Malcolm Arnold
[3] After seeing Louis Armstrong play in Bournemouth, he took up the trumpet at the age of 12,[1] and five years later won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music (R.C.M.).
When the army put him in a military band he shot himself in the foot to get back to civilian life; he remained in touch with the CO movement, giving a trumpet recital at the 1946 New Year party of the Central Board for Conscientious Objectors.
[5] After a season as principal trumpet with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he returned in 1946 to the London Philharmonic,[1] where he remained until 1948, leaving to become a full-time composer.
[citation needed] He was also a highly successful composer of film music, penning the scores to over a hundred features and documentaries, including titles such as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Hobson's Choice and the St Trinian's series.
[1] By the time of his 70th birthday in 1991 his artistic reputation with the general public was recovering and he was even able to enjoy a triumphant appearance on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall to receive an ovation after a Proms performance of his Guitar Concerto.
He also wrote a number of concertos, including one for guitar for Julian Bream, one for cello for Julian Lloyd Webber, two for clarinet for Frederick Thurston and Benny Goodman, one for harmonica for Larry Adler and one – enthusiastically welcomed at its premiere during the 1969 Proms – for three hands on two pianos for the husband-and-wife team of Cyril Smith and Phyllis Sellick.
Arnold also wrote some highly successful concert overtures,[10] including Beckus the Dandipratt (an important stepping stone in his early career), the strikingly scored Tam o' Shanter (based on the famous Robert Burns poem), the rollicking A Grand Grand Overture (written for a Hoffnung Festival and featuring three vacuum cleaners and a floor polisher, all in turn polished off by a firing squad in a mock 1812 manner), and the dramatic Peterloo Overture (commissioned by the Trades Union Congress to commemorate the historic massacre of protesting workers in Manchester).
A successful composer for the cinema, Malcolm Arnold was credited with having written over a hundred film scores for features and documentaries between 1947 and 1969.
[11][12] In 1957, Arnold won an Academy Award for the music to David Lean's film The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Also during the 1950s – an especially prolific period for Arnold – he provided a series of scores for major British and American feature films, such as The Captain's Paradise (1953), The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954), The Night My Number Came Up (1955), The Constant Husband (1955), I Am a Camera (1955), 1984 (1956), Trapeze (1956), A Hill in Korea (1956), Dunkirk (1958), The Key (1958) and The Roots of Heaven (1958).
His 1960s scores included The Angry Silence (1960), Tunes of Glory (1960), No Love for Johnnie (1961), Whistle Down the Wind (1961), The Inspector (1962), The Lion (1962), Nine Hours to Rama (1963), Tamahine (1963), The Chalk Garden (1964), The Thin Red Line (1964), Sky West and Crooked (1965), The Heroes of Telemark (1965), Africa Texas Style (1967) and The Reckoning (1970).
The Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra made the first commercial recording of Arnold's Divertimento for the Pye label in July 1967 and regularly performed many of his works in the UK and abroad.
Arnold also conducted the orchestra in a 1963 De Montfort Hall concert that included his own English Dances and Tam O'Shanter.
[14] As of 2020[update], the fate of an archive of material relating to the period between 1979 and 1986, when Arnold was in the care of the Court of Protection, is in question.
[7] In a written answer to John Hayes MP on 17 November 2020, John Whittingdale, Minister of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, stated that the fate of the records was under discussion between the Ministry of Justice, the National Archives and the Court of Protection, and that they were "not at imminent risk of destruction.
