Musicians - Robert Simpson

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	Musicians - Robert Simpson

Robert (Wilfred Levick) Simpson (March 2, 1921 – November 21, 1997) was an English composer and long-serving BBC producer and broadcaster. He is best known for his orchestral and chamber music (including 11 symphonies and 15 string quartets), and for his writings on the music of Beethoven, Bruckner, Nielsen and Sibelius. He studied composition under Herbert Howells. Remarkably for a composer who was still alive, a Robert Simpson Society was formed in 1980 by individuals concerned that Simpson's music was unfairly neglected. The Society works 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.

Biography

Simpson was born in Leamington and died in Tralee in County Kerry in the Republic of Ireland. His father, Robert Warren Simpson, was a descendent 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'. Simpson studied at Westminster City School. He married Bessie Fraser in 1946; she died in 1981 and he married Angela Musgrave, a fellow BBC employee and relative of composer Thea Musgrave, in 1982.

Simpson gained his degree of Doctor of Music from the University of Durham in 1952, with the submitted work being his First Symphony. Apart from music, his other great passions were astronomy (he was a member of the British Astronomical Association and – unusually for an amateur – was made a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society) and pacifism (he had been a conscientious objector in World War II). He was awarded many honours, including the Carl Nielsen Gold Medal, 1956 (for his book Carl Nielsen, Symphonist, published 1952), and the Medal of Honor of the Bruckner Society of America, 1962; when offered the CBE, however, he refused it.

The Music

Simpson wrote 11 Symphonies as well as concertos for violin, piano, flute and cello. (The Violin Concerto was subsequently withdrawn.) His extensive output of chamber music comprised 15 string quartets, 2 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 2 pianos, and a major organ work entitled (after the famous remark attributed to Galileo) Eppur si muove. He tended to avoid vocal music but his output includes two motets. Variation form was important to him, and he wrote orchestral variations on themes of Nielsen and J. S. Bach, and 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

Robert Simpson is said to have written and destroyed four Symphonies (one of which even used serial procedures) before his first published Symphony. He submitted his official Symphony No.1 (1951, but some of its material apparently goes back to 1946) as his doctorate thesis for the University of Durham. This work, in three connected movements, is all in one basic pulse, with the faster tempi being doublings of the basic pulse and the slower tempi halvings of the basic pulse. Also, the work pits the tonalities of A and E-flat against each other. The orchestra is fairly standard, with the exception of using high D trumpets instead of trumpets in B-flat. The premiere was played by the Danish State Radio Orchestra under Launy Grøndahl in Copenhagen on 11 June 1953 and it was recorded by HMV under the auspices of the British Council in 1956, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.

For Symphony No.2 (1955-56), Simpson decided to use the same orchestral instrumentation as Ludwig van Beethoven used in his first two Symphonies, though with high D trumpets. The dedicatee, Anthony Bernard, conducted the premiere of the work with the London Chamber Orchestra. The tonal conflict in this Symphony centers on B and the tonalities a major third above and below it (G and E-flat). There are three movements, the central one being a palindromic set of 13 variations, the second half of the movement mirroring the first in reverse.

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