Philip Cannon (composer)

Jack Philip Cannon (21 December 1929 – 24 December 2016) was a British composer and teacher.

Philip Cannon was born in Paris on 21 December 1929, to Franco-British parents. The family moved to Falmouth in Cornwall in 1936, where Philip was educated at the local Grammar School. Cannon subsequently studied with Imogen Holst at Dartington and with Gordon Jacob and Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music, where (in 1951) he was awarded the Octavia Travelling Scholarship.^[3]

In 1958 he became a lecturer in music at

In 2011 Cannon donated his manuscripts and other archives to the Bodleian Library at Oxford; to mark this, the composer's Te Deum was sung at Christ Church Cathedral.^[6]

Cannon's other works include; three operas (Morvoren (1964), The Man from Venus (1967), and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) (a commission for BBC TV, 1973), 2 symphonies, various instrumental pieces including his Concertino for piano & strings (1949), his clarinet quintet Logos (another BBC commission, 1977), and a Septain (1995) originally created for the pianist John Ogdon.,^[2] together with a number of works for voice, notably his song cycles Songs to Delight (1950), and Six Birdsongs (1993).

Cannon's String Quartet, Clarinet Quintet and his string sextet Cinq supplications sur un benediction (1985) are all available on an Olympia CD.^[7] The recording label Lyrita released a CD of Philip's works in 2017, including his Cinq Chansons de femme for soprano & harp (1952), together with his String Quartet and Lord of Light. ^[8] Recordings of performances of the Concertino, Three Rivers (1954), The Temple, Son of Man, Lord of Light, and Tip Toe Tango (1994) are also available on YouTube.

Cannon's first wife, Jacqueline, died in 1984. Cannon himself died, aged 87, on 24 December 2016 in the Florence Nightingale Hospice attached to Stoke Mandeville hospital. He is survived by his second wife, Jane, whom he married in 1997, and by his daughter (by his first marriage) Virginia.^[1]

Musical style

Cannon's first opera Morvoren premiered at the Royal College in 1964.

It is designed as one great arc from the bitter nihilism of What is our Life? through the despairing acceptance – with a slight ray of hope – of Even Such is Time to the determination of Give me my Scallop shell of quiet. I have cut out bar lines altogether; instead I have commas and pauses in between each violent outburst of Ralegh's magnificent sorties. The sounds and the silence are both integral to the overall structure. I ascribe the idea of unmetered silence and pause to Sir David Willcocks who, when conducting The Temple, suggested these, rather than metered rests, as being a more effective way of maintaining shape and emotional intensity. His casual suggestion of unmetering the silences is a good one when one takes into consideration the dramatic effects of different acoustics in different venues. For instances, The Temple's performances were in widely varying acoustics from

Versailles. The only possible snag to unmetered pauses, of course, is that the performances have to be under the direction of a very experienced, dynamitic and sensitive conductor. Not just a "metered, stick waver"!

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