Martin Shaw (composer)

Martin Edward Fallas Shaw (9 March 1875 – 24 October 1958) was an English composer, conductor, and (in his early life) theatre producer. His over 300 published works include songs, hymns, carols, oratorios, several instrumental works, a congregational mass setting (the Anglican Folk Mass), and four operas including a ballad opera. Biography Shaw delighted in describing himself as a cockney, a title he could claim under Samuel Rowlands’ definition of one born within the sound of the Bow Bells. Born 9 March 1875, he was the eldest of nine children, son of the Bohemian and eccentric James Fallas Shaw (1842–1907), composer of church music and organist of Hampstead parish church and Charlotte Elizabeth Shaw, née James (1850–1912). He was the elder brother of the composer and influential educator Geoffrey Shaw and the actor Julius “Jules” Brinkley Shaw (born in 1882, Clapham, Surrey now South West London), whose career was cut short by the First World War – he was killed in March 1918. He studied under Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music, together with a generation of composers that included Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Samuel Coleridge-Taylo