(7th November 1928 – 4th June 2025)
Raymond Warren was born in Somerset and although the family moved to London when he was young, the West of England felt like a natural home to him.
He read Maths at Cambridge before switching to Music in his second year. In 1955 he became a lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, where he was the first person in the UK to be given a personal chair in composition (1966), before becoming Hamilton Harty Professor of Music in 1969. During these years he was mentored by the composer Michael Tippett with whom he shared strong beliefs in the value of music to the community and the importance of musical education. Above all Tippett confirmed in him the necessity to be rigorously honest in the process of composition, something that helped him develop his own voice and a lesson he passed onto others.
Though by this time receiving national attention (‘The Pity of Love’ was written for Pears and Bream to perform at the 1966 Aldeburgh Festival) Warren himself remained convinced that a composer should primarily be useful to his own community. He became Resident Composer to the Ulster Orchestra and a key figure in the early days of the Belfast Festival at Queens (now the Belfast International Arts Festival).
The small size of the Queens Music department meant that it was more like an extended family than a place of work. As the optimistic spirit of the early-mid 60’s turned into bitterness and tension in Northern Ireland, Warren continued both to care for and support Protest and Catholic students alike. His answer to the growing sectarian division was to compose ‘Songs of Unity’ (1968), a work written for children and celebrating ecumenism, picketed by Ian Paisley at its premiere.
As the atmosphere in Northern Ireland grew increasingly tense his music became a witness to events. His setting of a contemporary Gospel translation in ‘The Passion’ (1962) had shown an acute empathy with suffering. This was now turned to current events. The violence of The Troubles informed his powerful Second Symphony (1969), reflecting both the conflict and the ensuing grief that united Catholics and Protestants alike.
Warren left Belfast in 1972 to take up the chair in Music at the University of Bristol. This homecoming to the West of England was coloured by his strong feelings of compassion for the society he left behind in Northern Ireland. Belfast was never far from his thoughts. His inaugural lecture as Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at Bristol in 1974 was a presentation of a new work reflecting on conflict and its effects, ‘Madrigals in Time of War’.
Set against this lasting impact his experience of the warmth of the Northern Irish community, the family atmosphere at Queen’s and the creative innovations of the Belfast Festival informed his approach to the Bristol Music Department.
He revised and modernised the Music course, recruited new staff, several of whom went on to have distinguished careers in academia, and led by example in his engagement with teaching and the wider development of students. Following the Queens example the department developed a family feel and pastoral care was always at the centre of his approach. Every September a list of information about the new intake of music students was put up in the family kitchen and memorised so that, when the new first years arrived, Warren seemed to know all about them already. Students in the Music department were made to feel valued and cared for from the moment they arrived at their new home.
Writing in the 2009 Centenary Issue of Nonesuch, Warren stated: ‘the quality of a good teacher is the ability to put your subject across in such a way that the people you’re teaching can learn to love it’. His own love of all aspects of music, performance, composition and historical and analytical study was evident and infectious as was his desire to communicate this to others.
In the wider educational community, he worked with the Bristol-based Academy of the BBC (formerly the BBC Training Orchestra), Bath College of Higher Education (now Bath Spa University) in the provision of teacher training in Music, and he composed his third Children’s Church Opera ‘In the Beginning’, for the seminal XVth conference of the International Society for Music Education in Bristol.
Warren was unusually engaged with the university’s musical ensembles; a tradition continued at the music department to this day. His view was that there should be no division between composing, or scholarship, and performance. He saw it as part of his teaching remit to train and conduct the choirs, orchestras and chamber groups run by the department and to encourage students in their own initiatives by supporting the activities and ensembles run by BUMS (the Bristol University Music Society).
He had no less of an impact on music making in the city beyond the university. The Wednesday (and occasional additional Friday) lunchtime recitals, held in the Wills Memorial Building, included student groups but were predominately given by professionals from across the UK. The audience for these recitals was made up of Warren’s ideal mix of students and university staff together with members of the public.
This mix of town and gown was institutionalised in St Paul’s Church Clifton, formerly the University of Bristol Church. Warren had a particularly long and close association with the church community where he continued to worship until 2025. On his arrival in Bristol he set up an organ scholarship at St Paul’s with the holder responsible for training the choir. Many of the former post holders have gone on to hold influential positions in church music and education and the musical life of the church has been further enriched by hundreds of former choir members still active in their musical communities in Bristol and beyond.
Always a natural collaborator, in 1970 he had written piano music to ‘A Lough Neagh Sequence’, by Seamus Heaney, his colleague at Queens. Together they performed this version with Warren playing the piano music interleaved with the poetry, spoken by Heaney. Heaney made a recording of this version of his poetry with Warren's music in 2011, shortly before his death. The success of this format, the music carefully enhancing and not disrupting the music of the spoken word (something Warren had learned as the house composer for The Lyric Theatre in Belfast) led to a further collaboration with the poet Michael Longley. At Bristol two further spoken word and music projects followed with the poet Charles Tomlinson (who held a personal chair in the English department), ‘Nine Variations on a Chinese Winter Song’ (1983) and ‘The Sound of Time’ (1984).
Following his retirement from the university in 1994, Warren realised his ambition, in his own words, to become ‘a professional composer’. His association with the Brunel Ensemble in the 1990’s produced two outstanding works, the 3rd Symphony (1995) and the orchestral song cycle ‘In My Childhood’ (1998). During the early 2000’s he extended his lifelong practice of writing music for the young with two pieces for school orchestra written for St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School, followed in 2012 by his ‘Variations on a Gloucester Chime’ for the Bristol School’s Philharmonic. His score for ‘Ballet Shoes’ was commissioned for the London Children's Ballet in 2001 and revived by them in 2010 and 2019.
In retirement Warren continued his association with many local musical groups including The Severnside Composers Alliance, the Bristol Music Club, Bristol Chamber Choir, the Bristol Bach Choir, the Bristol Graduate Singers (who realised a CD of his Choral music) and the Clifton Singers. Two of his most important choral works were written for Bristol choirs. His oratorio ‘Continuing Cities’ was commissioned for the centenary of Bristol Choral Society in 1988. In 2018 The Exultate Singers gave the premiere of his final large-scale work, the ‘Cello Requiem’.
His legacy of generating both inspiring music and inspired students continues to have an impact on the musical life of Northern Ireland and Bristol in particular, but also more widely across the UK where many former students work at high levels in the music industry and in churches, schools and Universities.