Robert Simpson (composer)


Robert Wilfred Levick Simpson was an English composer and long-serving BBC producer and broadcaster.
He is best known for his orchestral and chamber music, and for his writings on the music of Beethoven, Bruckner, Nielsen and Sibelius. He studied composition under Herbert Howells. Remarkably for a living contemporary composer, a Robert Simpson Society was formed in 1980 by individuals concerned that Simpson's music had been unfairly neglected. The society aims to bring Simpson's music to a wider public by sponsoring recordings and live performances of his work, by issuing a journal and other publications, and by maintaining an archive of material relating to the composer.

Biography

Simpson was born in Leamington, Warwickshire. His father, Robert Warren Simpson, was a descendant of Sir James Young Simpson, the Scottish pioneer of anaesthetics; his mother, Helena Hendrika Govaars, was the daughter of Gerrit Govaars, founder of the Leger des Heils, the Dutch arm of the Salvation Army. Simpson studied at Westminster School. He was intended for a medical career and studied in London for two years before his determination to be a musician gained the upper hand. A conscientious objector in World War II, he served with an ARP mobile surgical unit during the London Blitz, while taking lessons from Herbert Howells. Howells persuaded him to take the Durham University Bachelor of Music degree, and in 1952 he gained the further degree of Doctor of Music from that university, the submitted work being his First Symphony. After the war Simpson lectured extensively and founded the Exploratory Concerts Society; in 1951 he joined the music staff of the BBC and became one of its best-known and most respected music producers, remaining with the Corporation for nearly three decades. Simpson was a great champion of Havergal Brian's music, and under the BBC's auspices he produced many broadcasts featuring Brian's works. These included the mammoth "Gothic" Symphony in 1966 under Sir Adrian Boult, and in 1973 the 28th Symphony under Leopold Stokowski who, at the age of 91, was premiering a work written by a 91-year-old composer.
Simpson married Bessie Fraser in 1946; she died in 1981 and the following year he married Angela Musgrave, a fellow BBC employee and relative of composer Thea Musgrave.
In the latter part of his career as a BBC producer Simpson frequently clashed with the management of the organisation. In the 1970s he was one of those – Hans Keller and Deryck Cooke were others – who started the revolt against the report Broadcasting in the Seventies and its plan for "generic broadcasting". A decade later Simpson was energetic in his opposition to a cost-cutting reorganisation that ultimately proposed the decommissioning of five of the eleven BBC orchestras. During the ensuing musicians' strike Simpson chose to disregard BBC staff regulations and discuss the matter with a national newspaper; he then resigned from the Corporation, publicly alleging a "degeneration of traditional BBC values in the scramble for ratings". Had Simpson remained silent for a few more months he would have been able to retire with a full pension, but his feeling was that such a course would have compromised his principles. Abominating the ethos of Thatcherite Britain, in 1986 he moved to the Republic of Ireland, settling on Tralee Bay in Kerry. In 1991 he suffered a severe stroke during an English lecture tour, which caused damage to the thalamus and left him in debilitating pain for the remaining six years of his life. He died in Tralee in 1997.
Simpson's other great passions were astronomy and pacifism, specifically addressed in the title of his Tenth String Quartet, For Peace. He was awarded many honours, including the Carl Nielsen Gold Medal, 1956, and the Medal of Honor of the Bruckner Society of America, 1962. He refused appointment as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1980.

Music

Dedicated as he was to renewing the classical tradition of a dynamic musical architecture built on the gravitational power of tonality, Simpson wrote very few small or occasional works and concentrated on large-scale genres. He wrote 11 symphonies as well as concertos for violin, piano, flute and cello. His extensive output of chamber music comprised 15 string quartets, two string quintets, a clarinet quintet, piano trio, clarinet trio, horn trio, violin sonata and a number of non-standard chamber ensemble works as well as works for piano, a sonata for two pianos, and a major organ work entitled Eppur si muove. He tended to avoid vocal music but his output includes two motets. Variation form was important to him, and in addition to variation-movements on his own themes he composed orchestral variations on themes of Nielsen and Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as a set of piano variations on a palindromic theme by Haydn to which he returned in his large-scale String Quartet No. 9, which is a series of 32 variations and a fugue on the same Haydn theme. String Quartets Nos. 4–6 can be regarded as variations upon the compositional processes, rather than the themes, of Beethoven's three Rasumovsky Quartets, Op. 59.
Two significant features of Simpson's oeuvre are his ability to write long works entirely based on a single basic pulse, with faster or slower tempi being suggested by smaller or larger note-values, and the establishment of a dynamic tension between competing tonalities or intervals.

Symphonies

"People who write symphonies do it because they feel able to: a lot of those who don't tell everyone else the symphony is dead... The trouble is that the symphony as an abstraction does not exist: there may be exhausted symphonies and exhausted composers, but the response to a challenge to one's capacity for large-scale organisation and development – that can be exhausted only in individuals."
Robert Simpson is said to have written and destroyed four symphonies before his first published symphony. The official, published symphonies include the following:
From 1987 to 1996 Vernon Handley recorded all but one of the symphonies for Hyperion Records, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. The cycle was completed in 2003 when No. 11 was recorded by its dedicatee, Matthew Taylor, conducting the City of London Sinfonia.

