Geoffrey Allen Music

Geoffrey Allen was born in the UK in 1927. He studied chemistry and geography at Oxford between 1945 and 1951, and his first acknowledged compositions date from this time. Since then he held a number of positions in Australian libraries, latterly at the University of Western Australia, the WA Institute of Technology and Curtin University.

Allen spent much of his career championing Australian music, editing, publishing and facilitating recordings to that worthy end. Since the late 1980s he experienced a resurgence of creative drive. His body of work  approached opus 100, and includes eighteen piano sonatas,  recorded by Murray McLachlan for Divine Art, many shorter piano pieces and numerous works for woodwinds, together with songs and a few works for strings. He acknowledged the major influences on his style as those of early and mid-20th century British and French composers.

In his instrumental music Allen favoured Delius’s principle of ongoing rhapsodic development, instinctively applied. Motives and entire passages are often repeated, but frequently transposed by a semitone or tone, a habit which Allen thought may be derived from Milhaud. The tonality is evasive and constantly shifting, resisting classification into a key for the most part.

Geoffrey passed away in 2021 just as the recording of his complete  piano sonatas (delayed for two years due to the Covid pandemic) was aboutto begin

Photo by Neville Sparrow