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Welcome
to the website of the composer
Raymond Warren
Biography
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| Biography |
| Raymond
Warren was born in 1928 and studied at
Cambridge
University
(1949-52) reading mathematics at first and then changing to music under
Boris Ord and Robin Orr: later he studied privately with Michael Tippett
(1952-60) and Lennox Berkeley (1958). From 1955-72 he taught at Queen's
University,
Belfast
, where from 1966 he held a personal Chair in composition. While in
Belfast
, an association with the Lyric Players theatre company involved writing
music for many of the plays of W. B. Yeats. For the years 1966-72 he was
Resident Composer to the Ulster Orchestra, writing for them a number of
orchestral works and also conducting the Orchestra in a series of Sunday
afternoon concerts of contemporary music. In 1972 he was appointed
professor of music at the
University
of
Bristol
, a post from which he retired in 1994.
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The
pattern of this career has been of quite heavy university teaching and
administrative duties (particularly after the move to
Bristol
in 1972), with compositional activity tending to come in the vacations.
He has enjoyed this teaching (if not the administration!), but has been
glad since his retirement to fulfil his ambition of being a full-time
composer.
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| Some
personal thoughts |
| Of
my teachers I found Michael Tippett a very high powered man, perhaps a
bit inclined to over-praise or (I ruefully thought sometimes)
over-criticize. I was greatly influenced by him but perhaps more in
general musical thinking than in style. He became more than a teacher
– a real friend. Lennox Berkeley was much more gentle. He was
supportive but also very professional in his approach. As for my later
career I found university teaching a near ideal complement to
composition; for its main object, in studying (and that includes
performing) scores of a wide range of periods and cultures, is to
understand music, its context and how it works in relation to the
societies and performers for whom it was written. Certainly I have
enjoyed the challenge of trying to do something new and imaginative with
the forces at my immediate disposal.
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| In
musical terms my life has come at a very exhilarating time. To take just
the earlier formative period, Britten and Tippett were the rising new
stars in my teenage years (I saw the first production of Peter Grimes)
and then came the gradual national discovery of the second Viennese
school – I remember being bowled over by the first British performance
since the war of Pierrot Lunaire in
London in 1952.
Darmstadt
didn’t interest me much apart from what Messiaen did there, but the
new Polish composers in the sixties made a great impact, especially
Lutoslawski. Perhaps even greater have been the social and political
upheavals. Beginning with wartime experiences as a child, I have lived
through a fascinating period of change. There have been times when I
have felt the urge to react to these things overtly in music as in the
violence of the second symphony, written during the
Ulster
troubles, and its comic counterpart, Processions
overture, the harsh glitter of war and its tragedy in Madrigals in Time of War, and an international crisis in Spring
1948. But most of my music is “pure” and little that is
programmatic can be said in words about it. When the starting point has
been extra-musical it has usually been concerned with timeless issues
such as love, hope, childhood, old age, suffering, visionary
spirituality or just plain comedy, all no doubt approached with a 20th
century sensibility.
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| In
writing, as I often have, for particular performers I have invariably
been concerned that they (even more perhaps than the audience) should
understand me: for if it is them I can inspire, they’ll be able to
fulfil their role of transmitting to the audience. And I must say that
my most exciting experiences have been those moments when the creative
understanding of performers have given me back something richer and more
vibrant than the bare notes into which, by the nature of the game, I had
to concentrate my musical thoughts. I’ve been privileged to receive
this from some wonderful professional performers, among them Peter Pears
and Julian Bream, Erich Gruenberg, Thomas Hemsley, Albert Rosen, Wilfred
Brown, Cecil Aronowitz Christopher Austin and the Dartington Quartet.
But the joy is no less when one succeeds in communicating with amateur
musicians including, especially, children. |
| Another
view |
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"Warren
sees himself as a
‘community composer’ in that he is stimulated by the strengths of
the particular forces at his disposal. He contributed greatly to the
musical life of both the university and the wider community in
Belfast
and then in
Bristol
; many of his works have been written for local performance, most
notably in his opera In the
Beginning (1982) in which he brings together 15 youth groups. His
works are distinguished by an elegant simplicity of material and by an
appealing and vocally derived melodic style. While he has written in a
fully serial idiom in the Five Bagatelles (1967) and the Symphony no. 2
(1969), he has much more frequently employed harmonic techniques derived
from serial procedures, for instance in his use of rotating series of
notes in the Symphony no. 3 (1995) and In
my Childhood (1998) to create harmonic fields which articulate the
larger structures. Recurring structural devices include heterophony and
canon; examples of his fascination with bell changes can be found in A
Star Shone over Bristol (1973), the string quartet no. 2 (1975) and
the Violin Sonata (1993).
Warren
returns to themes of childhood and old age in such vocal works as Songs
of Old Age (1968), Golden
Rings (1987) and In my
Childhood, while his extensive body of religious music concentrates
on the sufferings of Christ and on divine involvement in human
suffering. With his cycles for speaker and piano he aims to integrate
the spoken word into a musical structure."
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| Ian
Stephens writing in The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians
(2001) |
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| Contact
address: Raymond
Warren, 4, Contemporis,
Merchants Road
,
Bristol
BS8 4HB
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