Welcome to this new website. It has been set up to support our upcoming Thomas Dunhill festival, called Maker of Music. The name comes from the inscription on his gravestone, possibly recalling Elgar’s work The Music Makers: “We are the music-makers, the dreamers of dreams . . .” inspired by Arthur O’Shaugnessy’s poem of the same name.
The Thomas Dunhill Connection is a project recently set up to explore the work and legacy of a composer who was at the heart of the British music scene from the 1890s through to his death in 1946, who wrote many significant works greatly admired at the time, but whose reputation rests on the many small pieces written for educational and exam purposes, and played by many thousands of aspiring students around the world over the last 100 years.
The advent of a number of high quality recordings of several Dunhill works in recent years has enabled many more people to access his work. A selection of CD recordings are mentioned elsewhere on the website. For reviews of some of these, it might be worth going to www.musicwebinternational.com.
The aim of the project is to encourage a modest revival of interest in a talented British composer, pupil of Stanford at the Royal College of Music along with Holst and Vaughan Williams, whose first love were the operas of Gilbert & Sullivan, and whose compositions include exquisite chamber works, song-settings and cantata, a symphony written during World War 1, suites for solo instruments and piano, scores for light opera and ballet – in all comprising over 100 Opus numbers, not including the very many educational pieces written for various publishers.
The work of Thomas Dunhill is currently still little known and appreciated. Where his work is most known, it is for the small educational compositions that do not form part of his serious oeuvre. And where some people are aware of a part of his output, usually it is only one part – his song-settings or chamber music, for example, very few are aware of his work across several different genres.
A possible overview of his whole career, would be to see TFD in terms of his boyhood love for musical theatre experienced in the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, tempered by a formidable formal education at the Royal College of Music learning composition under Stanford (where any mention of Sullivan and his comic operas was practically taboo).
When, after 1918, the creative efforts and styles of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras were suddenly dismissed wholesale, he was able to adapt to the new society by returning to his earliest true love, writing musical theatre, while at the same time working tirelessly in the educational field and contributing fine pieces for the instrumental repertoire.
The whole of his career could be viewed as that of a ‘serious’ English composer in whom the joyful colours of comic opera are always longing to be expressed. Though his work can certainly have a wistful quality, his compositions are without exception affirmative in spirit, produced by exceptional but modest workmanship.