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.
Career
Hamilton was born in Glasgow and educated in London, 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 the Royal Academy of Music for three years, studying composition with William Alwyn and piano with Harold Craxton. Simultaneously he earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of London (1950), and he was later awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music from the University of Glasgow (1970).[1]
In 1951 Hamilton became a lecturer at both Morley 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 at Duke 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 work Commedia was performed at the BBC Proms in 1993. He died in London, aged 78.[3]
Music
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 by Frederick 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 the Four 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 to The Musical Times "shocked a conservative Edinburgh Festival audience".[3]
In the 1960s Hamilton composed two operas, Agamemnon and The Royal Hunt of the Sun, using texts he adapted from literary sources. The latter was premiered and revived by English National Opera. A later opera, The Catiline Conspiracy, was first performed by Scottish 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 in Anna Karenina, a poignantly Mahlerian treatment of Tolstoy's novel."[6] Other late works include the orchestral Bulgaria: Invocation/Evocation (1999) and London: a kaleidoscope for piano and orchestra.[1]
Works
Chamber and solo instrument
Antigone for wind octet (1991)
Aria for horn and piano
Brass Quintet (by 1991)
Capriccio for trumpet and piano
Cello Sonata No. 1, Op. 39 (1958–59)
Cello Sonata No. 2 (1974)
Clarinet Quintet No. 1 (1948)
Clarinet Quintet No. 2, Sea Music (1974)
Clarinet Sonata, Op. 22 (1955)
Five Scenes for trumpet and piano (1966)
Flute Quartet, Op. 12 (1951)
Flute Sonata (1966)
Hyperion for five players (1977) (Cl., Hn., Vln., Vcl., Pno.)
^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 from the original(PDF) on 8 July 2007. Retrieved 9 December 2007. Catalog of papers, including worklist, list of sketched works, letters, etc.
