Biography
Madeleine Winefride Isabelle Dring (September 7, 1923 – March 26, 1977) was an English composer and actress.
Madeleine Dring was born into a musical family. Growing up in Raleigh Road, Harringay, she showed talent at an early age and took lessons in the junior division of the Royal College of Music beginning on her tenth birthday. She attended on scholarship for violin, though her talent for the stage was also noticed, and she performed in the children's theatre. She continued at the Royal College for senior-level study in music, where her composition teachers included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, and Gordon Jacob; she also studied mime and drama. Dring's two loves of theatre and music would coexist happily; many of her compositions were for the stage, upon which she often sang and played piano.
Read full biography ↓
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 student of Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Madeleine Dring's style is typically light and unpretentious. She admired the idiomatic and rhythmically vibrant writing of Francis Poulenc, which is echoed in her works. Her harmonizations are often jazzy; her writing has often been compared to that of George Gershwin. She wrote many of her songs for herself and as such made no particular effort to make them easy to sing, melodically, as she herself had perfect pitch.
As family responsibilities would keep her from completing large-scale works, most of Dring's output was in shorter forms; she wrote a good deal of solo piano and chamber music, as well as many pedagogical works. She did, however, complete a one-act opera, Cupboard Love, and a dance drama, The Fair Queen of Wu.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.