Herbert Murrill

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Herbert Murrill (May 11, 1909 – July 25, 1952) was an English musician, composer, and organist.

[edit] Biography

Murrill was born in London. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music from 1925 to 1928 and thereafter was organ scholar at Worcester College, Oxford, from 1928 to 1931.

From 1933 until his early death, he was Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music. He also worked for the BBC from 1936 onwards (save for a period in the Intelligence Corps between 1942 and 1946), reaching the post of Head of Music in 1950. He died in London.

[edit] Musical works

His works include a jazz opera, Man in Cage, which was performed in 1930 whilst he was still at university. He wrote film scores for And So To Work (1936) and The Daily Round (1937), both early films from the director Richard Massingham. He wrote two cello concertos (he was married to the cellist Vera Canning) and some chamber and vocal pieces. However, his most frequently performed works now are his choral and organ works: his setting of the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in E major (published in 1947), an organ piece called Carillon, and his arrangement for organ of the orchestral march Crown Imperial by William Walton.

Writing in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Ronald Crichton says that Murrill's affinities were Francophile and mildly middle-Stravinskian, both influences tempered by an English kind of neo-classicism. ^[1]