William Southcombe Lloyd Webber (11 March 1914 – 29 October 1982) was an English organist and composer, who achieved some fame as a part of the modern classical music movement whilst commercially facing mixed opportunities.
[2] By the age of 14, William Lloyd Webber had already become a well-known organ recitalist, giving frequent performances at many churches and cathedrals throughout Great Britain.
Lloyd Webber's earliest known composition is the "remarkably assured" Fantasy Trio in B minor for violin, cello and piano of 1936 (which didn't receive its premiere until 1995).
Compositions from this period include the oratorio St. Francis of Assisi (1948), the orchestral tone-poem Aurora (1948), and the six Country Impressions (1960), each movement for a solo woodwind instrument and piano.
But Webber's roots were firmly embedded in the romanticism of such composers as Sergei Rachmaninov, Jean Sibelius and César Franck, and he became increasingly convinced that his own music was 'out of step' with the prevailing climate of the time.