Bell, W(illiam) H(enry)
Bell, W(illiam) H(enry)
Bell, W(illiam) H(enry), English composer; b. St. Albans, Aug. 20, 1873; d. Gordon’s Bay, Cape Province, South Africa, April 13, 1946. He studied in his hometown. He won the Goss Scholarship for the Royal Coll. of Music in London (1889), where he studied organ with Stegall, violin with Burnett, piano with Izard, and composition with Corder and Stanford. He taught harmony at his alma mater (1903–12). In 1912 he was appointed director of the South African Coll. of Music in Cape Town and then dean of the music faculty at the Univ. of South Africa (1919), retiring in 1936. He was extremely critical of himself as a composer, and destroyed many of his MSS. Among his surviving works are the operas Hippolytus (1914) and Isabeau (1924). He also composed Walt Whitman Symphony (1899), Sym. No. 2 (1917–18), Sym. No. 3 (1918–19), South African Symphony (1927), Sym. in F minor (1932), A Vision of Delight (1906), Arcadian Suite (1908), the symphonic poems Love among the Ruins (1908), The Shepherd (1908), La Fée des sources (1912), and Veldt Loneliness (1921), Viola Concerto, and Violin Sonata.
Bibliography
H. du Plessis, ed., Letters from W.H. B. (Cape Town and Johannesburg, 1973).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire