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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: George Butterworth and His Contemporaries

Composer of the Week: George Butterworth and His Contemporaries: Episode 4: Over the Hills and Far Away

George Butterworth and His Contemporaries

Episode 4

Episode 4: Over the Hills and Far Away

Over the Hills and Far Away

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, George Butterworth and His Contemporaries, Over the Hills and Far Away

How the musical language of composers like Butterworth drew on a broad net of influences.

Donald Macleod explains that while Butterworth's English Idylls showed the popularity of pastoral and folk idioms, the musical language of composers like him had varied influences.

The search for a "new sound" is illustrated in a walk along the Thames and a lurid tale of revenge. 

A close friend of Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth was killed at the age of 31, during the battle of the Somme as dawn broke on the 5th August 1916. A war hero, he was awarded the Military Cross twice. Butterworth's legacy rests on a handful of pieces, notably his much loved English Idylls and folk-song arrangements. He belongs to a generation of composers who showed great promise early on, only to be denied the chance to reach musical maturity. Over the course of the week, we'll also hear the work of four contemporaries of Butterworth: fellow Englishmen Ernest Farrar and W Denis Browne, the Scottish composer Cecil Coles and the Australian composer Frederick Septimus Kelly. All of them, like Butterworth, died on active service during the Great War. Among the musical gems, there's the first ever recording of Denis Browne's ballet "The Comic Spirit", made for the series by the BBC Philharmonic. Their musical trajectory may be short, but this lost generation of composers nonetheless has made an indelible mark on the face of British music.

In today's instalment, Donald Macleod is joined once more by Dr Kate Kennedy, an authority on this period. While Butterworth's popular English Idylls reflect the popularity of pastoral and folk idioms, in fact the musical language of these composers draws on a broad net of influences. 

George Butterworth
English Idyll No.2
Hallé Orchestra
Mark Elder, conductor 

W Denis Browne
Arabia 
Martyn Hill, tenor 
Clifford Benson, piano 

George Butterworth
Love Blows as the Wind Blows
Jonathan Lemalu, bass-baritone
Belcea Quartet

Ernest Farrar
Variations for Piano and Orchestra
Howard Shelley, piano 
Philharmonia Orchestra
Alasdair Mitchell, conductor 

Cecil Coles
Fra Giacomo, scena for baritone and orchestra 
Paul Whelan, baritone
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 
Martyn Brabbins, conductor.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod explores the music of George Butterworth and four of his contemporaries

Donald Macleod explores the music of George Butterworth and his contemporaries Ernest Farrar, W Denis Browne, Cecil Coles and Frederick Septimus Kelly, who all died in the First World War

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George Butterworth and His Contemporaries

Episode 4: Over the Hills and Far Away

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