The son of a clergyman, Moeran studied at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford before service in the army during the First World War, in which he was wounded.
From 1925 to 1928 he shared a cottage with the composer Peter Warlock; the bohemian lifestyle and heavy drinking during this period interrupted his creativity for a while, and sowed the seeds of the alcoholism that would blight his later life.
Composer Anthony Payne declared that "Moeran occupied a minor place in the music of his time, but his meticulously polished and ready technique is unsurpassed among his British contemporaries.
Joseph William Wright Moeran, vicar of St Mary's, Spring Grove, and Ada Esther Smeed, née Whall, who came from Norfolk.
[2] Joseph subsequently served in several country parishes in southern and eastern England, including Salhouse in Norfolk,[3] before his retirement on health grounds when Ernest was 13.
[4][5] In 1913 he entered the Royal College of Music (RCM), initially as a piano student, but switching to composition under Charles Villiers Stanford after his first year.
[11] After a period of convalescence he returned to military duty, and saw out the rest of the war in Ireland, at Boyle, County Roscommon, attached to a transport section of the Royal Irish Constabulary.
[1] In London, just before his discharge from the army in January 1919, Moeran met the composer Arnold Bax, who described him at that time "as charming and as good-looking a young officer as one could hope to meet".
[1] Moeran's biographer Geoffrey Self observes that from this point "the main influences to be heard in his music were now in place: his teacher, his Irish and East Anglian heritages, and his love of rural England.
[13] They include numerous songs, a number of piano and chamber works and, on a larger canvas, his first attempts at orchestral writing, the symphonic In The Mountain Country and two Rhapsodies.
[14] As his reputation grew, he formed important friendships with leading figures on the musical scene, among whom was Hamilton Harty, who conducted a performance of Moeran's second orchestral Rhapsody and afterwards commissioned a symphony from the young composer.
[6] Another important friendship formed around this time was with the writer, critic and composer Philip Heseltine (better known by his pseudonym Peter Warlock), Moeran's exact contemporary and like him a prolific songwriter.
The cottage attracted many visitors from the musical and artistic worlds, and soon became notorious as a centre for wild parties and other extravagances, involving heavy drinking.
[17] The few works completed during the Eynsford years (1925–1928) include his single collaboration with Heseltine, a drinking song called "Maltworms", written for performance at a drama festival at the nearby village of Shoreham.
He had not been entirely forgotten by the musical establishment; in January 1930, the critic Hubert Foss wrote a reappraisal of Moeran's earlier works, referring to the composer's "over-long silence", but saw hope for the future: "One hopes that out of this corpus of early works a symphonic mind may grow, one that with intensity of form as well as intensity of utterance, will give us real music on a big scale".
[1] However, as the decade progressed, he became more interested in his Irish roots, and began to spend large parts of the year in a cottage in Kenmare, County Kerry, where he became a well known and popular figure;[2] Arnold Bax recorded a local comment: "If ever there was a move to elect a mayor of this town, Jack Moeran would be everybody's first choice".
These included the Violin Concerto (1937–41), written largely in Ireland and reflecting strong Irish influences; the madrigal suite Phyllida and Corydon (1939), possibly influenced by the music of Bernard van Dieren; the Rhapsody in F ♯ for piano and orchestra (1943), written for the pianist Harriet Cohen; the short Overture for a Masque (1944), commissioned by the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA); and the Sinfonietta (1944), inspired in part by the hills of the Welsh border country in Radnorshire, the latest location of the family home.
His body was retrieved; at first it was thought that he had drowned, possibly in an act of suicide, but medical evidence indicated that he had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and had died before entering the water.
Some of his larger-scale orchestral pieces were composed (or at least conceived) whilst Moeran walked the hills of western England, particularly in Herefordshire, and Ireland, where the grandness of the mountain ranges of Kerry inspired him greatly.
Moeran was capable of conveying a wide range of emotions through his music and wasn't afraid of writing in a darker and harsher idiom when it suited him.
By Moeran's time, however, such a style was already seen as somewhat dated and he never made a big breakthrough as a composer despite the success of the sombre, Sibelian Symphony in G minor (1934–1937) that is generally regarded as his masterpiece.
and even more so in the second movement of the String Quartet in E-flat, as well as in the Cello Concerto, in which fragments of Irish music, in particular "The Star of County Down" (also used by Vaughan Williams in his Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus), are evident.
The Serenade, an orchestral work, evinces madrigalist harmony re-worked by Moeran into an astringent style in which acerbic tonal and harmonic patterns are grafted onto the madrigalist basis to produce music of outstanding freshness and originality that surely places Moeran into the genre of inventive twentieth-century music, rather than into the "English Pastoral School", which, in itself, is arguably a misnomer.
Over 40 of his manuscripts, including that of his unfinished Second Symphony in E-flat, were bequeathed by his widow Peers Coetmore to the Victorian College of the Arts, now part of the University of Melbourne.