano with St. John Dykes. Vaughan Williams was chair of the panel that awarded him the Farrar Prize for Composition in 1938. He still speaks in glowing terms of Ireland’s humanistic approach, providing a solid grounding in harmony and counterpoint before helping a young composer find his own, true voice rather than imposing personal preferences and influences upon them. A factor in Arnell’s continued clarity of thought was Ireland’s rule that his students should not work in pencil, but in pen. Erasing was not an option, and alternative’s should be thought through and worked out fully in the mind before the music was actually committed to paper. He left England, as a newly-married man, in 1939 and headed for New York, where he was to reside until 1947. On a rented piano in a small apartment, while helping to raise his infant daughter, he set about producing a substantial body of work, and Opp. 1-47 date from this period. Important compositions completed during this period include the first 3 ‘official’ symphonies, as well as the ‘Sinfonia-Quasi Variazione’, which is, in fact, his first symphony. Arnell has spoken about ‘Brahms syndrome’ - that fear of taking that initial step to declare oneself a ‘symphonist’. Unlike Brahms, however, he overcame this fear in his early-twenties, rather than waiting till middle-age. It is remarkable, for a young composer in a foreign land, that the majority of these works were performed, and by some of the most prominent conductors and soloists of the day, Leopold Stokowski, Bernard Hermann, Leon Barzin, Dean Dixon, Vera Brodsky, Moura Lympany, et al. During this American sojourn, from 1943-1946, Arnell acted as Music Consultant to the BBC’s North American Service. Among the many prestigious commissions Arnell received during these years was one to compose a ‘Ceremonial and Flourish’ for brass to mark the occasion of Sir Winston Churchill’s visit to Columbia University, in 1946. Upon Arnell’s return to England, he became a teacher of composition at Trinity College, London, and he remained a member of staff there until his retirement in the 1980s. He was made an Honorary Fellow and Principal Lecturer of the College in acknowledgement of his long-term commitment to the institution and its