He remained there until 1928, winning medals for piano, organ, harmony and aural training, while at the same time serving as the organist of St Nicholas Church in Chiswick.
Ralph Vaughan Williams heard the ballet's performance at the Crouch Festival and liked the work; he subsequently became a friend of Murrill's.
[3] He then became an organ scholar at Worcester College, Oxford, from 1928 to 1931, studying with William Harris, Ernest Walker and Hugh Allen.
[9] Alan Frank disagreed, calling him "an outstanding success" at the BBC as well as "a skilled organist and pianist, a stimulating teacher [and] a composer of considerable charm".
[2] The early works include the jazz opera Man in Cage (1930), which ran for eight weeks at the Grafton Theatre in London while he was still at university.
In October 1937 he and his first wife Alice Good were at Alexandra Palace playing two pianos to accompany the live television revue Full Moon, written by Archie Harradine and produced by Eric Crozier, with music by Murrill.
[13] The orchestral Three Hornpipes (1934) were performed several times at the BBC Proms, and are reminiscent of William Walton's Portsmouth Point, while the 1945 Country Dances for string orchestra show the influence of Peter Warlock's Capriol Suite.
[1] He also wrote vocal works (such as the madrigal Love Not Me for Comely Grace and the Two Songs from Twelfth Night, dedicated to the memory of Peter Warlock).
[4][19] Murrill was also responsible for the official, martial orchestral version of the Indian national anthem, approved by Jawaharlal Nehru before independence in 1947.