Eric Coates
Eric Francis Harrison Coates was an English composer of light music and, early in his career, a leading violist.
Coates was born into a musical family, but, despite his wishes and obvious talent, his parents only reluctantly allowed him to pursue a musical career. He studied at the Royal Academy of Music under Frederick Corder and Lionel Tertis, and played in string quartets and theatre pit bands, before joining symphony orchestras conducted by Thomas Beecham and Henry Wood. Coates's experience as a player added to the rigorous training he had received at the academy and contributed to his skill as a composer.
While still working as a violist, Coates composed songs and other light musical works. In 1919 he gave up the viola permanently and from then until his death he made his living as a composer and occasional conductor. His prolific output includes the London Suite, of which the well-known "Knightsbridge March" is the concluding section; the waltz "By the Sleepy Lagoon" ; and "The Dam Busters March". His early compositions were influenced by the music of Arthur Sullivan and Edward German, but Coates's style evolved in step with changes in musical taste, and his later works incorporate elements derived from jazz and dance-band music. His output consists almost wholly of orchestral music and songs. With the exception of one unsuccessful short ballet, he never wrote for the theatre, and only occasionally for the cinema.
Life and career
Early years
Coates was born in Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire, the only son, and youngest of five children, of William Harrison Coates, a medical general practitioner, and his wife, Mary Jane Gwyn, née Blower. It was a musical household: Dr Coates was a capable amateur flautist and singer, and his wife was a fine pianist.As a child, Coates did not go to school, but was educated with his sisters by a governess. His musicality became clear when he was very young, and asked to be taught to play the violin. His first lessons, from age six, were with a local violin teacher, and from thirteen he studied with George Ellenberger, who was once a pupil of Joseph Joachim. Coates also took lessons in harmony and counterpoint from Ralph Horner, lecturer in music at University College Nottingham, who had studied under Ignaz Moscheles and Ernst Richter and was a former conductor for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. At Ellenberger's request, Coates switched to the viola, supposedly for a single performance; he found the deeper sound of the instrument to his liking and changed permanently from violinist to violist. In that capacity he joined a local string orchestra, for which he wrote his first surviving music, the Ballad, op. 2, dedicated to Ellenberger. It was completed on 23 October 1904 and performed later that year at the Albert Hall, Nottingham, with Coates playing in the viola section.
File:Tertis-and-Corder.jpg|thumb|left|alt=portraits of two white men of mature years, one with a full head of dark hair, one bald, both with moustaches|Coates's professors: Lionel Tertis and Frederick Corder
Coates wanted to pursue a career as a professional musician; his parents were not in favour of it, but eventually agreed that he could seek admission to the Royal Academy of Music in London. They insisted that by the end of his first year there he must have demonstrated that his abilities were equal to a professional career, failing which he was to return to Nottinghamshire and take up a safe and respectable post in a bank. In 1906, aged twenty, Coates auditioned for admission; he was interviewed by the principal, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who was sufficiently impressed by the applicant's setting of Burns's "A Red, Red Rose" to suggest that Coates should take composition as his principal study, with the viola as subsidiary. Coates was adamant that his first concern was the viola. Mackenzie's enthusiasm did not extend to offering a scholarship, and Dr Coates had to pay the tuition fees for his son's first year, after which a scholarship was granted.
At the RAM Coates studied the viola with Lionel Tertis and composition with Frederick Corder. Coates made it clear to Corder that he was temperamentally drawn to writing music in a light vein rather than symphonies or oratorios. His songs featured in RAM concerts during his years as a student, and although his first press review called his two songs performed in December 1907 "rather obvious", his four Shakespeare settings were praised the following year for the "charm of a sincere melody". and his "Devon to Me" was credited by The Musical Times as "a robust and manly ditty, worthy of publication".
Coates was fortunate in his viola professor. The New York Times called Tertis the first great protagonist of the instrument, and Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians ranks him as the foremost player of the viola. He was also regarded as a great teacher, and under his tutelage Coates developed into a first-rate viola player. While still a student he earned money playing in theatre orchestras in the West End, including the Savoy, where he played for several weeks under François Cellier in a Gilbert and Sullivan season in 1907.
