Sir Arnold Bax Society jobs and careers

About Sir Arnold Bax Society

The Sir Arnold Bax Society was founded in 2024 with the intention of sponsoring and promoting Bax's music, through performances, recordings, and the publication of critical-performing editions. You can find out more about our charity on this page. Arnold Bax was born in 1883 into a wealthy family. Their large house on the outskirts of London provided an isolation that would captivate Bax throughout his life, and a kinship with nature that seeped deep into his music. He studied in London at the Royal Academy of Music and was by all accounts one of the finest sightreaders in the country when sat at the piano. But it was his composing that blossomed furthest, and soon Bax was receiving premieres of major orchestral works by important British musical figures like Sir Henry Wood. Bax came across the poetry of W.B. Yeats early on and declared “the Celt in me revealed”. Ireland became an obsession for the utterly non-Irish Bax, and he travelled extensively. After his marriage, he and his family moved to Rathgar, a suburb of Dublin, where Bax mixed with the upper echelons of the Irish literary circles. Inevitably, there were strong pro-Irish (and therefore anti-English) views circulating, and some of Bax's poetry and music of the time reflects this. Bax learnt Irish Gaelic and travelled far westwards, as rural as possible, staying regularly in Glencolumcille, near Donegal. In later years he also stayed in Morar, Scotland, where each symphony from the Third onwards was worked on. After the Seventh Symphony was completed, Bax almost completely stopped composing – possibly a side effect of ill health – completing only a few major commissions: the famous soundtrack to the 1948 film ‘Oliver Twist’, and works to fulfil his role as Master of the King's Music including coronation music for Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.