Eric Coates - Life, Works

Composer, born in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, C England, UK. He studied in Nottingham and at the Royal Academy of Music, London, working as a violinist. Sir Henry Wood performed several of his early works at Promenade Concerts. Success as a composer of attractive light music enabled him to devote himself to composition after 1918. Among his best-known compositions are ‘London Suite’ (1933) and ‘The Three Elizabeths’ (1944), and a number of popular waltzes, marches, and other melodies such as ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’ (1930), which became the signature tune for the BBC radio programme ‘ Desert Island Discs’ for over fifty years, and ‘The Dambusters March’ (1954).

Eric Coates (August 27, 1886 – December 21, 1957) was an English composer of light music and a viola player.

Life

He was born in Hucknall in Nottinghamshire, the son of a doctor, and studied music at the Royal Academy of Music in London from 1906, receiving viola lessons from Lionel Tertis.

Coates' autobiography, Suite in Four Movements, was published in 1953.

Eric Coates is not directly related to Albert Coates, the contemporary conductor and composer.

Works

Coates' music, with its simple and memorable melodies, proved particularly effective for theme music. As well as "Knightsbridge", the BBC also used Calling All Workers (1940) as the theme for the radio programme Music While You Work and By the Sleepy Lagoon (1930) is still used to introduce the long-running radio programme Desert Island Discs. Coates' "Halcyon Days", the first movement of the suite The Three Elizabeths, was used as the theme to the popular 1967 BBC TV series The Forsyte Saga, although he received no credit.

Coates also wrote a number of pieces which were used as television start-up music: the BBC Television March (for BBC-TV), was used daily from 1946 to the end of 1958 and occasionally from then until 1960, the Rediffusion March (written as Music Everywhere;

Coates is also well-known for his contribution to the film score for The Dam Busters (1954); He was unwilling to write the entire score when asked by the film's producers, but warmed to the idea of writing a signature march around which the rest of the film's score was based - in fact, he submitted a piece that he had recently completed, so the famous Dam Busters March was not itself composed with the film in mind.

His songs, some with lyrics by Arthur Conan Doyle and Fred E.