Composer
As a composer, he produced a number of pieces in the classical, jazz and popular idioms. It is likely that the composer of light Latin American dance tunes known as "Esteban Cera" was Race hiding behind a pseudonym. One of his better-known compositions is the short melodic piano instrumental "Nicola" (named after his daughter). His catchy "Pied Piper (The Beeje)" was also popular and reached No. 29 in the UK Singles Chart in March 1963, but his best-known and, according to his autobiography, his most lucrative composition is his music for the Birds Eye frozen peas jingle, "Sweet as the moment when the pod went pop".
Race's autobiography, Musician at Large, was published in 1979, and in 1988 Souvenir Press Ltd published his book about his grandfather's short but interesting life, from lead miner to missionary, entitled "The Two Worlds of Joseph Race".
Race was survived by his second wife and a daughter from his first marriage.
Read more about this topic: Steve Race
Famous quotes containing the word composer:
“Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“A nation creates music—the composer only arranges it.”
—Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857)
“A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.”
—Harry S. Broudy (b. 1905)