Percy William Whitlock

Percy Whitlock was the most gifted English organ composer of the period between the wars — a master of the small, perfectly turned piece, whose Folk Tune and Plymouth Suite are played in cathedral lofts the world over, and who at the same time spent his afternoons at the console of a seaside theatre playing light music to holidaymakers. Born in Chatham, Kent, on 1 June 1903, he held two careers at once, the church and the concert hall, and was equally serious about both. He studied at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford and Ralph Vaughan Williams for composition and Henry Ley for organ — the heart of the English musical renaissance — and carried its lyric gift into music designed, frankly, to please.

From 1921 to 1930 he was assistant organist at Rochester Cathedral, and it was there, in 1929, that he wrote the Five Short Pieces that first made his name. Published the next year just as he moved to Bournemouth, they were greeted by the Musical Times as “among the most encouraging of recent organ publications,” with “tune and freshness.” The second of the five, the simple, singing Folk Tune, has outlived everything: it is among the best-loved miniatures any English organist plays.

The seaside organist

In 1930 Whitlock moved to Bournemouth as Director of Music at St Stephen’s Church, and from 1932 combined that post with the role of the town’s Borough Organist, presiding over the great concert organ in the Pavilion. From 1935 he gave up the church work to play full-time at the Pavilion Theatre, accompanying the resident municipal orchestra and turning out a steady stream of light orchestral and organ music — some of it under the pseudonym “Kenneth Lark.” A devoted railway enthusiast, he wrote about trains with the same fluency he wrote tunes.

It was an unusual division for a serious musician — high-church liturgy in the morning, seaside entertainment in the afternoon — and Whitlock saw no contradiction in it. The orchestral colour of the Pavilion fed back into his organ writing: his registrations think like an orchestra, and his big works, the Organ Sonata in C minor of 1935-36 and the Symphony in G minor for organ and orchestra, have the breadth of the concert hall rather than the choir stall.

The Plymouth Suite

The work that best shows his range is the Plymouth Suite, written between August and November 1937 after Whitlock and his wife Edna travelled to Plymouth for a conference of the Incorporated Association of Organists. Its five movements are each dedicated to a fellow organist who had been at the conference — a private memorial of a happy occasion made public. The suite runs from a striding Allegro risoluto through the flower-named Lantana, a salty Chanty, the tender Salix — Latin for the weeping willow, set as a drooping Sicilian tune in 6/8 — to a glittering closing Toccata. Salix in particular has taken on a life of its own as a quiet recital and recessional favourite.

Through all of this Whitlock was working against his health. He had been diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1928, when he was only twenty-five, and the disease shadowed the rest of his short life. By the end he had lost his sight altogether. He died in Bournemouth on 1 May 1946, a month short of his forty-third birthday.

What he left

Whitlock’s reputation faded after his death and revived slowly: a Percy Whitlock Trust was founded in 1983, the organ Symphony was broadcast again by the BBC in 1989, and his music is now firmly back in the repertoire. The late Reflections: Three Quiet Pieces (1942-45) and the two Fantasie Chorals sit beside the early miniatures as the work of a composer who understood, better than almost any English contemporary, how to make the organ sing a tune.

What carries his music is exactly that gift — melody, colour, and an unembarrassed wish to give pleasure. The boy from Chatham who divided his days between a cathedral and a seaside pavilion never wrote a note that was merely clever, and the Folk Tune he tossed off at Rochester at twenty-six has outlasted the symphonies of grander men.