30 Facts About Eric Coates

Eric Francis Harrison Coates was an English composer of light music and, early in his career, a leading violist.

Eric 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.

Eric Coates was born in Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire, the only son, and youngest of five children, of William Harrison Eric Coates, a medical general practitioner, and his wife, Mary Jane Gwyn, nee Blower .

Eric Coates's musicality became clear when he was very young, and asked to be taught to play the violin.

Eric Coates 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.

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At Ellenberger's request, Eric 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.

Eric 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.

In 1906, aged twenty, Eric 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 Eric Coates should take composition as his principal study, with the viola as subsidiary.

Mackenzie's enthusiasm did not extend to offering a scholarship, and Dr Eric 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.

Eric Coates made it clear to Corder that he was temperamentally drawn to writing music in a light vein rather than symphonies or oratorios.

Eric Coates's 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".

Eric Coates was regarded as a great teacher, and under his tutelage Coates developed into a first-rate viola player.

Eric Coates resigned his scholarship at the academy and joined the tour.

In early 1911 Eric Coates met and fell in love with an RAM student, Phyllis Marguerite Black, an aspiring actress, who was studying recitation.

Eric Coates's affections were reciprocated but her parents were doubtful of Coates's prospects as a husband and provider.

Eric Coates played under the batons of composers including Elgar, Delius, Holst, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and virtuoso conductors such as Willem Mengelberg and Arthur Nikisch.

Eric Coates was declared medically unfit for military service in the First World War, and continued his musical career.

Eric 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, Eric 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.

Some of his findings and recommendations were accepted but, according to a biographical sketch by Tim McDonald, Eric Coates "failed to bring about any significant lessening of the inherent snobbery within the Corporation which tended to take a rather dismissive view of light music".

On 28 November 1957 Eric Coates made one of his final public appearances at a fund-raising dinner for the Musicians Benevolent Fund held at the Savoy Hotel, playing dulcimer in the premiere performance of Malcolm Arnold's Toy Symphony.

In Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Geoffrey Self writes that Eric Coates consistently recognised and accommodated new fashions in music.

Eric Coates derived the effective orchestration of his scores from his rigorous early training, experience in theatre pits of the practicalities of orchestration and arranging, and from hearing the symphony orchestra from the inside as a viola player.

Eric Coates wrote a few works outside his normal genre – a rhapsody for saxophone and orchestra in 1936 and a "symphonic rhapsody" on Richard Rodgers's "With a song in my heart" – his only treatment of music by another composer.

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Eric Coates's first published works were the "Four Old English Songs", written while he was still a student at the RAM.

The violist and music scholar Michael Ponder writes that Eric Coates, who was principally interested in writing orchestral music, found writing songs limiting and did so chiefly to fulfil his contract with his publisher.

Eric Coates chose texts by a wide range of authors, including Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti, Arthur Conan Doyle; among those whose words he set most often were Weatherly, Phyllis Black, and Royden Barrie.

Eric Coates always conceived his music in orchestral terms, even when writing for solo voice and piano.

Eric Coates realised that film music is liable to be cut, rearranged, or otherwise changed to meet the requirements of directors, and, mindful of such difficulties encountered by Arthur Bliss in composing the score for Things to Come, he did not wish his music to be subjected to similar treatment.