Madeleine Dring

Madeleine Winefride Isabelle Dring (September 7, 1923 – March 26, 1977) was an English composer and actress.

Madeleine Dring was born into a musical family. She spent her first four years at Raleigh Road, Harringay and moved to Streatham. She showed talent at an early age and took lessons in the junior department of the Royal College of Music beginning on her tenth birthday. She attended on scholarship for violin and piano. As part of their training, all of the students performed in the children's theatre. She began composition studies at the RCMJD with Stanley Drummond Wolff, Leslie Fly, and Percy Buck. She continued at the Royal College for senior-level study in music, where her composition teacher was Herbert Howells. She also studied mime and drama. Dring's love of theatre and music would coexist happily; many of her compositions were for the stage, radio, and television.

In 1947 she married Roger Lord, an oboist, for whom she composed several works, including the highly regarded Dances for solo oboe. They had a son in 1950.

A book, Madeleine Dring: Her Music, Her Life, by Ro Hancock-Child, was published in 2000 (2nd edition 2009), with cartoon illustrations from Dring's own notebooks. The effort was funded by a grant from Dring's husband, Roger Lord, in an effort to disseminate information about his former wife. Several articles, compact disc recordings and inclusions of Dring's biographical information in books about composers in the last decade have secured her compositions a place in the modern concert repertoire. Dring died in 1977 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

A student of Herbert Howells, and occasionally Ralph Vaughan Williams, Madeleine Dring's style is typically unpretentious. She admired the idiomatic and rhythmically vibrant writing of Francis Poulenc, which is echoed in her works. Her harmonizations are often innovative and colorful. Her songs are highly lyrical and the words are set expertly. Her cabaret songs and West End Revue material often featured her own lyrics and are full of clever writing, both musically and textually.

Dring never delved into large-scale works. Most of Dring's output was in shorter forms; she wrote a good deal of solo piano, songs with piano, and some chamber music, as well as many pedagogical works, mostly for piano. She completed a one-act opera, Cupboard Love, and a dance drama, The Fair Queen of Wu which was broadcast on BBC Television in 1951. She also wrote music for "The Real Princess," a ballet and for several stage plays in London given from 1946-1963.

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