Some Fugitive Notes on William John Fenney, Composer (1891-1957)

Sadly, the standard musical reference works tell us little about the composer William J. Fenney. There is no entry in Grove’s Dictionary or the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The interested listener will find no CDs devoted to his music. Any information about Fenney must be pieced together from occasional notices, obituaries and reviews. A researcher with access to several archives may be able to provide more details. A small collection of scores are available at the University of Birmingham. I was unable to locate an image of the composer.

Philip Scowcroft, at MusicWeb International has given a brief overview: “William Fenney (1891-1957), born in Handsworth, Birmingham on 23 May 1891 and a pupil of Granville Bantock, composed, besides some chamber music, several, shortish, lightish, pictorial orchestral pieces (Dawn, In Shadow, In the Woods for strings, and Pastoral), also songs which are ballad-like in character: The Bugles of Dreamland, Gold Wings and The Sands o’ Dee.”  

One of the most significant sources of information about Fenney is found in a letter from him to N. Say. (Foreman, Lewis, From Parry to Britten: British Music in Letters 1900-1945, Batsford, 1987, p.129). The composer includes a brief biography and an overview of his compositions. The letter was a response to a request from Edwin Evans, music critic. Fenney states that he had an “early preference for music and was self-taught in composition, until the time when I studied with Prof. Bantock at the Midland Institute School of Music.”  He explains his musical tastes and inspirations: “From early years I studied the great masters, - Beethoven and Chopin were my first teachers; I liked Wagner only on the stage. I have never liked the modernist school; my own style owes to Elgar.”

There are several compositions mentioned including the orchestral Avon Romance, Dawn, in the Shadow and the Vision of Ancient Empire [Nineveh]. Finally, he remarks that “I think I succeeded with a string quartet (after the usual preliminary failures) though nobody has noticed it; and I have nothing better to show than my ops.20 and 26 – the latter unpublished - consists of an Air for violin and piano, a Romance for viola and piano and a Rhapsody for cello and piano, all of equal length.” Although he does not mention it, the op.20 is a highly competent Piano Trio. I have seen the score of this work, and it seems to me to deserve revival. His final gnomic comment in his letter is “I have lived like a streak of light!”

The census returns (1911) states that the 20 year old Fenney was an insurance clerk. Clearly this was before he got the music bug. His father was John Horatio Fenney, and his mother was Rosa Harriet Blake. John Horatio was a “Town Traveller in Castors for Furniture.”

The essential British Music Society publication, British Composer Profiles (Leach, Gerald et. al. 3^rd edition, 2012 p.83) confirms that Fenney’s style was influenced by Edward Elgar. He gave up composing in later life rather “than conform to the developing contemporary idioms.”

Finally, Hughes and Stradling (English Musical Renaissance, 1840-1940 (Music and Society, 2001, p.XVII) adds that Fenney “the young starlet who dazzled [Granville] Bantock’s composition classes before the Great war, who lived to attract the ironic pity of Cecil Gray and died in an Epsom bedsitter so alone that his body was not discovered for days.” Contrariwise, The Times (25 June 1957, p.14) obituary states that Fenney died in hospital in Epsom.

A final post in this series about William J. Fenney will feature Josef Holbrooke’s comments and works list.