David Moule-Evans

David Moule-Evans (21 November 1905 – 18 May 1988) was an English composer, conductor and academic.

Moule-Evans was born in Ashford, Kent, and was educated at the Judd School in Tonbridge before studying at the Royal College of Music in London with Malcolm Sargent and Herbert Howells.[1] While at the Royal College he became friendly with his contemporary Michael Tippett, beating him to gain the Mendelssohn Scholarship in 1928 and continuing studies at Queen's College, Oxford.[2] Tippett asked him to conduct the first full concert of his own music at the Barn Theatre in Oxted on 5 April 1930.[3] From 1945 to 1974 Moule-Evans returned to the RCM to teach harmony, counterpoint and composition.

As a composer Moule-Evans has been largely forgotten today, but during his lifetime he achieved a measure of success. His Concerto for String Orchestra won the Carnegie British Music award in 1928.[4] The Dance Suite, scored for full orchestra with piano, five percussion players and timpani, was completed in December 1930 and received its first performance at a Royal College of Music Patrons' Fund Concert in March, 1931.[5] He was one of several composer contributors (alongside Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Cole, Julian Gardiner and John Tilehurst) to the 1938 Dorking pageant play England's Pleasant Land, written by E.M. Forster.[6]

His Symphony in G (1944) was the controversial £1,000 prizewinner of the Australian International Jubilee Symphony Competition of 1951[7] with The Musical Times and others claiming that the runner up, a symphony by Robert Hughes, was "definitely superior".[8] (Malcolm Sargent revived the work in the UK for a Royal Festival Hall performance by the London Symphony Orchestra in 1952, but to mixed reviews, the Musical Times dismissing it as "conventional, banal and boring").[9][10]

The orchestral poem September Dusk was premiered at the BBC Proms on 25 August 1945.[11] Moule-Evans mostly wrote in a popular, straightforward "light music" style, although the composer Michael Hurd has commented that his later chamber works, including the Violin Sonata in F-sharp minor (1956)[12] and the Piano Sonata (1966) are more adventurous in style.[1] The only music currently available in recorded form are the soundtracks to a series of British Council documentary films commissioned by Muir Mathieson, including Health of a Nation and London 1942.[13]

Moule-Evans married Monica Warden Evans in March 1935[14] and the couple lived at Claremont, 10 Rose Hill, Dorking in Surrey.[2] They later moved to Merry Down, Harrow Road West, Dorking. Illness cut short his composing career from 1968, although he continued to teach until his death in 1988. His archive and manuscripts are housed in the National Library of Wales.[15]