Margaret More (composer)

Margaret More (26 June 1903 – 1966) was a Welsh composer.

Margaret More, often called "Peggy", was born in Harlech, North Wales, the daughter of William and Alice More.

In the mid-1920s Margaret More lived in London for a year. She attended Trinity College of Music where she studied composition with Edward d’Evry. Apart from this period, she lived in Harlech almost continuously, at Crown Lodge, till 1930 when she married Raymond Bantock, second son of the composer . Thereafter she spent most of her life in the Midlands at Barnt Green, near Birmingham, where she raised her family. Contact with Harlech was maintained through summer holidays spent at Traethdy in the dunes. Later she restored a stone cottage, Hen Gaerffynnon, to the south of Harlech where she was able to compose in solitude.

More’s interest in music showed early, but she was not an infant prodigy. It became clear that her main concern was composition; she had no interest whatever in a career as a performer. She was educated at home by a governess, who gave her a grounding in musical theory and encouraged her ambition.

In her early teen-years More had been befriended by the composer Joseph Holbrooke who at that time was living in Harlech. He introduced her to the work of Debussy and gave her the recently published Préludes and Children's Corner. These had a lasting effect on More’s own work. It was also through Holbrooke that she met her future husband Raymond Bantock, who was a writer.

It was while living in London that she met the poet Claudine Currey, who later became the mother-in-law of her brother Jack. Currey had recently written an extended narrative poem, ""The Little Mermaid" (pub. Elkin Mathews 1925), based on the 1837 story by Hans Andersen "The Sea Maid", and this became the starting point for More’s first major work, a grand opera: The Mermaid. More was called back to Harlech in 1926 to care for her mother, who died the following year. She collaborated with the librettist for several years and the opera was finished, unorchestrated and unperformed, in 1929. There were, however, many evenings at Crown Lodge, where parts of the work were played to invited audiences of friends, with More at the keyboard. The opera was finally orchestrated in 1950 and performed in its entirety in 1951 by the Barfield Grand Opera Society in Birmingham, as part of the City’s contribution to the Festival of Britain.

During the 1930s and early 1940s the Bantocks raised a family of six children. Music took second place but she composed Matris Carmina, a suite of six works for piano and recorder, each piece dedicated to a particular child. During the war the family returned to Harlech for three years, living at Traethdy. The composer ran a school in the village and wrote music for school concerts and a Christmas performance n the Memorial Hall.

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