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William Alwyn was born in Northampton where he showed an early interest in music and began to learn to play the piccolo. At age 15 he entered the Royal Academy of Music in London where he studied flute and composition. He was a virtuoso flautist and for a time was a flautist with the London Symphony Orchestra. Alwyn served as professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1926 to 1955.
William Alwyn had a remarkable range of talents. He was a distinguished polyglot, poet, and artist, as well as musician.
His compositional output was varied and large and included five symphonies, four operas, several concertos and string quartets.
Alwyn wrote over 70 film scores from 1941 to 1962. Some of the scores have been lost, although many scores and sketches are now in the William Alwyn Archive at Cambridge University Library. In recent years CD recordings have been made, some works, for which only fragmentary sketches remained, were reconstructed by Philip Lane or Christopher Palmer from the film soundtracks themselves.
He relished dissonance, and devised his own alternative to twelve-tone serialism. |