Biography
Sir George Dyson (1883–1964) was a well-known English musician and composer. His son is the physicist Freeman Dyson and his grandchildren are Freeman's children the science historian George Dyson and his sister Esther Dyson. He was born in Halifax, Yorkshire on May 28, 1883 and died in Winchester September 28, 1964.
He attended the Royal College of Music and was a winner of the Mendelssohn Travelling Scholarship which enabled him to spend some years in Italy and Germany. He then worked for thirty years as a school music teacher (at Rugby, Wellington and Winchester), before being appointed as Director of the Royal College of Music in 1937.
He received a knighthood in 1941 and was made a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (KCVO) in 1953.
His compositions include a symphony in G major (1937), a violin concerto, and a number of other works, many of them for choir. Ernest John Moeran's symphony of the same decade (and completed the same year) has some similarities of style and ambition with Dyson's. Both are among the longest works of each at about 45 minutes, and both show some influence, harmonically and in instrumental use, from Jean Sibelius. Another work of significant length by Dyson is the poem cycle Quo vadis for soloists, semi-chorus, and orchestra, the nine poems of which taken together last over an hour and a half.
Dyson composed some fifty works for the Anglican liturgy, including two complete morning and evening Canticles in D major and F major, as well as a setting of the evening service in C minor for trebles. The two evening services for full choir remain extremely popular in English churches and cathedrals, and are certainly part of the core repertoire. The F major service is particularly noted for its solos: about half of the Magnificat is written for a solo treble, and half the Nunc Dimittis for a solo bass.
In the Oxford Companion to Music, Percy Scholes described his compositions as "skilful, sometimes deeply felt, but never forward-looking in idiom".
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