Buxton Orr
(1924 – 1997)
Buxton Orr was a Glasgow-born composer and teacher. He worked in many genres, including songs, chamber music, works for brass and wind band, orchestral music, opera and music theatre as well as film scores
Originally trained as a doctor, Orr gave up medicine and switched to music in 1952, studying composition at the Guildhall School of Music with Benjamin Frankel and conducting with Aylmer Buesst. Through Frankel's help and influence, Orr became active for a time composing film scores, and his first general recognition as a composer came from the high-profile production of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer in 1959, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. His one-act opera The Wager was successfully staged at Sadler's Wells in 1961.
With his return to the Guildhall School of Music as a professor in 1965, Orr soon gained a reputation as an energetic and influential teacher. He founded the Guildhall New Music Ensemble and also conducted the London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra between 1970 and 1980, the latter stimulating his particular interest in improvisation. His pupils included Deirdre Gribbin, Barry Guy, Gary Higginson, Philip Sawyers and Debbie Wiseman.
Since 1975 he directed the Guildhall New Music Ensemble and between 1970 and 1980 he was conductor of the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra, touring England and Europe. He received commissions from the Park Lane Group, BBC London, Radio Scotland, the City of London and Merseyside Arts. His interest in music theatre led to his writing 'Unicorn’, ‘The Last Circus' and 'Ring in the New', the latter during his period as Composer-in-Residence and Associate Director of the Music Theatre Studio Ensemble at the Banff Centre for Fine Arts in Canada and for which he received the American National Music Theatre Network Seagrams Prize in 1988.
His early film music included horror film scores such as Grip of the Strangler (1958), Corridors of Blood (1958) and Doctor Blood's Coffin (1961). Some of his stock music was used in several Doctor Who serials in the 1960s. During the 1980s Orr composed three music theatre pieces: Unicorn (1981), The Last Circus (1984) and Ring in the New (1986), and a number of song cycles, including the "caustic" Ten Types of Hospital Visitor(1986), setting Charles Causley.
