York Bowen - Compositional Style

Compositional Style

Bowen’s compositions each display a unique ‘blend of Romanticism and strong individuality’. Although his influences include Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Grieg and Tchaikovsky, Bowen's music is very much defined by its distinctive textures and harmonies. Although his active career spanned more than fifty years, Bowen's compositional style altered very little and he continued to employ a diatonic key system with use of colourful chromatic harmonies throughout his life.

Bowen's compositional output is made up almost entirely of instrumental works. Although he wrote for numerous different instrumental combinations, the piano features prominently in many of his works. Despite this, Bowen's varied instrumental proficiencies are evident in his technical and musical understanding of individual instrumental capabilities.

The varying standards of difficulty of his compositions make Bowen's instrumental music accessible to a wide range of musicians. This is particularly true of Bowen's piano works which span from study pieces such as Twelve Easy Impromptus, Op. 99. to the extreme technical virtuosity of works such as Sonata No. 5 in F minor, Op. 72.

Many of Bowen's piano works are aimed at improving piano technique. One of his most notable works, Twenty Four Preludes, Op. 102, is set in all major and minor keys and his Twelve Studies, Op. 46, are also intended to address different elements of piano technique. Bowen dedicated the studies to his piano teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, Tobias Matthay, who had written several books about various aspects of fore-arm rotation and piano touch. Each of Bowen's studies deals with a different aspect of piano technique discussed in Matthay's books. Inspired by Matthay's innovative approaches, Bowen later produced two books on piano technique: Pedalling the Modern Piano Forte (London, 1936) and The Simplicity of Piano Technique (London, 1961)