Mátyás Seiber

Mátyás Seiber (May 4, 1905 – September 24, 1960) was a Hungarian-born composer who lived in England from 1935 onward. He studied in Budapest with Zoltán Kodály, and in 1928 gave the first academic lectures on jazz in Frankfurt. From 1942, he was on the staff of Morley College in London, and he became a respected teacher of composition. Several of his students went on to become great musicians themselves, including Peter Racine Fricker, Anthony Milner and Hugh Wood.

Seiber's music is eclectic in style, showing the influences of jazz, Bartók and Schoenberg; it includes Ulysses (1947) (a cantata on words by James Joyce) scores to animated films including Animal Farm (1954) and choral arrangements of Hungarian and Yugoslav folk songs.