Percy Buck

Sir Percy Carter Buck (born March 25, 1871 in West Ham , London , † October 3, 1947 in Hindhead , Surrey ) was a British music teacher, writer, organist and composer.

Life

Percy Buck was born in London and attended the Merchant Taylors' School . He then studied at the Royal College of Music . He was then church organist at Worcester College, University of Oxford (1891-1894), Wells Cathedral (1896-1899) and Bristol Cathedral (1899-1901). He was then appointed senior music teacher at Harrow School and remained at that school until 1927. At the same time he was Professor of Music at Trinity College Dublin from 1910 to 1920 .

In 1925 Buck was appointed King Edward Professor of Music at the University of London . He also taught at the Royal College of Music. From 1927 to 1936 he was a music advisor to the London County Council . In 1937, when he gave up his professorship in London, he was promoted to Knight Bachelor . He continued teaching at the Royal College of Music after 1937.

Private

Percy Buck was married with a total of five children. The British writer Sylvia Townsend Warner , daughter of his colleague George Townsend Warner at Harrow School, became his lover in 1913. The relationship lasted until 1930, although Sylvia Townsend Warner had relationships with other men in the meantime. Born in 1893 Warner, a talented musician, was one of his private piano and organ students from 1909 and from 1913 worked on the Tudor Church Music series published by Buck .

Compositions and publications

Buck's compositions include a piano quintet , a string quintet , a violin sonata , a piano quartet , three organ sonatas and several pieces for piano and song compositions. Together with Charles Macpherson he published The English Psalter in 1925 . Tudor Church Music , a series of English church music from the Tudor period , was edited by Percy Buck and Edmund Horace Fellowes and published on behalf of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust by Oxford University Press in London and New York between 1923 and 1929. Buck's best-known works include his Oxford Song Book (1929) and his non-fiction book Psychology for Musicians (1944).

Publications

• The Organ: a Complete Method for the Study of Technique and Style (London, 1909)
• Unfigured Harmony. Oxford 1911.
• Organ playing. London 1912.
• Acoustics for Musicians. Oxford 1918.
• The Scope of Music. Oxford 1924.
• A History of Music. London, 1929.
• Psychology for Musicians. London 1944.

literature

• Claire Harman: Sylvia Townsend Warner - A Biography. Penguin Random House, 2015, ISBN 978-0-241-96444-6 .
• Maggie Humphreys, Robert Evans: Dictionary of Composers for the Church in Great Britain and Ireland . Mansell Publishing Limited, London 1997, ISBN 0-7201-2330-5 ( online [accessed December 29, 2015]).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Harman: Sylvia Townsend , p. 22.
2. ^ Harman: Sylvia Townsend , p. 24.
3. ^ Harman: Sylvia Townsend , p. 21.