Iain Ellis Hamilton (6 June 1922 – 21 July 2000) was a prolific Scottish composer of ten operas, four symphonies, four string quartets and much more. He worked in the United States for twenty years.
Hamilton was born inGlasgow and educated inLondon, where he became an apprentice engineer. He remained in that profession for the next seven years, studying music in his spare time. In 1947 he won a scholarship to attend theRoyal Academy of Music for three years, studying composition withWilliam Alwyn and piano withHarold Craxton. Simultaneously he earned aBachelor of Music degree from theUniversity of London (1950), and he was later awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music from theUniversity of Glasgow (1970).[1]
In 1951 Hamilton became a lecturer at bothMorley College and the University of London, posts he held until 1960, when he moved to New York. There he was appointed Mary Duke Biddle Professor atDuke University, North Carolina. In 1971 he was also appointed to the Cramb lectureship at the University of Glasgow. He returned to London in 1981, but struggled to regain a place in the mainstream of UK musical life,[2] although his orchestral workCommedia was performed at theBBC Proms in 1993. He died in London, aged 78.[3]
Hamilton's early works, romantic in style but using a highly chromatic form of tonality, included many large scale orchestral works in traditional forms. In 1951 his Symphony No 2 won the Koussevitzky Foundation Award and his Clarinet Concerto (premiered byFrederick Thurston) the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize. Other works from this period include the Violin Concerto (1952) and the Symphonic Variations (1953). While some of the vocal and chamber music use a simpler, more diatonic style (such as theFour Border Songs for choir (1953), the longer term direction was towards serialism,[4] as in the Cello Sonata (1958–9) and the Sinfonia for two orchestras (1959), which according toThe Musical Times "shocked a conservative Edinburgh Festival audience".[3]
In the 1960s Hamilton composed two operas,Agamemnon andThe Royal Hunt of the Sun, using texts he adapted from literary sources. The latter was premiered and revived byEnglish National Opera. A later opera,The Catiline Conspiracy, was first performed byScottish Opera in 1974 and marked a return to tonality, also evident in a further opera,Anna Karenina (1978) and in the Third and Fourth Symphonies (both composed in 1981).[5] Conrad Wilson wrote that "inside Hamilton there was always a romantic composer struggling to get out ... it finally exploded inAnna Karenina, a poignantly Mahlerian treatment of Tolstoy's novel."[6] Other late works include the orchestralBulgaria: Invocation/Evocation (1999) andLondon: a kaleidoscope for piano and orchestra.[1]
^Piano Concerto No. 2 premiered in May 1989"News Section".Tempo. New Series (169 (50th Anniversary, 1939–89)):69–70. June 1989.ISSN0040-2982.JSTOR945334.
Hamilton, Iain Ellis (April 2004). Karel, Anastasia (ed.)."Iain Hamilton Papers at New York Public Library"(PDF). Archived fromthe original(PDF) on 8 July 2007. Retrieved9 December 2007. Catalog of papers, including worklist, list of sketched works, letters, etc.
