Robert Wilfred Levick Simpson (2 March 1921 – 21 November 1997) was an English composer, as well as a long-serving BBC producer and broadcaster.
[2] His father, Robert Warren Simpson, was a descendant of Sir James Young Simpson, the Scottish pioneer of anaesthetics; his mother, Helena Hendrika Govaars, was the daughter of Gerrit Govaars, founder of the Leger des Heils, the Dutch arm of the Salvation Army.
A conscientious objector in World War II, he served with an ARP mobile surgical unit during the London Blitz, while taking lessons from Herbert Howells.
A decade later Simpson was energetic in his opposition to a cost-cutting reorganisation that ultimately proposed the decommissioning of five of the eleven BBC orchestras.
Abominating the ethos of Thatcherite Britain, in 1986 he moved to the Republic of Ireland, settling on Tralee Bay in County Kerry.
In 1991, he suffered a severe stroke during an English lecture tour, which caused damage to the thalamus and left him in debilitating pain for the remaining six years of his life.
In his letter of rejection, he wrote: "While I am most appreciative of the intended honour, it could not properly be accepted by a determined republican in whom memory of the British Empire arouses no nostalgia.
[7] Dedicated as he was to renewing the classical tradition of a dynamic musical architecture built on the gravitational power of tonality, Simpson wrote very few small or occasional works and concentrated on large-scale genres.
[8] Two significant features of Simpson's oeuvre are his ability to write long works entirely based on a single basic pulse, with faster or slower tempi being suggested by smaller or larger note-values, and the establishment of a dynamic tension between competing tonalities or intervals.
1–3 at the Arts Council of Great Britain building in London SW1 on 11 February 1955, Simpson wrote that "although they were not consciously designed as a group, they nevertheless seem to fall into a natural sequence".
As a writer on music (he would have disavowed the title 'musicologist'), Simpson was guided by his deep admiration for Tovey's ability to discuss a composer's sophisticated treatment of forms and keys in a manner that was accurate and incisive without ever alienating the non-specialist reader.
His earliest published writings were as a reviewer and critic; but before long his focus had shifted towards being an advocate for widely unappreciated or misunderstood composers like Anton Bruckner, Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius, as well as to the analysis of better-known figures (such as Beethoven) whenever he felt able to illuminate their work from a composer's perspective.
The music was performed by the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra and the LP was released by Unicorn Records to great critical acclaim in 1973.
A special edition of the television programme Aquarius called The Unknown Warrior gave considerable coverage to the recording session and a camera crew also joined Robert Simpson and members of the orchestra during a visit they made to the composer's home in Shoreham (see video links below).
This CBS release included the 22nd Symphony, Brian's setting of the 23rd Psalm (which clearly belongs to the mainstream British choral tradition of Vaughan Williams and Parry) and the English Suite Rustic Scenes which contains some highly original music.