Ernest Austin

Ernest Austin (31 December 1874 – 24 July 1947) was an English composer, music arranger and editor. Although little-remembered today (he does not even have an entry in the comprehensive New Grove dictionary), Austin's orchestral music enjoyed some success in its own time, including performances at the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts and on BBC Radio during the 1920s. He was a prolific composer of songs, covering a wide spectrum of mood, from serious Shakespearean settings to ballads of both sentimental and robust natures. He found some success writing piano pieces and unison songs for children. He also made piano transcriptions of the work of other composers, a particularly common practice of the time.

He was born Ernest John Austin in Poplar, London (now in the borough of Tower Hamlets), the son of Elizabeth and William Austin, a shirt tailor. Ernest Austin was the younger brother of baritone and composer Frederic Austin (1872–1951).

He first worked for the Board of Trade and then pursued a career in business. Largely self-taught, by 1902 he had composed a piano sextet (first performed in 1910) and by the age of about 30 he had turned to music as a career. He worked as a copy-editor and reviser for the London music publisher Robert Elkin (Elkin & Co.), where he edited some of Cyril Scott's piano works for publication. According to Austin, Scott's manuscripts were not always legible, and "the published result was occasionally his personal 'best guess' as to the intentions of the composer."

He gave a concert of his own works in November 1908 in Wallington, London, including two Piano Trios (No. 2, Op.15, and No. 4), his brother Frederic Austin singing some songs along with Miss Grainger-Kerr (also a proponent of Cyril Scott's vocal works); a Piano Trio was also performed in November 1909. Austin was described as being "well known as an apostle of modernism" in a review of his Songs From The Highway, also published in 1909: "In his case the tendency manifests itself in the form of indefinite tonality and rhythm. 'Love's Tragedy', for instance, [...] is practically unbarred, and the accentuation is left to the discrimination of the singer, with whom it is to be hoped the accompanist will be in sympathy."

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