Raymond Warren

For other people named Raymond Warren, see Raymond Warren (disambiguation).

Raymond Warren (born 7 November 1928) is a British composer and university teacher.

He studied at Cambridge, and taught at Queen's University Belfast before becoming Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Bristol from 1972 until his retirement in 1994.

His works include a choral Passion, a Violin Concerto, and the oratorio Continuing Cities. He has also written six operas.

He currently lives in Clifton in Bristol.

Biography

Raymond Warren was born in 1928 and studied at Cambridge University (1949–52) reading mathematics at first and then changing to music under Boris Ord and Robin Orr: later he studied privately with Michael Tippett (1952–60) and Lennox Berkeley (1958). From 1955-72 he taught at Queen's University, Belfast, where from 1966 he held a personal Chair in composition. While in Belfast, an association with the Lyric Players theatre company involved writing music for many of the plays of W. B. Yeats. For the years 1966-72 he was Resident Composer to the Ulster Orchestra, writing for them a number of orchestral works and also conducting the Orchestra in a series of Sunday afternoon concerts of contemporary music. In 1972 he was appointed Professor of Music at the University of Bristol, a post from which he retired in 1994. Since then he has composed to commission for a wide variety of performers notably the Brunel Ensemble (Symphony No.3, In My Childhood) and the London Children's Ballet (Ballet Shoes, 2001). He has collaborated with many other artists of note including the poets Seamus Heaney and Charles Tomlinson, the choreographer Helen Lewis and the founders of the Lyric Theatre, Belfast and written for performers including Peter Pears, Julian Bream, Eric Gruenberg, Cecil Aronowitz, Janet Price, Christopher Austin and Jeremy Huw Williams.

Major works

Major works include: The Passion (1962), the Violin Concerto (1966), Songs of Old Age (1968), Symphony No.2 (1969), the oratorio Continuing Cities (1989), Symphony No.3 (1995) and In My Childhood (1998) as well as his six operas. Many of his shorter works are among his most powerful including the solo cantata Drop, Drop Slow Tears (1960), the song cycle The Pity of Love (1966) and the motet Salvator Mundi (1976).

Discography

Dwell In My Love: Choral Music by Raymond Warren, Bristol Graduate Singers, Edward Davies, 1994

Kenneth Mobbs: Piano Recitals 1959-1996 (2nd Sonata), www.mobbsearlykeyboard.co.uk/cd.htm

Severnside Composers' Alliance Composers Inaugural Piano Recital (Monody & Chaconne), Peter Jacobs Dunelm Records, 2005

Piano Sonata (Philip Mead), “Lough Neagh Sequence”, (with Seamus Heaney - reader), “In my childhood” (Olivia Robinson with the University of Hertfordshire Chamber Orchestra conducted by Robin Browning) http://www.uhrecordings.co.uk/about/default.aspx, 2010

Due for release in 2010 - Songs Cycles including Songs of Old Age and The Coming, http://www.jeremyhuwwilliams.com/Jeremy/Welcome___Croeso.html

Operas

• The Lady of Ephesus (1959)
• Finn and the Black Hag (1959)
• Graduation Ode (1963)
• Let My People Go (1972)
• St. Patrick (1979)
• In the Beginning (1982)

Publications

• Warren, Raymond: The Composer and Opera Performance in Thomas, W. (ed.), Composition - Performance - Reception: Studies in the Creative Process in Music, Ashgate, 1998, ISBN 1-85928-325-X

External links

• Biography at Severnside Composers Alliance website – contains photograph and list of works