This is the blog attached to the website www.warcomposers.co.uk, which as the name suggests is a website looking at composers with a connection to the First World War.
Despite the title of the website, I have been trying not to make it a site about the War. Plenty of military and social historians have already done that, and much as WWI is the thing that ultimately binds this collection of young musicians together, the war is almost always a small percentage of their lives, and with a few exceptions the one time when they were not involved in music-making.
Whereas the war seemed to bring out an extraordinary flourish of poetry, one can only imagine how much more difficult it would have been to write music under military conditions. This what makes those rare examples of compositions written at the Front – including pieces by Frederick Kelly, Cecil Coles, Ivor Gurney, Ernest Farrar – even more penetrating.
This blog is intended to feature some of the highways and byways of the research on this project, with mention of things that are perhaps related, interesting facts, updates, and questions that readers may be able to help me with.
