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Robert Simpson
March 2, 1921 - December 21, 1997
born in Leamington Spa, England, composed during the Contemporary period
Biography
British composer Robert Simpson was educated at Westminster City School. His parents wanted him to be a doctor, and he did devote two years of study to medicine before the lure of music overtook him. Simpson was a lifelong pacifist and served in a mobile surgical unit during World War II as a conscientious objector. It was during this time that he began studying music with Herbert Howells and writing the first of four symphonies. For one of the works, Simpson even experimented with serial procedures. Unsatisfied with the compositions, he destroyed them and began anew, writing in his own style that often found two different tonal centers reacting against the other.

The Piano Sonata (1946) and his Symphony No. 1 (1946-51) are among Simpson's earliest works. While writing his "new" First Symphony, Simpson discovered the music of Carl Nielsen, which had a great influence on Simpson's development as a composer.

Simpson earned his doctorate in music at the University of Durham in 1951, using his First Symphony as a thesis. In the same year he finished his First String Quartet and founded the Exploratory Concert Society, along with Donald Mitchell and Harold Truscott, which focused on little-known composers and compositions that Simpson liked.