John Blackwood Mc Ewen - Music

Music

He is best known for orchestral works on his native Galloway, such as A Solway Symphony (1909), Hills o' Heather and Where the Wild Thyme Blows (1918). His Three Border Ballads include "Grey Galloway" (1908), "The Demon Lover" (1906–1907) and "Coronach" (1906). Other works include Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, a setting of The Hymn from Milton's Ode of the same title. He wrote a Viola Concerto in 1901 at the request of Lionel Tertis, and nineteen string quartets (only seventeen are numbered), written over a fifty-year period (1893–1947).

He invented the term "inflected speech" and introduced it in his 14 Poems for inflected voice and piano after Margaret Forbes in 1943. This is equivalent to the sprechgesang of Arnold Schoenberg.

His main influences appear to be Scottish folk music, Jean Sibelius and Richard Wagner, for example, in the third movement of A Solway Symphony which shows a very strong influence from Siegfried's Rhine Journey. Most of his music is not so derivative. He seems to have been a sort of predecessor of the Scottish Renaissance in trying to use Scottish folk culture, but in a non-sentimental manner.

However, he wrote many pieces of music that were left unplayed and neglected and to this day lie in archives. Grove's Dictionary (1954) referred to him as "perhaps the most grievously neglected British composer of his generation". But he contributed to this state of affairs because he was never particularly concerned about bringing his work to the attention of the public.

Thanks to a couple of recordings of his works in the early 1990s, often performed by Moray Welsh, he has become known to a new generation of listeners. More recently, the Chilingirian Quartet has recorded ten of the string quartets. Several late string trios remain unrecorded.