Concertos

; Violin Concerto : A work of some forty minutes, dedicated to the violinist Ernest Element, withdrawn by the composer late in his life. Simpson had considered revising the work, and Matthew Taylor has reworked the composition to fulfil Simpson's original intentions.
; Piano Concerto : A one-movement twenty-minute work, falling into several sections and written for the pianist John Ogdon. The concerto is one of his most big-hearted and instantly accessible scores.
; Flute Concerto : A one movement work of twenty-five minutes duration, commissioned by and dedicated to the flautist Susan Milan. The work embraces a calmness in the manner of Symphony No. 11.
; Cello Concerto : A one-movement variation-form work of twenty-three minutes duration, commissioned by and dedicated to the cellist Raphael Wallfisch. The work begins vigorously and ends in an atmosphere of contemplative mystery.

Quartets

Simpson composed 15 numbered string quartets; a quartet preceding this sequence was written as part of his course at Durham University and still exists there. He regarded Quartets Nos. 1–3 as forming a natural sequence, and Nos. 4–6 are a clearly distinct group related to three Beethoven quartets, though they can all be performed as entirely independent compositions. The second movement of No. 8 has the label Eretmapodites gilletti, and the quartet is dedicated to two people including the discoverer of the mosquito with that scientific name; the ninth quartet, from 1982, is a one-movement palindromic 32 Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Haydn; Number 10 is entitled "For Peace".
In programme notes for a recital consisting of quartets nos. 1–3 at the Arts Council of Great Britain building in London SW1 on 11 February 1955, Simpson wrote that "although they were not consciously designed as a group, they nevertheless seem to fall into a natural sequence". In construction and tonality there are elements of an overall symmetry encompassing the three works.
; String Quartet No. 1 : is in two movements, quick and slow; the second movement is a set of variations on a palindromic theme stated by the viola. There is a power-struggle by the opposed tonal centres of E flat and A: E flat is the focus of the first movement and beats off the challenge of A, the second movement theme starts and ends in E flat with a central climax in A; the variations work round to A major, in which key the work ends. The quartet is dedicated to George Enescu.
; String Quartet No. 2 : is the shortest of all Simpson's quartets, playing for about 15 minutes. It is cast in a single movement and a single metronome mark, within which three themes contest for dominance.
; String Quartet No. 3 : is in two movements, slow and quick: an Adagio in C major and a pulsing Allegro deciso that works round to an affirmative E major.
Simpson stated that String Quartets Nos. 4–6, which are on a much larger scale than Nos. 1–3, constituted "a close study of Beethoven's three Rasumovsky quartets, Op. 59; that is to say, the attempt to understand those great works resulted in, not a verbal analysis, but music". The three Simpson quartets offer, in his own idiom, "musical analogies" to the procedures of Beethoven's three quartets, but they can be performed without reference to the Beethoven and indeed without reference to each other.
; String Quartet No. 4
; String Quartet No. 5
; String Quartet No. 6
Quartets Nos. 7 and 8 both explore the possibilities of the perfect fifth in shaping their themes, harmonies and tonalities.
; String Quartet No. 7
; String Quartet No. 8
; String Quartet No. 9
; String Quartet No. 10
; String Quartet No. 11
; String Quartet No. 12
; String Quartet No. 13
; String Quartet No. 14
; String Quartet No. 15

Other chamber music

; Clarinet Quintet
; Violin Sonata
; String Trio
; String Quintet No. 1
; String Quintet No. 2

Compositions for brass band

As a writer on music, Simpson was guided by his deep admiration for Tovey's ability to discuss a composer's sophisticated treatment of forms and keys in a manner that was accurate and incisive without ever alienating the non-specialist reader. His earliest published writings were as a reviewer and critic; but before long his focus had shifted towards being an advocate for widely unappreciated or misunderstood composers like Anton Bruckner, Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius, as well as to the analysis of better-known figures whenever he felt able to illuminate their work from a composer's perspective. His writings can usefully be divided into five categories: books written by Simpson; books edited by Simpson; contributions to other books and collections; posthumous collections of articles; individual articles, programme- and sleeve-notes, etc.

Authored by Simpson

Robert Simpson was also the producer for the first commercially available recordings of Havergal Brian’s music. Symphonies Nos. 10 and 21, conducted by James Loughran and Eric Pinkett respectively, were recorded at the De Montfort Hall, Leicester in 1972. The music was performed by the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra and the LP was released by Unicorn Records to great critical acclaim in 1973. A special edition of the television programme Aquarius called The Unknown Warrior gave considerable coverage to the recording session and a camera crew also joined Robert Simpson and members of the orchestra during a visit they made to the composer's home in Shoreham. Following the success of the Unicorn issue, a second Brian album, also produced by Robert Simpson, was recorded by the LSSO in 1974 at Hove Town Hall and Leicester De Montfort Hall with the conducting being shared by László Heltay and Eric Pinkett. This CBS release included the 22nd Symphony, Brian's setting of the 23rd Psalm and the English Suite Rustic Scenes which contains some highly original music.

Writings

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