John Blackwood McEwen

[4] In that year he entered the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), where he studied with Ebenezer Prout, Frederick Corder and Tobias Matthay.

The Manchester Guardian said of his tenure that although he did not go out of his way to seek popularity among his students and staff, "his unfailing loyalty and integrity won him the respect of all those who came into touch with him".

[1] He bequeathed the residue of his estate to the University of Glasgow to help promote the performance of chamber music by composers of Scottish birth and descent.

[1] McEwen's biographer Jeremy Dibble writes that the composer's orchestral music shows an indebtedness "to the highly coloured, post-Wagnerian palette of Strauss, Skryabin, and the late French Romantics such as Chausson, Dukas, and Charpentier … a late-Romantic propensity that even extended to 'Sprechgesang' in the Fourteen Poems for 'inflected voice' and piano (1943)."

Dibble comments that McEwen's large output of chamber music "reveals a creative mind disposed towards more abstract, polyphonic thought.

[5] Dibble writes that In the Three Border Ballads (1905–8) the composer's "mastery of form and orchestration, backed by a powerful emotional impetus, rivals mature Elgar".

[1] In recent years Chandos Records has revived many of McEwen's works, issuing three CDs of large-scale pieces conducted by Alasdair Mitchell including A Solway Symphony, Hills o`Heather for Cello and Orchestra, Where the Wild Thyme Blows, Three Border Ballads, and Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity; three more CDs of McEwen's string quartets; and a single CD of solo piano music, including the large scale Piano Sonata of 1903.