William Alwyn: The Film Composer Who Wrote Five Symphonies

William Alwyn (1905–1985) had two careers that his contemporaries treated as one embarrassing and one respectable, and he refused to rank them that way. He wrote around two hundred film scores — including Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Ship That Died of Shame — and, in the same decades, five symphonies, four string quartets, concerti and a large body of songs.

A flute player first

He entered the Royal Academy of Music in 1920 to study flute, not composition, and paid his way through by playing in theatre and cinema orchestras. That matters more than a biography usually would: he wrote for wind instruments with the fluency of somebody who had spent evenings in a pit playing the things, and his flute and oboe writing is among the most idiomatic in twentieth-century British music.

He returned to the Academy as professor of composition in 1926 and taught there until 1955 — for most of that time simultaneously running a film-scoring career that would have exhausted anyone else.

The film scores

Alwyn's screen work coincided exactly with the strongest period of British cinema, and he was the composer directors asked for when a film needed tension held rather than underlined. Odd Man Out (1947) is the one to hear first: Carol Reed's film gives him long stretches with no dialogue, and Alwyn fills them without ever reaching for the obvious.

Very little of this exists as printed sheet music. Film scores are written for a specific orchestra on a deadline and are rarely engraved for sale, so what circulates is recordings and the occasional concert suite.

What you can actually play

The concert music is where the catalogue is, and it divides usefully:

• Wind and flute music — the most approachable and the most idiomatic. His writing sits well under the fingers because he played the instrument.
• Piano music, including the Fantasy-Waltzes, a substantial set that deserves to be played far more than it is.
• Songs, which he wrote throughout his life and which suit a recitalist looking for English repertoire beyond the obvious.
• The five symphonies and the string quartets — orchestral and chamber material, mostly available as scores and hire parts rather than as retail sheet music.

A note on copyright

Alwyn died in 1985, so his music remains in copyright in the UK and EU until 2056. Nothing of his is legitimately free, and there are no public-domain scans to fall back on the way there are for a nineteenth-century composer. Editions come from his publishers, and that is the only lawful route.

What our index holds under his name is on the William Alwyn composer page.