George Dyson (composer)
As a composer Dyson wrote in a traditional idiom, reflecting the influence of his teachers at the RCM, Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford.
[2] He won the Arthur Sullivan prize for composition[3] while still an RCM student, and in 1904 was awarded a Mendelssohn Scholarship,[4] which enabled him to spend three years in Italy, Austria and Germany.
[1] After a long convalescence Dyson was commissioned as a major in the newly formed Royal Air Force (RAF), serving until 1920.
His biographer Lewis Foreman comments that it was during his dual tenure at the RCM and Winchester that "the various strands of his mature career as a composer developed".
[1] In addition to teaching at the RCM and Winchester and directing the school's music, Dyson was conductor of an adult choral society, and a visiting lecturer at Liverpool and Glasgow universities;[4] composing had to be fitted into what spare time he had.
[8] Works from this period include the cantata In Honour of the City (1928), described by The Musical Times as "a virile fantasia for chorus and orchestra [which] illustrates memorably the composer's talent for diatonic melody of impressive eloquence, his predilection for enharmonic modulation contrived with apposite ingenuity, and his accomplished handling of orchestral subtleties.
Purely orchestral works included a Symphony in G (1937), which The Times praised for originality, underivative nature and avoidance of "the freakishly obscure or the pompously grandiose".
[15] At the RCM, Malcolm Sargent took charge of the college orchestra, and Karl Geiringer, displaced by the Nazis from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, joined the faculty.
[18] His emphasis on practical musicianship led him to cull the college's library and archives, disposing of many old books and manuscripts, to the outrage of some colleagues.
Although Colin Davis, as a clarinet student, was not allowed to take part in the conducting class because his pianistic skills were judged inadequate,[20] Malcolm Arnold fared better: even though he decamped from the college, Dyson encouraged him to return and smoothed his path in doing so;[21] for Julian Bream Dyson made special arrangements to enable him to pursue his guitar studies, not hitherto part of the college's curriculum.
[22] Dyson received a knighthood in the 1941 New Years Honours List and was appointed Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO) in 1953.
He moved to Winchester, and enjoyed what Foreman describes as "a remarkable Indian summer" of composition, although by this time his music seemed old-fashioned to some listeners.
The same writer observed that although everything Dyson wrote was well made, he never developed a personal idiom, "nor engendered much emotional sap in his larger works".
[15] Dyson's biographer Paul Spicer writes that of the composer's works only The Canterbury Pilgrims and two sets of evening canticles in D and F are performed with any frequency.
