John Greenwood (composer)

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John Danforth Herman Greenwood (26 June 1889 – 15 April 1975), was an English composer best known for his film scores.

Education and early career

Greenwood was the son of New Zealander Alfred Greenwood (1842–1912) and his English-born wife Ottilie Rose Minna (1855–1932) née Schweitzer. He was named after his grandfathers: Herman Schweitzer, a Prussian born analytical chemist; and Dr. John Danforth Greenwood (1803–1890) from Sussex, England, a pioneering New Zealand physician and educationist, who had emigrated to New Zealand in 1842 after retiring from medicine due to ill health.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Greenwood was born in London. He learned piano and viola from his parents and at 18 entered the Royal College of Music to study viola and horn, as well as composition with Charles Villiers Stanford.<ref name=hunt>Huntley, John. British Film Music (1947)</ref> While there he won the Grove scholarship and Arthur Sullivan composition awards.<ref name=who/> For a short period he taught at Brighton and Hove Grammar School, and then made his living as a pianist, horn and viola player in various orchestras as well as conducting at the Queen's Hall and in the provinces.<ref name=dict/>

During the First World War Greenwood was a conscientious objector. At that time he was living at 39, Hillcrest Road, Acton Hill.<ref>National archives record</ref> Greenwood married Winifred Margaret Hicks in 1917 and a son, Alfred Michael Greenwood, was born a year later.<ref name=who>Sir Landon Ronald. Who's Who in Music (1935 edition), p. 123</ref>

Composer

Greenwood's early concert works had their first performances from the Queen's Hall Orchestra under Henry Wood in the early 1920s. But he quickly became involved with writing music for the cinema, composing and editing music for silent films from the 1920s onwards. In 1929 he wrote a new score for the part-talkie film To What Red Hell.<ref name=dict>Musiker, R and Musiker, N. Conductors and Composers of Popular Orchestral Music (1998)</ref> From the 1930s until the mid-1950s he worked on around 50 films, from Man of Aran (1934) to Grand National Night (1953).<ref name=hunt/> While he no doubt gained considerable satisfaction from these compositions – and access to a large audience – there were also frustrations as the film editing process frequently required the removal or addition of passages of music quite regardless of the overall form and themes of the piece.

Whether his compositions of incidental theatre music for Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream (as staged by J.B. Fagan) were intrinsically more satisfying is not known. A Fantasy was extracted from A Midsummer Night's Dream and performed separately.<ref>'Radio Times Issue 726, 29 August 1937, p 62</ref>

His film credits also include scores for documentaries such as Berth 24 (1950), portraying the life of the Hull docks, and The Lake District (1954), with narration by Michael Redgrave.<ref>Barnett, Rob. 'British Film Music Composers' at MusicWeb International</ref> His march The Eighth Army (from the film The Nine Men) written with Eric Coates, was recorded on 78.<ref>HM Grenadier Guards Band/Lieut F Harris. Columbia DB2140</ref>

The concert works, composed in parallel with his work for film and theatre, are now entirely forgotten. Salute to Gustav Holst was premiered at the Sir Henry Wood Promenade Concerts in 1936, conducted by the composer.<ref>Radio Times Issue 647, 23 February 1936, p 56</ref> His setting of Psalm 150 for chorus and orchestra was broadcast in May 1936, conducted by Adrian Boult.<ref>Radio Times Issue 660, 24 May 1936, p 58</ref> On 24 January 1938 Constant Lambert conducted the BBC Orchestra in the first performance and broadcast of Greenwood's Symphonic Movement.<ref>Radio Times Issue 747, 23 January 1938, p 28</ref>

The Piano Quintet, composed around 1940, was performed by the Aeolian String Quartet and Kyla Greenbaum on 15 October 1953 at Queen Mary Hall, Great Russell Street, as part of a chamber concert that also included the String Quartet No 2 (1928) and the Flute Sonata (1943).<ref>The Times, 16 October 1953, p 2</ref> On 14 September 1956 his Viola Concerto received its world premiere at the Proms, with Watson Forbes as the soloist, conducted by John Hollingsworth.<ref>BBC Proms archive</ref>

The composer's archives, held at McMaster University,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> contain documentation (including some manuscripts) of two symphonies, three piano sonatas and two orchestral ballet suites (The Silver Harlequin, 1917 and Piccadilly, 1953).<ref name=whofifth/>

Later life

By the 1930s he was living at Roedean, Brighton. During the Second World War he worked on the staff of the BBC European Service as Assistant Music Supervisor. By the early 1950s, as his work on films drew to a close, he was living at Greenwoods, North End, Ditchling in Sussex.<ref>Who's Who in Music (1950 edition)</ref> In 1969 his address was Guntsfield, 32 Beacon Road, Ditchling.<ref name=whofifth>Who's Who in Music, Fifth Edition (1969), p.123 (includes list of concert works)</ref> He died at Ditchling, aged 85.<ref>Leach, Gerald. British Composer Profiles (3rd edition, 2012), p. 99</ref>

Bibliography

• Everyman's Dictionary of Music 5th Edition, 1975. Template:ISBN

External links

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