Bantock, Granville

Granville Bantock – Atalanta in Calydon

(b. London, 7 August 1868 – d. London, 11 October 1946)

1911, premiered and published 1912

Preface (Bruce Schueneman, 2017)
Granville Ransome Bantock was born in London on August 7, 1868. He was the son of the surgeon and gynecologist George Granville Bantock. In 1884, at age 16, Bantock began showing a strong interest in music.His father opposed this desire, and Bantock prepared for the Indian Civil Service Examinations at his father’s wish, but was unable to sit for the examinations because of illness. His father next chose chemical engineering as a profession for his son, but engineering study soon gave way to concert-going and study of music scores. The Principal of the City and Guilds Institute realized that Bantock’s heart was not in engineering, and helped persuade Bantock’s father to allow young Granville to study music – first private harmony and counterpoint lessons and then, after an 1889 visit to Germany where he saw Wagner’s Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde, at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM). A student of composition, his most significant instructor at RAM was Frederick Corder (1852-1932) In only Bantock’s second term at RAM, and with little formal music instruction, he won the Macfarren Scholarship.

Graduation from the Royal Academy in 1893 left Bantock at loose ends and with few prospects. He founded, with almost no capital, a music periodical called The New Quarterly Musical Review. Bantock persuaded some of the finest musicians of the time to contribute to his journal without recompense, but the journal folded in 1896. The only article bearing Bantock’s name was entitled Confucianism and Music, an early sign of Bantock’s love and respect for things oriental. …

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