Roy Agnew

Roy Ewing "Robert" Agnew (23 August 1891 – 12 November 1944) was an Australian composer and pianist. He has been called the most outstanding Australian composer of the early twentieth century.

Agnew was born in Sydney on 23 August 1891, the son of Samuel Agnew, a cordial manufacturer, and his wife Maria Jane, née Miller. Agnew taught himself piano at an early age. He attended Chatswood and Hornsby public schools, and received his first formal music training from Emanuel de Beaupuis, an Italian pianist then residing in Sydney. He received some further teaching from Daisy Miller and Sydney Moss, and later also briefly studied composition under Alfred Hill at the NSW Conservatorium of Music. He began working as a piano teacher in Marrickville in 1911.

By this time, Agnew was already writing "strikingly original works" which abandoned "the limitations of key and tonal relationship". The first piece of his music to be published was Australian Forest Pieces for Piano in 1913; however, his music did not receive much public attention until the internationally renowned pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch gave a recital of his works Deirdre's Lament and Dance of the Wild Men at a Sydney Town Hall matinee. Partly through the generosity of friends and supporters, Agnew was then able to travel to London in 1923 to study composition and orchestration with Gerard Williams and Cyril Scott at the Royal College of Music.

While in London, Agnew gave recitals of works by contemporary composers such as Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, while his own Fantasie Sonata was premiered in London in 1927 by William Murdoch. Augener Ltd. of London began to publish his pieces, and in the United States he also found a publisher in Arthur P. Schmidt of New York.

...
Wikipedia