Composer, born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, EC England, UK. He studied at Cambridge and the Royal College of Music, learning composition under Vaughan Williams and conducting from Adrian Boult. He became professor of music at Cambridge (194662), where he established excellent male-voice chapel and secular choirs. He wrote his most significant work, a choral symphony entitled The Hills, in 1946.
Patrick Arthur Sheldon Hadley (5 March 1899–17 December 1973) was a British composer.
Biography
Patrick Hadley was born on 5 March 1899 in Cambridge. His father, William Sheldon Hadley, was at that time a fellow of Pembroke College.
Patrick studied initially at St Ronan's Preparatory School at West Worthing and then at Winchester College. Hadley's elder brother was himself killed in action during the Great War.
After the War he went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge. Hadley was awarded B.Mus. He then went to the Royal College of Music in London. Eric Weatherall notes that Hadley's contemporaries at the RCM included Constant Lambert and Gordon Jacob.
He eventually became a member of the RCM staff in 1925 and taught composition. In fact his friends are a litany of all that was best in English music at that time.
In 1938 he was offered a Fellowship of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridgeshire and a position as lecturer at Cambridge University. Much of his time was spent in run of the mill activities associated with the administration of the music faculty.
During the Second World War he deputized for Boris Ord as the conductor and musical director of the Cambridge University Music Society.
He was keen to promote a wide range of music, including the formation of a Gilbert and Sullivan Society.
In 1946 he was elected to the Chair of Music at Cambridge University. Some of the students taught by Hadley have gone on to make big names for themselves: Raymond Leppard, David Lumsden, and Peter le Huray.
In 1962 Hadley retired to his house at Heacham.
Patrick Hadley died on 17 December 1973 at King's Lynn.
Music
Patrick Hadley was influenced by the music of Frederick Delius and also to a certain extent folk music.
His output was limited. Most people think of Hadley as composer of one or two church anthems: I Sing of a Maiden and the mildly erotic My Beloved spake. The catalogue shows a wide variety of musical forms: from a symphonic ballad to incidental music for Twelfth Night.
He maintained throughout his a career a sense of the lyrical. Not for him was the experimental music of the Second Vienna School. He had an exceptional understanding of how to set words to music. Much of his music is meditative and quite inward looking. One is left wishing he had written more music for chamber and orchestral forces. Much of Patrick Hadley's music seems to evoke the English and the Irish landscape.
One of Hadley's undoubted masterpieces is his Symphonic Ballad: The Trees So High. The work is in four movements and it is only in the last that Hadley deploys the chorus and soloist. It is in this movement that Hadley quotes the folk-song in its entirety.
The Hills was completed in 1944 and is perhaps the finest of Hadley’s cantatas, the other two being Fen and Flood and Connemara. The landscape described is Derbyshire and this is well reflected in the music.
Perhaps the gentlest introduction to Hadley is his short orchestral work One Morning in Spring, which was composed to celebrate Ralph Vaughan Williams' seventieth birthday.
Perhaps the desideratum is the early orchestral sketch Kinder Scout.
Although Hadley was best of friends with Ralph Vaughan Williams, he never truly bought into the so-called folk song revival. Much of his music has folk characteristics, however not for him the old adage of Constant Lambert: "All you can do with a folk tune is to repeat it—louder!". Hadley's use of the folk idiom was subtle.
Much of the composer's output was connected with the Caius Choir.
Patrick "Paddy" Hadley’s music will never be widely popular. However, he will appeal greatly to those interested in British music.
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