Madeleine Dring


Madeleine Winefride Isabelle Dring was an English composer and actress.

Life

Madeleine Dring spent the first four years of her life at Raleigh Road, Harringay when the family moved to Streatham. She showed talent at an early age and took lessons in the junior department of the Royal College of Music beginning on her tenth birthday. She attended the College with scholarships for violin and piano. As part of their training, all of the students performed in the children's theatre. She formally began composition studies at the RCMJD with Stanley Drummond Wolff in 1937, continued the next year with Leslie Fly, and the next two with Percy Buck. She continued at the Royal College for senior-level studies, where her composition teacher was Herbert Howells. She dropped the study of violin after the death of her instructor, W.H. Reed, at the end of the first year. She also studied mime, drama, and singing. Dring's love of theatre and music co-mingled happily; many of her earliest professional creations were for the stage, radio, and television.
In 1947 she married Roger Lord who served as Principal Oboist with London Symphony Orchestra for thirty years. She composed several works for Roger, including the highly regarded Dances for solo oboe. Soon after her marriage, her first pieces were published with Lengnick and with Oxford. The Lords had one son in 1950.
A book Madeleine Dring: Her Music, Her Life by Ro Hancock-Child, was published in 2000, and included cartoon illustrations from Dring's own notebooks interpreted by Ro Hancock-Child. The biography was partially funded by Dring's husband, Roger Lord, in order to disseminate information about his late wife's compositions. Several articles, compact disc recordings, and inclusions of Dring's biographical information in books about composers in the last decade have secured her name a place in the modern lexicon. Dring died in 1977 of a cerebral hemorrhage. Despite some confusion about her final resting place, Dring's tombstone was recently uncovered at Lambeth Cemetery in Streatham. Both Roger and their son Jeremy died in 2014. Roger died at age 90 and Jeremy died of ALS. All facts are confirmed by family members.

Music

Dring's favourite composer in her youth was Rachmaninov and she owned much piano and vocal sheet music by Rachmaninov, which is now in the possession of Ro Hancock-Child. Dring studied with Herbert Howells but her own work shows no debt to his musical style. Occasionally she was taught by Ralph Vaughan Williams but again there is little obvious influence, and her music does not reflect the English folk song tradition. She looked further afield.
Dring particularly enjoyed the mannerisms of Poulenc, for instance in the accompaniment to her song I Feed A Flame. As observed by Ro Hancock-Child, Dring preferred jazzy idioms, Gershwin, Cole Porter and the sunny style of Arthur Benjamin. Having heard the calypso in London, she responded with her own Caribbean Dance and West Indian Dance, for piano.
Dring deliberately did not repeat her musical material from piece to piece, always finding a fresh approach to harmony and rhythm. If her vocal music has ever been compared to Roger Quilter it is a mistaken comparison. Quilter was solidly Victorian in outlook, and his songs are deeply melodic and contrapuntal. By contrast, Dring looked to the future, and thrived on novelty and surprise, hoping that what she wrote might gently shock or make you smile. Her vocal melodies arise from the underlying harmonies and can be difficult to pitch: the chords come first, as Ro Hancock-Child observes. Dring wrote most of her songs for her own use: she had a high quality soprano voice with a wide range, and perfect pitch. Several informal and informative recordings exist of Dring singing and playing her own compositions.
Dring's cabaret songs and West End Revue material sometimes featured her own lyrics and are full of clever writing, both musically and textually. They have recently been given recordings and published.
Dring chose not to compose large-scale works, therefore most of her output was in shorter forms. She wrote pieces for solo piano, piano duets, songs with piano, and some chamber music, including pieces for piano duo, flute, oboe, harmonica, recorder, and clarinet, a small number of which are pedagogical works. Her works for television and radio are all within a 45-minute time frame or shorter. She completed a one-act opera, Cupboard Love with her friend D.F. Aitken. A dance drama entitled The Fair Queen of Wu which was broadcast on BBC Television in 1951. The ballet called for a full company of soloists who were off camera. She was commissioned to write music for "The Real Princess," a ballet and for several stage plays in London given from 1946 to 1971. She often collaborated with Felicity Gray, choreographer, and D.F. Aitken, librettist.
Simon William Lord, Dring's grandson, used some of her compositions for tracks on his solo 'Lord Skywave' album.

Works

Dring rarely provided dates for her compositions; many dates come from Alistair Fisher's treatise on her songs. Publication dates have been provided, many of which are posthumously published by her husband, Roger Lord. Some dates have more recently been re-established using dates of first performances and other information as confirmed in Dring's personal papers as well as in archival newspaper reviews. In 2018 three volumes of songs were engraved and published as well as four volumes of cabaret and musical revue numbers. Duets and ensembles were also published.

Instrumental and vocal

Incidental music