Clive Strutt

Clive Edward Hazzard Strutt (born 19 April 1942) is an English composer. He was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, England, and he was educated at Farnborough Grammar School.

Strutt lives on the island of South Ronaldsay in Orkney, Scotland. He studied composition under Lennox Berkeley, orchestration under Leighton Lucas, and piano with Robert O. Edwards, Georgina Smith, and Hamish Milne at the Royal Academy of Music, London. He also studied the viola for one year under Watson Forbes. He is very interested in the music of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and has visited Mount Athos several times. He is also a philatelist, and an authority on the Universal Postal Union.

Strutt's works have been performed in France, Germany, Norway, Russia, Serbia, Switzerland, as well as in the UK, Ireland, Canada and the USA. A large number of his scores are available from the Scottish Music Centre (SMS), Glasgow, the Bibliothèque Božidar Kantušer, Paris and more recent ones from Amoris International & Amoris Imprint, Vouvry, Switzerland.

The Symphony No. 1 in E minor (a student work composed during 1962–63 whilst Strutt was at the Royal Academy of Music, London) was submitted for the Division V Composition Examination in 1964 and was awarded the Manson Bequest for Composition. A four-movement large-scale piece for large orchestra (including 2 bassett horns, piano, organ, 8 French horns, 4 trumpets, and a large body of strings), and lasting one hour, it is dedicated to the memory of the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose achievements had impressed the composer and were a source of inspiration to him.

The money from the Manson Bequest enabled the composer to spend the summer in the Highlands of Scotland at Loch Kishorn, in Wester Ross, where he was able to make good headway on the composition of the symphony No. 2 in C minor, also in four movements. Scored for an orchestra of more conventional size this work plays for some 57 minutes, and includes a chorus singing wordlessly in the second movement, and, in the finale, singing a text of one line only, taken from Virgil's epic, the Aeneid, Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt ("These are the tears of things which pierce the universal heart"). The second movement is based on the Romanesca bass as a passacaglia theme, and the following slow movement attempts to reflect an experience which the composer had during a highland holiday. One evening while staying at the Carbisdale Castle youth hostel on the Firth of Sutherland he walked up the hill behind the castle and was deeply impressed by the total and absolute silence: no sound of human voices, or bird calls, no mechanical noise, and not even the sound of the wind. Paradoxically, then, the music attempts to convey the impression of silence. The original part for organ in the score was minimal, and was removed in 1991 on the revision of the symphony. The score was taken on a visit that Strutt made to the home of the composer Havergal Brian in Shoreham-by-Sea, and was read through by Brian for his approval as the dedicatee. This happened a couple of years before Brian's death in the 1970s.

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