Ernest John Moeran

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Ernest John Moeran (December 31, 1894 – December 1, 1950) was an English composer.

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[edit] Early life

Moeran was born in Heston (in the London Borough of Hounslow), the son of an Irish clergyman. The family moved around for several years as the Revd J. W. W. Moeran was appointed to various parishes but they eventually settled in Bacton, on the coast of Norfolk.

Moeran learnt the violin and the piano as a child. He was educated from an early age at home, by a governess. At the age of ten, he was sent to Suffield Park Preparatory School in Cromer, North Norfolk. In 1908, he was enrolled at Uppingham School where he spent the next five years. On leaving Uppingham in 1913, he studied piano and composition at the Royal College of Music with Charles Villiers Stanford.

[edit] War service

Moeran spent most of the World War I as a dispatch rider but this ended when he was wounded at Bullecourt in 1917. After recovering from his injuries, he did not return to the front.

After the war he returned for a few months to Uppingham School, where he was employed as a teacher of music. This role did not satisfy him and he returned to the Royal College of Music to resume his composition studies, now with John Ireland, who had been a pupil of Moeran's earlier teacher Charles Villiers Stanford.

[edit] Composing music

His first mature compositions, songs and chamber music, date from this time. He also began collecting and arranging folk music of Norfolk and other regions. He collected about 150 folk songs in Norfolk and Suffolk. His preferred method was to sit in a country pub and wait until an old man started singing. He noted the song down then asked for more. According to the biography "The Music of E. J. Moeran" by Geoffrey Self (1986), he spent time living with gypsies, but no further details are available.

By the mid-1920s, Moeran had become close friends with Peter Warlock and they lived for some years in Eynsford, Kent, notorious among the locals for their frequent drunken revelry. For the rest of his life, Moeran was to have problems with alcohol, later joined by mental instability.

After Warlock's death, he became interested in his Irish roots and began spending much of his time in Kenmare, County Kerry. He married the cellist Peers Coetmore in 1945. The marriage was not entirely happy although it inspired some of Moeran's masterpieces, the Cello Concerto and Cello Sonata. He died suddenly, probably from a cerebral haemorrhage, in Kenmare at the age of 55. He was found in the River Kenmare and it was at first assumed he had drowned. However, an inquest later established that he had died before falling into the water.

Moeran was one of the last major English composers to be heavily influenced by English folk-song and thus belongs to the lyrical tradition of such composers as Delius, Vaughan Williams and Ireland. The influence of the nature and landscapes of Norfolk and Ireland are also often evident in his music. Some of his larger-scale orchestral pieces were composed (or at least conceived) whilst Moeran walked the hills of western England, particularly in Herefordshire, and Ireland, where the grandness of the mountain ranges of Kerry inspired him greatly. But, unlike some now-forgotten English "pastoralist" composers, Moeran was capable of conveying all sorts of emotions through his music and wasn't afraid of writing in a darker and harsher way when he felt like that. His style is conservative but not derivative.

By Moeran's time, however, such style was already seen as somewhat dated and he never made a big breakthrough as a composer despite the success of the sombre, Sibelian Symphony in G minor (1924-1937), generally regarded as his masterpiece. Though he first received favourable critical attention for his chamber music and continued to compose significant works in this genre, his greatest achievements in general are to be found among his few large-scale orchestral works, including a Violin Concerto, Sinfonietta and Serenade. Recently, there has been more interest in and many recordings of Moeran's works, but many of them, such as the songs to poems by A. E. Housman and James Joyce, still remain relatively unknown.

Moeran was very interested in "folk" music and utilised an extensive collection of songs that he had notated in Norfolk pubs as part of his creative material. He also made great use of Irish music. The Norfolk material can be sensed in the piano works of the early 1920s, and the Irish influence is seen within the second movement of the Violin Concerto (Puck Fair at Killorglin?), but even more so in the Cello Concerto, in which fragments of Irish music, in particular "The star of County Down" (also used by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus), are evident.

Another facet to the music of Moeran is the madrigal. He once stated to a friend that if he were ever arrested and thus forced to state his profession, he would have to say it was that of being a madrigalist. Moeran was capable of staggering harmonic invention whilst working within the madrigal form - in "Spring the Sweet Spring" the harmonies progress from those of the madrigal into harmonies of a jazz style reminiscent of Duke Ellington; full of contradictions and added-note chords. The Serenade, an orchestral work, evinces madrigalist harmony re-worked by Moeran into an astringent style in which acerbic tonal and harmonic patterns are grafted onto the madrigalist basis to produce music of outstanding freshness and originality that surely places Moeran into the genre of inventive twentieth-century music, rather than into the "English Pastoral School", which, in itself, is arguably a misnomer.

The Symphony in G minor stands along with the First Symphony of Sir William Walton as one of the two tightest and most controlled symphonies emanating from the British Isles of the inter-war era. The Moeran work demonstrates a robust sonata form in the first movement, along with a questioning harmonic structure, which, on first examination, may appear orthodox, but which on deeper analysis indicates the dichotomy of the interval of the fifth (which is European diatonic), with the interval of the fourth, which is both the completion of the European fifth, but also introduces the Irish dimension, in which the fourth can be the predominant interval. More will follow.

Not by any means a prolific church composer, his services in D and E flat are, however, still performed today.

As a person, E. J. Moeran was greatly influenced by a number of people. However, it was the time spent with Peter Warlock in Eynsham that had the greatest impact on his life. While Warlock was seemingly capable of drinking alcohol to excess without any apparent long-term effects, Moeran developed a dependency which handicapped him for the remainder of his life. His later problems have been attributed to his war wound to the head, but this is incorrect. By 1930, Moeran had become an alcoholic.

Moeran was undoubtedly middle-class, but would be at ease in a bar surrounded by local characters from local farms. He was looked on with affection by all who knew him, and his gauche, bumbling personality belied a very sharp-witted character who was quick to learn and take up new approaches to music. He also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of trains and train timetables.

[edit] Compositions

  • Theme and Variations for piano
  • Piano Trio in E minor
  • Ludlow Town, song cycle
  • In the Mountain Country, symphonic impression
  • On a May Morning, for piano
  • Rhapsody No 1 in F major
  • Three Fancies, for piano
  • Rhapsody No 2 in E major
  • Summer Valley, for piano
  • Irish Love Song, for piano
  • Farrago, suite for orchestra
  • Nocturne, for baritone, chorus and orchestra
  • Symphony in G minor
  • Violin Concerto
  • Rhapsody No 3 in F sharp major for piano and orchestra
  • Sinfonietta
  • Overture for a Masque
  • Cello Concerto
  • Fantasy Quartet, for oboe and strings
  • Serenade in G major
  • Sonata for Violoncello and Piano

[edit] External links