William G. Whittaker

William Gillies Whittaker (Newcastle upon Tyne, July 23, 1876 – Orkney Islands, July 5, 1944) was an English composer, pedagogue, conductor, musicologist, Bach scholar, publisher and writer. He spent his life promoting music. The University of Durham, where he once studied and taught, called him one of “Britain’s most influential musicians during the first half of the twentieth century”. An autodidact, he was a prodigious creator of Gebrauchsmusik. Early life and education in Newcastle Whittaker was born into a Methodist family in the Shieldfield district of Newcastle upon Tyne. His father, John Whittaker, the illegitimate son of a farm labourer’s daughter, came from Little Corby in Cumberland. His mother, Ellen Gillies, was an orphan from a respected family in Hexham in Northumberland. From an early age Whittaker showed an interest in music: he learnt to play the flute and his father bought him a piccolo; and he played as a schoolboy organist at St George’s Church in Jesmond. His father encouraged him to follow a career in science, which led to Whittaker initially studying mathematics—without great success—at Armstrong College, at that time part of the University of Durham (it lat