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Howard Ferguson (21 October 1908 – 31 October 1999) was a British composer andmusicologist from Belfast. He composed instrumental, chamber, orchestral and choral works. While his music is not widely known today, his Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 8 and hisFive Bagatelles, Op. 9, for piano are still performed. His works represent some of the most important 20th-century music to emerge fromNorthern Ireland.[1]
Ferguson was born inBelfast and attendedRockport School inHolywood, County Down, where his musical talent was recognized, leading to several school prizes. The pianistHarold Samuel heard him in 1922 and encouraged his parents to allow him to travel to London to become his pupil. Following further studies atWestminster School, Ferguson entered theRoyal College of Music in 1924 to study composition withR. O. Morris andRalph Vaughan Williams. He also studied conducting withMalcolm Sargent and formed a lifelong friendship with fellow-studentGerald Finzi with whom he attendedRichard Strauss'sAlpine Symphony at theRoyal Albert Hall.[2][3] His early compositions such as hisOctet of 1933 (scored for the same forces asFranz Schubert'soctet) met with considerable success.
DuringWorld War II, Ferguson helpedMyra Hess run the popular, morale-boosting series of concerts at theNational Gallery. From 1948 to 1963 he taught at theRoyal Academy of Music, his students there includingRichard Rodney Bennett,Cornelius Cardew andIan Kellam. He regarded Bennett as having an astonishing natural talent, though lacking a personal musical style.[citation needed]
His music has a haunting, searching quality, as if a deeply personal question is being asked, but never answered (Tait 2007, see below). In the song cycleDiscovery, the surrealistic poetic language ofDenton Welch ("What are you in the morning when you wake? A quacking duck, a quacking drake?") is the ideal spark for Ferguson to express such private questioning in his aphoristic, fleeting settings (Tait). Ferguson produced what (according to Tait) is probably one of the greatest British solo piano works of the twentieth century, the stormy and passionate Piano Sonata, Op. 8, inspired by the death of a friend. Of his two violin sonatas, the second emerged after a long silence just after World War II; the ferocious energy of its finale has a spirit of escape and liberation, a suppressed voice finally speaking (Tait) (Ferguson had not had the time to compose during the war due to his other commitments). His miniatures, such as theFour Short Pieces for clarinet and piano and theThree Sketches for flute and piano, have a crystalline intensity, as if hinting at much larger works (Tait) –Anton Webern was a composer he admired, even if stylistically Ferguson's own work belongs to the sound world of twentieth century Romanticism. Ferguson was always highly self-critical as a composer: after writing the large choral workThe Dream of the Rood in 1958–9, he received a commission to write a string quartet. It was during the composition of this that he felt he was merely repeating his previous work, so he destroyed the sketches and gave up composing, saying that in his relatively few works he had said all he wanted to say.
For the next decades he concentrated on musicology. His editions of such repertoire as early keyboard music and the completepiano sonatas of Schubert are outstanding, with a meticulous attention to detail which makes them authoritative (Tait). Ferguson also worked withGerald Finzi to select and edit the songs ofIvor Gurney for publication after his death: five volumes of ten songs were issued between 1938 and 1979.[4]
In his later years he lived in a white-painted converted farmhouse in Barton Road inCambridge, his quiet hospitality legendary (Tait). He wrote a cookbook in the 1990s,Entertaining Solo, which commemorates the remarkable welcome he gave to so many friends, as does the memoir mentioned below. In the same decade he also prepared an edition of letters between himself and Gerald Finzi, which is an invaluable source of information on the professional lives of Ferguson and his circle. Late in his life, a friendship with the German singer Reiner Schneider-Waterberg led to his rediscovering a song written in 1958 as part of incidental music for aWilliam Golding play,The Brass Butterfly, and subsequently rearranging it for counter-tenor and piano (originally harp) as "Love and Reason" (1958/1994), a moving postscript to a compositional output whose great characteristic is powerful emotions expressed through superb and strictly controlled craftsmanship. (Tait)
Other destroyed works include the early Short Symphony, part of which was absorbed into the Octet, and a Mass setting.
Ferguson's music has had many distinguished interpreters. These have includedMyra Hess, who recorded the Piano Sonata in 1942, andJascha Heifetz who recorded the first violin sonata in 1966. In addition, a live recording ofDiscovery, performed byKathleen Ferrier andErnest Lush in 1953, has been issued by Decca (475 6060).
More recent recordings include:
