Research and Scholarship
The first biography of Bax was Colin Scott-Sutherland’s Arnold Bax, published in 1973. It offers a description of Bax's life and some insightful analysis of his music, especially the large-scale works. Scott-Sutherland also published the works of Dermot O'Byrne (Bax's literary pseudonym): Ideala: Poems and Some Early Love Letters of Arnold Bax including the Collected Poems of Dermot O'Byrne (2001). Bax’s principal biographer, however, is the English writer Lewis Foreman. Foreman's first major contribution to Bax scholarship was a 1983 biography entitled Bax, A Composer and His Times. A second edition appeared in 1988 and a third edition in February 2007.
The principal primary source for information regarding Bax’s life and philosophy is his anecdotal autobiography Farewell My Youth (1943), which, for personal reasons, ends at the year 1914. In it Bax attempted to create several myths about himself, but many of his own statements are contradicted by things he wrote elsewhere. Lewis Foreman's 1992 edition of Bax's autobiography is the most recent currently available. Entitled Farewell My Youth, and Other Writings by Arnold Bax, it also includes photographs and some letters. Another compendium of primary source material is Cuchullan Among the Guns (1998), a selection of letters from Bax's correspondence with the British conductor Christopher Whelen, edited by Dennis Andrews.
A significant event in Bax musicology was the publication of Graham Parlett's exhaustive list of Bax's works entitled A Catalogue of the Works of Sir Arnold Bax (1999). Recognising Parlett's achievement and contribution, Bax musicologists have now started to use his chronological numbering system as a universal system of reference (e.g. Bax's celebrated Third Symphony would be "Parlett #297" or simply P. 297). The doctoral dissertation of Dr. Paul R. Ludden and the M. Litt. dissertation of Thomas Elnaes (University of Dublin, Trinity College, 2006) use the succinct Parlett Numbers exclusively. As a composer Graham Parlett has also edited and orchestrated several Bax scores, including the Russian Suite and the film music to Oliver Twist.
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