John Gardner (composer)

John Linton Gardner, CBE (2 March 1917 – 12 December 2011) was an English composer of classical music.

John Gardner was born in Manchester, England and grew up in Ilfracombe, North Devon. His father Alfred Linton Gardner was a local physician and amateur composer who was killed in action in the First World War. His grandfather was John Twiname Gardner, also a G.P. and composer. His mother, Emily Muriel Pullein-Thompson, was the sister of Captain Harold J "Cappy" Pullein-Thompson, who was the father of the Pullein-Thompson sisters and their brother, the playwright Denis Cannan.

Gardner was educated at Eagle House School, Sandhurst, Wellington College and Exeter College, Oxford. An important figure in his early life was Hubert J. Foss of Oxford University Press, who published the Intermezzo for Organ in 1936 and introduced him to the composer Arthur Benjamin, to whom Gardner dedicated his Rhapsody for Oboe and String Quartet (1935). This work had its first performance at the Wigmore Hall in February 1936. The String Quartet No. 1 (1938) was broadcast from Paris by the Blech Quartet in 1939, and the anthem The Holy Son of God most High (1938) was also published by OUP. At Oxford Gardner was friendly with Theodor Adorno with whom he played piano duets.

After coming down from Oxford in 1939, he completed two terms as music master at Repton School, where one of his pupils was the composer John Veale, then a sixth former. In 1940 he enlisted and working first as a Bandmaster (Fighter Command) and then as a Navigator with Transport Command. It was during the War that ideas for the Symphony No.1 began to form.

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