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Howard Ferguson

Biography

Howard Ferguson was born in Belfast on October 21, 1908. He took piano lessons and in 1922 won a prize at the Belfast Musical Competition. The adjudicator on that occasion was the distinguished pianist Harold Samuel who offered to take Ferguson to London and prepare him for the Royal College of Music after a period of study at Westminster School.

He studied composition and conducting at the Royal College of Music under R.O. Morris and Malcolm Sargent, and studied piano privately with Harold Samuel. Morris introduced Ferguson to another of his pupils, the composer Gerald Finzi with whom he enjoyed a lifelong friendship. Ferguson left the College in 1928 having spent his final year as a composition pupil of Ralph Vaughan Williams. By this time the Oxford University Press had accepted his Five Irish Folk Tunes for publication.

His first success as a composer was with his first violin sonata, played at Wigmore Hall in October 1932 by Isolde Menges and Samuel. Realising that he would never be prolific and could not look to composition as a livelihood, Ferguson turned to chamber music forming a piano trio with Eda Kersey (violin) and Helen Just (cello), which was later expanded into the Ensemble Players. This led him, in 1933, to compose the work that made him famous, the Octet for two violins, viola, cello, double bass, clarinet, bassoon and horn. Brahmsian in form and spirit, it made an immeditate impression and led to a lifelong association with the music publisher Boosey & Hawkes.

At the outbreak of war Ferguson joined the RAF as a musician. His duties left him free to organise and take part in the morale-raising lunchtime chamber concerts which Dame Myra Hess had instigated at the National Gallery. After the war Ferguson taught composition at the Royal Academy of Music for 15 years, where his pupils included Richard Rodney Bennett, John Joubert, Cornelius Cardew and Susan Bradshaw. His activities as a performer continued in distinguished duo partnerships with the pianist Denis Matthews and the violinist Yfrah Neaman. In 1956 he completed a large-scale work for chorus and orchestra, Amore langueo, following it in 1958 with a companion piece, The Dream of the Rood. Despite the success of these works at the 1956 and 1959 Three Choirs Festivals in Gloucester, he decided in 1961 that he had said all he had to say and would compose no more. Ferguson’s own published music is limited to 20 compositions.

During the fifties he began editing some works for violin and continuo, and since then, a great deal of the music of the past has benefited not only from his penetrating eye and scholarly mind, but also from the experience which his lifetime as a performer has brought to the music in terms of practical detail. He meticulously researched editions of keyboard music of all periods, but in particular early keyboard works. Many regard his scholarly editions of the complete piano works of Schubert as definitive. In 1973 he was elected to honorary membership of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in recognition of his services to musical scholarship - his achievements as a composer having already been acknowledged in 1959 by an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University, Belfast.

He died in Cambridge on 1 November 1999, aged 91.

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