Professional violist and composer: 1908–1919
In 1908 Coates's studies at the RAM came to an unexpected end when Tertis had to drop out of a tour of South Africa as a member of the Hambourg Quartet, a leading string ensemble; he arranged for Coates to be invited to fill the vacancy. Coates resigned his scholarship at the academy and joined the tour. At about this time he began to be troubled by pain in his left hand and numbness in his right, which were symptoms of the neuritis that affected him throughout the remaining eleven years of his career as a violist. After working with the Hambourg Quartet, Coates was violist of the Cathie and Walenn quartets.Alongside his busy playing career, Coates had several early successes as a composer. The soprano Olga Wood, wife of the conductor Henry Wood, sang Coates's "Four Old English Songs" at the Proms in 1909; the music critic of The Times wrote that they were "tuneful, somewhat in the manner of Mr. Edward German", and showed the influence of Arthur Sullivan in the word-setting. The songs were taken up by other prominent singers including Gervase Elwes, Carrie Tubb and Nellie Melba. The composer's many collaborations with the lyricist Frederic Weatherly began with "Stonecracker John", the first of a succession of highly popular ballads. Wood was the dedicatee of the Miniature Suite, the last movement of which was encored when he conducted its first performance, at the Proms, in October 1911.
In early 1911 Coates met and fell in love with an RAM student, Phyllis Marguerite Black, an aspiring actress, who was studying recitation. His affections were reciprocated but her parents were doubtful of Coates's prospects as a husband and provider. Although he continued to compose, he was concentrating for the time being on playing the viola for his principal income, first with the Beecham Symphony Orchestra, and, from 1910, with Wood's Queen's Hall Orchestra. He played under the batons of composers including Elgar, Delius, Holst, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and virtuoso conductors such as Willem Mengelberg and Arthur Nikisch. This work gave him the necessary financial security to marry Phyllis in February 1913. They had one child, Austin, born in 1922.
Coates was declared medically unfit for military service in the First World War, and continued his musical career. The war brought about a severe reduction in work, and the couple's income received a welcome boost from Phyllis's acting engagements. As her career progressed, she appeared with other rising performers including Noël Coward.
In 1919 Coates gave up playing the viola. His contract to lead the section in the Queen's Hall orchestra expired and was not renewed. Some sources ascribe this to Coates's wish to pursue a full-time career as a composer; others say that his neuritis affected his playing; Coates himself said that Wood valued reliability more than virtuosity, and had become exasperated by Coates's frequent absences conducting his compositions elsewhere.
Full-time composer: 1920s and 1930s
Whether or not Wood had lost patience with Coates as a violist, he regarded him well enough as a composer to invite him to conduct the first performance of his suite Summer Days at a Queen's Hall Promenade concert in October 1919, and to engage him for repeat performances of the piece in 1920, 1924 and 1925, and for more of his orchestral works including the suite Joyous Youth and the premiere of The Three Bears. The latter, one of three of Coates's most substantial works, labelled "Phantasies", was inspired by the children's stories that Phyllis Coates read to their son; the others were The Selfish Giant and Cinderella.File:Eric Coates - Chiltern Court Baker St NW1 5SR.jpg|thumb|left|upright|alt=exterior of expensive residential block of flats|Chiltern Court, Baker Street, Coates's London home 1930–1936. A blue plaque by the door commemorates him.
What Coates's biographer Geoffrey Self describes as "a not-too-onerous contract with his publisher" stipulated an annual output of two orchestral pieces – one of fifteen minutes' duration and one of five – and three ballads. Coates was a founder-member of the Performing Right Society, and was among the first composers whose main income came from broadcasts and recordings, after the demand for sheet music of popular songs declined in the 1920s and 1930s.
Between the First and Second world wars, Coates was in demand as a conductor of his own works, appearing in London and seaside resorts such as Bournemouth, Scarborough and Hastings, which then maintained substantial orchestras devoted to light music. But it was in the studio that he made the most impact as a composer-conductor. Beginning in 1923 he made records of his music for Columbia, which attracted a substantial following. Among those who bought his records was Elgar, who made a point of buying all Coates's discs as they came out.
Although he and his wife maintained a country house in Sussex, Coates found city life more stimulating, and was more productive when at the family's London flat in Baker Street. The views from there across the roofscapes prompted his London Suite, with its depictions of Covent Garden, Westminster and Knightsbridge. The work transformed Coates's status from moderate prominence to national celebrity when the BBC chose the "Knightsbridge" march from the suite as the signature tune for its new and prodigiously popular radio programme In Town Tonight, which ran from 1933 to 1960.
Another work written at the Baker Street flat that enhanced the composer's fame was By the Sleepy Lagoon, an orchestral piece that made little initial impression, but with an added lyric became a hit song in the US in 1940, and in its original instrumental version became familiar in Britain as the title music of the BBC radio series Desert Island Discs which began in 1942 and is still running.