George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, MC (12 July 1885 – 5 August 1916) was an English composer who was best known for the orchestral idyll The Banks of Green Willow and his song settings of A. E. Housman's poems from A Shropshire Lad.

He was awarded the Military Cross for his gallantry during the fighting at Pozières in the First World War, and died in the Battle of the Somme.

[1] Soon after his birth, his family moved to York so that his father Sir Alexander Kaye Butterworth could take up an appointment as general manager of the North Eastern Railway, which was based there.

In 2016, the centenary year of his death on the Somme, biographer Anthony Murphy unveiled on behalf of the York Civic Trust a blue plaque to his memory at College House, Driffield Terrace, part of the Mount School.

[4] Upon leaving Oxford, Butterworth began a career in music, writing criticism for The Times, composing, and teaching at Radley College, Oxfordshire.

[2] He also briefly studied piano and organ at the Royal College of Music, where he worked with Hubert Parry among others, though he stayed less than a year as the academic life was not for him.

[5]When the manuscript for that piece was lost (having been sent to Germany, either to the conductor Fritz Busch or for engraving, just before the outbreak of war), Butterworth, together with Geoffrey Toye and the critic Edward J. Dent, helped Vaughan Williams reconstruct the work.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Butterworth, together with several of his friends, including Geoffrey Toye and R. O. Morris, joined the British Army as a private in the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, but he soon accepted a commission as a subaltern (2nd Lieutenant) in the 13th Battalion Durham Light Infantry, and he was later temporarily promoted to lieutenant.

After his captain had been wounded, Butterworth commanded his company with great ability and coolness, and with his energy and utter disregard of danger he set a fine example on the front line.

In desperate fighting during the night of 4–5 August, and despite friendly fire from Australian artillery, Butterworth and his miners captured and held on to Munster Alley, albeit with heavy losses.

His body was hastily buried by his men in the side of the trench, but was never recovered for formal reburial following the fierce bombardments of the final two years of conflict.

When his brigade commander, Brigadier General Page Croft, wrote to Butterworth's father to inform him of his death, it transpired that he had not known that his son had been awarded the Military Cross.

Sir Alexander Butterworth erected a plaque at St Mary's Priory Church, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire in memory of his son and of his nephew, Hugh, who died at Loos in 1915.

[3] Nine of the songs were first performed by James Campbell McInnes (baritone) and Butterworth (piano) on 16 May 1911 at a meeting of the Oxford University Musical Club, organized by Boult.

The Rhapsody, A Shropshire Lad – a sort of postlude to the songs – employs a normal sized symphony orchestra, and was first performed on 2 October 1913 at the Leeds Festival, conducted by Arthur Nikisch.

[3] Butterworth's other orchestral works are short and based on folksongs he had collected in Sussex in 1907: Two English Idylls (1911) and The Banks of Green Willow (1913).

[11] The Two English Idylls and The Banks of Green Willow show an ability to handle folk song in a way that eluded many other composers – as the true building blocks of larger forms.

that is left to us from the battlefields of northern France, and he joins the Frenchman Albéric Magnard, the Spaniard Enrique Granados, and the German Rudi Stephan as possibly the greatest losses to music[11] from the First World War.