The career of British composer John Jeffreys is unusually interesting. A World War II veteran of the RAF, he studied music at Trinity College of Music in London after the war. Although he composed music in all genres, he was strongly oriented toward the art song. Parallel to his own composing, he pursued strong interests in Renaissance music, becoming an authority on the lutenist/composer Philip Rosseter and in English and Scots poetry. As a child he had been exposed to the music and literature of the English Renaissance, ...
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The career of British composer John Jeffreys is unusually interesting. A World War II veteran of the RAF, he studied music at Trinity College of Music in London after the war. Although he composed music in all genres, he was strongly oriented toward the art song. Parallel to his own composing, he pursued strong interests in Renaissance music, becoming an authority on the lutenist/composer Philip Rosseter and in English and Scots poetry. As a child he had been exposed to the music and literature of the English Renaissance, but never to the Viennese classics, a fact that profoundly shaped his style. During the period of maximal modernist repression of other styles, he became discouraged and destroyed in most of his music. But in his old age (he still lives in West Suffolk, where, one learns from the booklet, "his hobbies include hardy plants"), he rediscovered tapes from the 1960s of his music being performed and was encouraged to reconstruct it. A modest renaissance has ensued, and any lover of English...
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