Archives: Composers

Rachel Broadbent is a professional, freelance oboist, oboe d’amore, and cor anglais player, as well as an educator and arranger/composer of oboe educational music and double reed ensemble music. She has a varied musical career that includes performing, teaching, music arranging, and running Chase Oboe Reeds.

Rachel studied at Birmingham Conservatoire with Jonathan Kelly and George Caird, where she won the Birmingham and Midland Institute Woodwind Prize and the Rollason Award for Performance. She was also chosen to perform an Albinoni Double Concerto with George Caird. For her postgraduate studies, she moved to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where her oboe tutors were Richard Simpson and Kieron Moore.

In her professional career, Rachel has worked with many orchestras and ensembles, including the BBC Concert Orchestra, London Concert Orchestra, Brandenburg Sinfonia, New London Orchestra, Mozart Festival Orchestra, and Southern Sinfonia. As a soloist, she gives regular recitals with her accompanist Kevin Vockerodt and has performed a variety of Baroque Concertos with the Southern Sinfonia.

As an educator, Rachel teaches young oboists around London and Hertfordshire in various schools and has tutored at the ‘Big Double Reed Day’. She is also a published arranger and makes oboe reeds for oboists around the country. Her dedication to music and education is evident in her contributions to the next generation of musicians and her active involvement in the music community.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was an esteemed English composer whose works spanned various genres including operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces, and orchestral compositions. He was born on October 12, 1872, in the Cotswold village of Down Ampney, where his father was vicar, and he passed away on August 26, 1958.

Vaughan Williams’ music is characterized by its strong influence from Tudor music and English folk-song, marking a significant departure from the German-dominated style of British music in the 19th century. His output includes nine symphonies written over sixty years, showcasing a wide range of moods from tranquil to exuberant.

Some of his most familiar concert works are the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” (1910) and “The Lark Ascending” (1914). His vocal works include hymns, folk-song arrangements, and large-scale choral pieces. He also wrote eight works for stage performance between 1919 and 1951.

Vaughan Williams served in the army during the First World War, which had a lasting emotional effect on him. He was married twice, first to Adeline Fisher in 1897, and then to the poet Ursula Wood in 1953. He refused a knighthood but was awarded the Order of Merit in 1935. His ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey, near Purcel.

His legacy includes a vast array of music that enriched nearly every musical genre, with works that remain staples of the British concert repertoire.

Born in Havana, Cuba, Lourdes C. Montgomery moved to the United States at age five. She studied jazz piano at Miami-Dade Community College with Sanford Gold and, at the University of Miami, music composition with Dr. Dennis Kam as well as classical piano with Dr. Rosalina Sackstein. Many of Lourdes’ sacred and liturgical compositions are published by Oregon Catholic Press, who also produced her CD entitled “De La Cruz a la Gloria”, and World Library Publications.

In 2008, Lourdes was honored to have her song Bienaventurados (“The Beatitudes”) was performed at the mass of Pope Benedict XVI that was held at the National Stadium in Washington, D.C., and televised nationally. In 2005 Lourdes became music director at St. Vincent de Paul Church in the Ozark Mountains of NW Arkansas, where she now lives with her double bassist husband Michael Montgomery.

Jan [Johann] Geissel was a Czech double bassist, teacher, and composer, born in Pardubice in 1859, who lived most of his life in Strasbourg and died there in 1919.

He wrote a number of works for double bass and his Concerto in A major Op.32 and Konzertstück Op.24 are still in print today, helping to keep his name alive a hundred years after his death. Several of his works have been recorded and his music successfully combines musical and technical challenges in equal measure, written in an accessible musical style and part of the rich heritage of music from the mid to late 19th-century.

Charles Harford Lloyd (1849-1919) was an English composer and organist. He was a fairly prolific composer, primarily of church music, and was organist of Gloucester Cathedral, Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford and Eton College Chapel. Between 1887 and 1892 Lloyd taught organ and composition at the Royal College of Music in London and after his retirement from Eton was appointed organist of the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace

v was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela in 1954. He graduated as a classical guitarist from the “Vicente Emilio Sojo” Conservatory in 1980 and began his double bass studies with Volmar Laubach in 1978, and later with Joel Novoa at the “Simón Bolívar” Conservatory in Caracas, in 1984.

Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (1689-1755) was a French Baroque composer writing a wealth of instrumental and vocal music. He was one of the first composers to have no patrons, having been awarded a royal licence to engrave music in 1724, and became a wealthy man from the sales of his music.

Boismortier was a prolific composer and he, alongside Rameau, lived through the Rococo age of Louis XV both writing music of great elegance and sophistication which proved popular with performers and audiences alike.

Daniel Chiva Sanz is a double bassist and composer from Ludiente (Spain). He is dedicated to orchestral playing, with experience in ensembles from early music to contemporary, and is highly interested in solo playing, focusing on new repertoire for unaccompanied double bass.

Daniel’s compositions have been published by Recital Music (UK) and ProBass (Germany), and have been performed in more than 5 countries. He has orchestrated and performed the almost forgotten Concerto No.2 Op. 25 by Th. A. Findeisen.

Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) was born in Dublin, studied at Cambridge University and in Leipzig and Berlin, and in 1882 was one of the founding fathers of the Royal College of Music in London, where he taught composition for the rest of his life.

He was a prolific composer, writing seven symphonies, nine operas, concertos, orchestral music, choral music and songs, which he combined alongside his teaching and conducting duties. Stanford, together with Hubert Parry and Alexander Mackenzie, were considered responsible for a renaissance in music in Britain, and towards the end of the 20th-century there has been a resurgence of interest in his music.