Career
Thomas Brendan Wilson said that he not only wanted to be a composer, he said that he had to be one. There was an inner compulsion - he felt as though he had no choice in the matter. One of the first honours graduates in music from Glasgow University, Wilson became a lecturer at his alma mater in 1957. He was later appointed a Reader (1971) and given a Personal Chair in 1977. He consistently played an active part in the musical life of the UK, holding executive and advisory positions in such organisations as the Scottish Arts Council, The New Music Group of Scotland, The Society for the Promotion of New Music, The Composers' Guild of Great Britain (Chairman 1986-89) now the British Association of Composers and Songwriters, and The Scottish Society of Composers (of which he was a founder member).
His works have been played all over the world and embrace all forms - orchestral, choral-orchestral, chamber-orchestral, opera, ballet, brass band, vocal music of different kinds, and works for a wide variety of chamber ensembles and solo instruments. Wilson completed five symphonies, the fourth of which, Passeleth Tapestry, was premiered by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Bryden Thomson on 6 August 1988 in Paisley Abbey. He also completed several concertos and choral works. His largest work was an opera, Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1972–75), commissioned by Scottish Opera and based on the novel by James Hogg.
Wilson was awarded the CBE in 1990. The following year he was awarded an honourary DMus Degree from Glasgow University and created a Fellow of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
The 80th anniversary of Thomas Wilson's birth on 10 October 1927 was marked by a performance of the composer's St Kentigern Suite on 17 January 2008 by the RSAMD Chamber Orchestra, and by a performance of the composer's Violin Concerto also in January 2008 by the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland.
A biography co-written by David Griffith and Margaret Wilson and edited by Prof. Karl Gwiasda has been completed and published in 2011 to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of his death. The music critic, Michael Tumelty recently described Wilson in the Glasgow Herald (12/02/2011) as "a gently magisterial composer and one of the wisest and most philosophical musicians I have met".
Read more about this topic: Thomas Wilson (composer)
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)