This week’s post on a talented but undeservedly neglected composer has been prompted by some recent chat with Jamie Reid Baxter (whose name is more readily known for research on early Scottish music), who has long been a fan of this fine miniaturist.
Quite a few composers have a background in education (it helps to have some regular salary alongside the piecemeal nature of making afresh). Ronald Center was an Aberdeen-born composer who started his working life as a dispensing chemist and organist and then briefly as a high school music teacher, before turning to private piano tuition (his most famous pupil being the broadcaster James Naughtie). He composed, quietly and without much fuss, during a lifetime spent in Aberdeenshire conducting choirs and writing quite a bit of lovely music, particularly for piano, but also for choirs (especially church), solo voice and string chamber ensembles.
As many composers do, Center wrote for particular people. His wife, Evelyn Morrison, was a singer and many of his songs were written specifically for her. String music was also inspired by his friendship with two Polish soldiers, marooned in Scotland at the end of WW1, the violinist Witold Nowacki and the cellist Kazimierz Łydzínski.
Perhaps because his father was a bagpiper (see liner notes) his music, particularly for strings, has echoes of Scottish traditional music. This sat alongside his active interest in the folk-music inflected work of eastern Europe composed by the like of Kodàly, Bartòk and Prokofiev. Center was largely self-taught as a composer. Although his music is fully competent and often moving, he was too retiring to force his way into the mainstream of British fame. Although his work was played from time to time by the BBC, at the time he was composing in the 1950s and 1960s the Scottish national orchestras tended to be rather conservative in their programming choices.
Some of this music is now finding its way back into circulation thanks to new recordings and concert performance. The wonderfully named Bubblyjock Collective, who specialise in Scottish classical and contemporary music, has added Center to recent concert programmes. Bubblyjock’s repertoire page has a list that reads like a who’s-who of Scottish 20th century composers: Ronald Center, Erik Chisholm (songs with lyrics by Lillias Scot), Ronald Stevenson (whose tiny song on Hugh McDiarmid’s poem “The Bubblyjock” inspired their name), Francis George Scott, Marie Dare…. And so it goes on.
Check out Bubblyjock, Center and also read more about Center’s life and work in the essay by his fellow-Aberdeenshire-born Jamie Reid Baxter in Further Reading, below. This essay also provides a very interesting insight into the richness of Aberdonian music-making in the early to mid 20th century, the posthumous recognition given to Center by Ronald Stevenson, and Baxter’s remarkable experience of getting Center’s work performed in the unlikely location of Bogotá, Columbia – where he was a well-known envoy for Scottish art music back in 1979.
Further Reading, Discography and Performances to watch for
- The Bubblyjock Collective website
- Ronald Center, Chamber and Instrumental Music, recorded by the Fejes Quartet, Volumes 1 to 3 (Tamàs Fejes and Yoan Hlebarov violin,Theodore Chung Lei viola, Balázs Renczés cello, Christopher Guild piano), Toccata, TOCC0179 (2013), TOCC0533 (2021) and TOCC0723 (2024) – CD liner notes are available e.g. Vol 3 liner note
- James Reid Baxter, ‘One Foot in Eden: Ronald Center’s Centenary’, for The British Music Society 8(2), (2021), pp.19-34
- Ruzena Wood, ‘Center, Ronald’ in Grove Music Online (2001), Accessed 20 Sep. 2024.