Ronald Settle
British composer, pianist, teacher, writer and examiner (1909–1998)
Ronald Coulter Settle (21 June 1909 – 11 July 1998) was an English composer, pianist, teacher, writer and examiner.
Education
Settle was born in Wirral, Cheshire on 21 June 1909. He was educated at the Royal Manchester College of Music, where he studied pianoforte as a student of Frank Merrick.
Liverpool Playhouse
Settle was Musical Director at the Liverpool Playhouse for twenty-six years from 1944 until 1970, when cost saving measures dictated that two pianists were too expensive and that recorded music would be played instead.
Joan Ovens joined Settle as a second pianist and they would play duets before a performance, as well as during the shows and intervals.
Settle wrote incidental music for numerous plays. For example, during the 1944-45 season, this included Shakespeare's Hamlet and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist.
Willard Stoker’s play, ‘I Remember, I Remember’, (with music composed by Settle), was staged at the Playhouse in the week commencing 14 June 1960 and starred Rita Tushingham, who had assumed the position of student Assistant Stage Manager with the Liverpool Repertory Company in 1958, a company which presented stage plays at the Liverpool Playhouse.
Settle also arranged music by other composers to suit Playhouse performances and the theatre’s two pianos. This included H. Fraser Simson’s music to Toad of Toad Hall by A A Milne and based on Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, performed in the week commencing 23 December 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ronald Settle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.