George Dyson

His works were well known during his lifetime but underwent a period of neglect before being revived in the late 20th century.

George Dyson studied at Royal College of Music. Training under Charles Villiers Stanford is recorded. The recorded working language is English. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are classical music. Employment is recorded with Royal College of Music. Works named in the authority record are In Honour of the City and Concerto Leggiero. Distinctions recorded are Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and Knight Bachelor.

Dyson was born in Halifax, Yorkshire, the eldest of the three children of John William Dyson, a blacksmith, and his wife, Alice, née Greenwood, a weaver. Dyson senior was also organist and choirmaster at a local church, and both parents were members of amateur choirs. They encouraged their son's musical talent, and at the age of 13 he was appointed as a church organist. Three years later he secured an FRCO (Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists), and in 1900 he won an open scholarship to the Royal College of Music (RCM) where he studied composition with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. He supported himself during his years studying at the RCM by working as assistant organist at St Alfege Church, Greenwich. He won the Arthur Sullivan prize for composition while still an RCM student, and in 1904 was awarded a Mendelssohn Scholarship, which enabled him to spend three years in Italy, Austria and Germany. He met leading musicians including Richard Strauss, whose style is believed to have influenced Dyson's early compositions. His symphonic poem Siena (1907) was considered by The Times to stand out from many works by other young composers, but the score has not survived. When he returned to Britain in 1907 Dyson was appointed director of music at the Royal Naval College, Osborne, on the recommendation of Sir Hubert Parry, director of the RCM. From there he moved to Marlborough College in 1911. • Illustration — Dyson's first publication: notes on grenade warfare, 1915 On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Dyson joined the Royal Fusiliers, becoming grenadier officer of the 99th infantry brigade. In that role he wrote a training pamphlet on grenade warfare for which he became well known. In 1916, incapacitated by shell-shock, he was invalided back to England. Parry recorded in his diary how shaken he was when he saw Dyson, "a shadow of his former self". In November 1917 Dyson married Mildred Lucy Atkey (1880–1975), daughter of a London solicitor. They had a son, Freeman, who became a noted theoretical physicist and mathematician, and a daughter, Alice. In 1917 Dyson received the degree of DMus from the University of Oxford. After a long convalescence Dyson was commissioned as a major in the newly formed Royal Air Force (RAF), serving until 1920. In this capacity, organising RAF bands, he completed the short score of Henry Walford Davies's RAF March Past, adding a slow middle section and fully scoring the whole piece.

• Illustration — Royal College of Music, London In 1938 Dyson was appointed director of the RCM on the retirement of Sir Hugh Allen; he took great pride in being the first former student of the RCM to become its director. He secured funding for the college from the University Grants Committee, and set up a pension scheme for the staff. He instituted an overhaul of the college's facilities, from rehearsal space down to lavatories, to provide a better working environment for the students. He also modernised the curriculum and examination system of the college. He held the strong view that with first-rate performances of music now easily and regularly available on radio and record, people now coming into the musical profession needed to attain the highest standards if they were to compete. His emphasis on technical excellence led to criticism; The Times said that he "reversed the humanistic trend that had been the ideal of the college". When the Second World War began in 1939 many educational and other organisations were evacuated from London to avoid the expected bombing. Dyson was adamant that the RCM should remain in its home in South Kensington. His decision had important consequences beyond the college, as other institutions followed suit, with the result that continuity of training was possible and standards were maintained. At the RCM, Malcolm Sargent took charge of the college orchestra, and Karl Geiringer, displaced by the Nazis from the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, joined the faculty. After the war, Dyson had to deal with a surge in demand for places at the college: students who had interrupted their studies to join the armed forces and the post-war generation of new applicants swelled the numbers of applicants, and Dyson and his board were obliged to make the requirements for entry more stringent. His emphasis on practical musicianship led him to cull the college's library and archives, disposing of many old books and manuscripts, to the outrage of some colleagues. Dyson's encouragement of talent sometimes showed itself in a willingness to depart from normal practice when he felt it necessary. Although Colin Davis, as a clarinet student, was not allowed to take part in the conducting class because his pianistic skills were judged inadequate, Malcolm Arnold fared better: even though he decamped from the college, Dyson encouraged him to return and smoothed his path in doing so; for Julian Bream Dyson made special arrangements to enable him to pursue his guitar studies, not hitherto part of the college's curriculum. Dyson received a knighthood in the 1941 New Years Honours List and was appointed Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO) in 1953. He held honorary degrees from the universities of Aberdeen and Leeds and honorary fellowships of the Royal Academy of Music and Imperial College London. In 1952 Dyson retired from the RCM. He moved to Winchester, and enjoyed what Foreman describes as "a remarkable Indian summer" of composition, although by this time his music seemed old-fashioned to some listeners. His late works were published and performed, but did not, according to Foreman, "have quite the immediate following" of the music from earlier in his career. Dyson died at his home in Winchester on 28 September 1964, aged 81.

Dyson said of himself as a composer, "My reputation is that of a good technician … not markedly original. I am familiar with modern idioms but they are outside the vocabulary of what I want to say". The music critic of The Times remarked that Dyson's works had a certain ambiguity, "due probably to the fact that great musical skill was allied, exceptionally, with an extrovert temperament." The same writer observed that although everything Dyson wrote was well made, he never developed a personal idiom, "nor engendered much emotional sap in his larger works". Dyson's biographer Paul Spicer writes that of the composer's works only The Canterbury Pilgrims and two sets of evening canticles in D and F are performed with any frequency. Dyson himself chose to include the following works in his Who's Who entry: In Honour of the City, 1928; The Canterbury Pilgrims, 1931; St Paul's Voyage, 1933; The Blacksmiths, 1934; Nebuchadnezzar, 1935; Symphony, 1937; Quo Vadis, 1939; Violin Concerto, 1942; Concerto da Camera and Concerto da Chiesa for Strings, 1949; Concerto Leggiero for Piano and Strings, 1951; Sweet Thames Run Softly, 1954; Agincourt, 1955; Hierusalem, 1956; Let's go a-Maying, 1958; and A Christmas Garland, 1959. In addition to those mentioned by the composer, the Dyson Trust lists the following compositions as available as at 2017: A Spring Garland, Children's Suite for orchestra, Evening Service in C Minor, Evening Service in D, Morning Service in D, Prelude, Fantasy and Chaconne for cello and orchestra, Te Deum Laudamus, and Three Rhapsodies for string quartet. The Trust has published a full list of works, totalling nine orchestral works, seven chamber works, thirteen pieces or sets of pieces for piano, four solo organ pieces, twenty works for chorus and orchestra, seventy-nine works for chorus with piano, or organ or unaccompanied, five hymns, six songs, and thirteen lost or destroyed works from the composer's early career. In 2014, to mark the 50th anniversary of Dyson's death, Ben Costello produced an arrangement of In Honour of the City for two pianos and percussion.