Raymond Warren

Heaney made a recording of this version of his poetry with Warren's music in 2011.

Chamber music includes two Piano sonatas, a Violin sonata, three String quartets and the Piano trio Burnt Norton Sketches (1985), which were later orchestrated by Christopher Austin (1999). Peter Jacobs has recorded the Monody movement from Warren's Second Piano Sonata (1977), which consists of a single line of melody with decoration. Song cycles include Spring 1948 (1956), The Pity of Love (1966), Songs of Old Age (1968), the orchestral song cycle In My Childhood (1998), Another Spring (2008) and The Coming (2010). Music for children and young people includes the opera Finn and the Black Hag (1959), Songs of Unity (1968) written for Methodist College, Belfast and several pieces written for youth orchestras including Ring of Light (2005), A Star Danced (2009) and Variations on a Gloucester Chime (2012).

Warren has worked closely with several poets, providing instrumental music to complement spoken words, including Lares (1972) with Michael Longley and The Sound of Time (1984) with Charles Tomlinson. The first of these was with his contemporary Seamus Heaney, A Lough Neagh Sequence (1970). Warren wrote:

He studied at Cambridge, and taught at Queen's University Belfast, where he was the first person in the UK to be given a personal chair in composition in 1966, before becoming Hamilton Harty Professor of Music in 1969. He was Stanley Hugh Badock Professor of Music at the University of Bristol from 1972 until his retirement in 1994.

For the years 1966–72 he was Resident Composer to the Ulster Orchestra, writing for them a number of orchestral works and also conducting the Orchestra in a series of Sunday afternoon concerts of contemporary music. In 1972 he was appointed Professor of Music at the University of Bristol, a post from which he retired in 1994. Since then he has composed to commission for a wide variety of performers notably the Brunel Ensemble (Symphony No.3, In My Childhood) and the London Children's Ballet (Ballet Shoes, 2001).

Major works include the oratorio The Passion (1962), Symphony No.1 (1964) the Violin Concerto (1966), Songs of Old Age (1968), Symphony No.2 (1969), the oratorio Continuing Cities (1989), Symphony No.3 (1995), In My Childhood (1998) and Cello Requiem (2018) as well as his six operas.

Many of his shorter works are among his most powerful including the solo cantata for flute, piano and mezzo soprano, Drop, Drop Slow Tears (1960) and the Song for St. Cecilia’s Day (1967) scored for tenor, flute, viola, guitar and first performed by Peter Pears, Richard Adeney, Cecil Aronowitz and Julian Bream. His best selling work as a recording is the orchestral suite Wexford Bells (1970).

His shorter choral works include the cantata The Death of Orpheus (1953 revised 2009), the motet Salvator Mundi (1976), The Starlight Night (1990), the evening canticles written for Bristol Cathedral: The Bristol Service (1991) and Celtic Blessings (1996). Music for dance includes two notable collaborations with Helen Lewis, There is a Time (1970) and the London Children's Ballet, Ballet Shoes (2001).

Raymond Henry Charles Warren (born 7 November 1928) is a British composer and university teacher.

Raymond Warren was born in 1928 and studied at Cambridge University (1949–52) reading mathematics at first and then changing to music under Boris Ord and Robin Orr. Later he studied privately with Michael Tippett (1952–60), Lennox Berkeley (1958) and Benjamin Britten (1961). From 1955 to 1972 he taught at Queen's University, Belfast, where from 1966 he held a personal Chair in composition. While in Belfast, an association with the Lyric Players theatre company involved writing music for many of the plays of W. B. Yeats.