Howard Ferguson

Among the most important 20th century composers from Northern Ireland, Howard Ferguson was also active as a musicologist and even wrote a cookbook. His style, though essentially Romantic, had a compactness and rigor that marked it as part of the modern era. Ferguson was born in Belfast on October 21, 1908. He attended Rockport School in Holywood in County Down, winning several prizes there. Pianist Harold Samuel heard him play in Belfast in 1922, spotted his talent, and prevailed upon Ferguson's parents to let him move to London for study. Ferguson took music courses at the Westminster School and then was accepted at the Royal College of Music, entering in 1924. There, he studied composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams and R.O. Morris and conducting with Malcolm Sargent. Ferguson and fellow student Gerald Finzi became close friends and attended concerts together. In 1933, Ferguson scored an early success with his Octet for winds and strings, Op. 4, written for the same combination of instruments as Franz Schubert's Octet in F major, D. 803. That work became one of Ferguson's greatest successes and has been recorded multiple times, most recently by the Wigmore Soloists in 2023. Ferguson was a prominent figure in British musical life. With pianist Myra Hess, he organized a series of concerts at London's National Gallery during World War II, intended to help wartime morale. From 1948 to 1963, he taught at the Royal Academy of Music, where his students included composers Richard Rodney Bennett and Cornelius Cardew. Ferguson's Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 8, and Five Bagatelles for piano, Op. 9, entered the keyboard repertory; the latter typified a strain of concision in Ferguson's music that may have reflected his admiration for Anton Webern, although Ferguson avoided modernist styles. He also wrote works in larger forms, including the choral work The Dream of the Rood (1958). Shortly after that, Ferguson gave up composing, destroying the sketches of a string quartet he was working on. He remained active as a musicologist, however, issuing editions of music by Schubert and Finzi. Living in Cambridge, he issued a cookbook, Entertaining Solo, in the 1990s. Ferguson died in Cambridge on November 1, 1999. His output was not large, running to just 19 opus numbers plus a few other works, but his works are esteemed, and recordings of most of them were available as of the mid-2020s.
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