Eric Coates
Eric Francis Harrison Coates[n 1] (27 August 1886 – 21 December 1957) was an English composer of light music and, early in his career, a leading violist.
He studied at the Royal Academy of Music under Frederick Corder (composition) and Lionel Tertis (viola), and played in string quartets and theatre pit bands, before joining symphony orchestras conducted by Thomas Beecham and Henry Wood.
[1] Coates also took lessons in harmony and counterpoint from Ralph Horner, lecturer in music at University College Nottingham, who had studied under Ignaz Moscheles and Ernst Richter and was a former conductor for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
[4] At Ellenberger's request, Coates switched to the viola, supposedly for a single performance; he found the deeper sound of the instrument to his liking and changed permanently from violinist to violist.
[7] Coates wanted to pursue a career as a professional musician; his parents were not in favour of it, but eventually agreed that he could seek admission to the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in London.
They insisted that by the end of his first year there he must have demonstrated that his abilities were equal to a professional career, failing which he was to return to Nottinghamshire and take up a safe and respectable post in a bank.
The New York Times called Tertis the first great protagonist of the instrument,[12] and Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians ranks him as the foremost player of the viola.
At about this time he began to be troubled by pain in his left hand and numbness in his right, which were symptoms of the neuritis that affected him throughout the remaining eleven years of his career as a violist.
[3] In early 1911 Coates met and fell in love with an RAM student, Phyllis (Phyl) Marguerite Black (1894–1982), an aspiring actress, who was studying recitation.
He played under the batons of composers including Elgar, Delius, Holst, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and virtuoso conductors such as Willem Mengelberg and Arthur Nikisch.
[29] What Coates's biographer Geoffrey Self describes as "a not-too-onerous contract with his publisher" stipulated an annual output of two orchestral pieces – one of fifteen minutes' duration and one of five – and three ballads.
[24] Coates was a founder-member of the Performing Right Society, and was among the first composers whose main income came from broadcasts and recordings, after the demand for sheet music of popular songs declined in the 1920s and 1930s.
[24][30] Between the First and Second world wars, Coates was in demand as a conductor of his own works, appearing in London and seaside resorts such as Bournemouth, Scarborough and Hastings, which then maintained substantial orchestras devoted to light music.
[31][32] Although he and his wife maintained a country house in Sussex, Coates found city life more stimulating, and was more productive when at the family's London flat in Baker Street.
[33] The work transformed Coates's status from moderate prominence to national celebrity when the BBC chose the "Knightsbridge" march from the suite as the signature tune for its new and prodigiously popular radio programme In Town Tonight, which ran from 1933 to 1960.
[34] Another work written at the Baker Street flat that enhanced the composer's fame was By the Sleepy Lagoon (1930), an orchestral piece that made little initial impression, but with an added lyric became a hit song in the US in 1940,[n 3] and in its original instrumental version became familiar in Britain as the title music of the BBC radio series Desert Island Discs which began in 1942 and (in 2023) is still running.
[36] During the early part of the Second World War, Coates composed little until his wife suggested he might write something for the staff at the Red Cross depot where she was a volunteer worker.
Some of his findings and recommendations were accepted but, according to a biographical sketch by Tim McDonald, Coates "failed to bring about any significant lessening of the inherent snobbery within the Corporation which tended to take a rather dismissive view of light music".
[39][n 4] On 28 November 1957 Coates made one of his final public appearances at a fund-raising dinner for the Musicians Benevolent Fund held at the Savoy Hotel, playing dulcimer in the premiere performance of Malcolm Arnold's Toy Symphony.
As contemporary reviewers observed, his early compositions showed the influence of Sullivan and German, but as the 20th century progressed, Coates absorbed and made use of features of the music of Elgar and Richard Strauss.
[17] In its obituary notice, The Manchester Guardian took issue with such a dismissal, and preferred the French attitude of cherishing petits-maîtres for what they were rather than condemning them for what they were not: "better to write second-class masterpieces than fail to be a second Beethoven".
[22] One of Coates's most important musical gifts was the ability to write memorable tunes – "a genuine lyrical impulse" as The Manchester Guardian put it.
The most extended of his orchestral works (at just under 20 minutes in length) is the tone poem The Enchanted Garden (1938), derived from an abortive ballet on the theme of the Seven Dwarfs, originally composed for André Charlot.
When conducting his music, he tended to set fairly brisk tempi, and disliked it when other conductors took his works at slower speeds that, to his mind, made them drag.
When he toured with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducting his own music, in 1940, the reviewer in The Manchester Guardian urged him to find a librettist and write a comic opera: "He ought to succeed greatly in that line.
