Matyas Seiber

Mátyás Seiber (May 4, 1905 – September 24, 1960) was a Hungarian-born composer who lived in England from 1935 onward. He studied in Budapest with Zoltán Kodály, and in 1928 gave the first academic lectures on jazz in Europe at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. From 1942, he was on the staff of Morley College in London, and he became a respected teacher of composition. Several of his students went on to become eminent musicians themselves, including Peter Racine Fricker, Anthony Milner, Hugh Wood and Wally Stott, who later became Angela Morley.

While studying with Kodály he collected Hungarian folk-songs from the countryside. Later he arranged these for choral and solo performances. He worked on other folk-song arrangements with A. L. Lloyd and William Walton.

Seiber's music is eclectic in style, showing the influences of jazz, Bartók and Schoenberg; it includes Ulysses (1947) (a cantata on words by James Joyce) scores to animated films including Animal Farm (1954) and choral arrangements of Hungarian and Yugoslav folk songs.

He was killed in a car crash while on a lecture tour of South Africa.

External links

• Mátyás Seiber 2005 centenary website
• Suppressed Music

References

• Hugh Wood, Mervyn Cooke: "Seiber, Mátyás (György)", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 16 February 2005), http://www.grovemusic.com