Edward Lowbury - The Place of Music

The Place of Music

Lowbury grew up surrounded by appreciation of music and regularly played the piano himself until almost the end of his life. He married a teacher of music and his two younger daughters became professional musicians. The eldest recalls his enthusiasm on discovering a new composer and the way he would play their records over and over. Lowbury himself recounted in an interview how, ‘When I was a student, somebody played me a record of Tapiola, the great sound-poem of Sibelius, and I was so overwhelmed by this that I couldn’t listen to any other music for a time.’ Soon after he wrote his own “Tapiola” and received enthusiastic permission from the composer to dedicate the poem to him.

Soon after arriving in the city, he became a founder member of the Birmingham Chamber Music Society. He also went regularly to the Aldeburgh Festival, at one session of which he gave a talk on Thomas Campion. Out of these visits grew the poems collected in Variations on Aldeburgh. What had intrigued Lowbury about Thomas Campion was that he too combined medical practice with poetry and musicianship. In 1970 he co-authored a biography of Campion with his wife and the composer Timothy Salter. On a much smaller scale, he gave an account of his father’s former patient, the avant-garde composer Bernard van Dieren, in one of his "Apocryphal Letters".

Another result of the co-operation with Timothy Salter was a setting of five Lowbury poems in his cantata “Against the Light” (1971) followed by two other settings in the next decade. During the 1980s there were further settings by two other composers teaching at Birmingham University, Ivor Keys and John Joubert, as well as by David Haines.