Gardiner, William

Composer

b Leicester 1769 [sic], d Leicester 1853. From his youth he entered and continued the family business as a stocking manufacturer (cf Wm Matthews, and authors Gadsby and H K White), and was also an enthusiastic amateur musician, composing songs and duets in his youth under a pseudonym. From 1812 to 1815 he published Sacred Melodies from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, Adapted to the Best English Poets and Appropriated to the Use of the British Church; all these composers he had met on his travels, and this proved a rich quarry of tunes for 19th cent hymnal editors. His pastiche oratorio Judah used music from these three with his own words and linking passages. As an enthusiast for Beethoven, he claimed to be the first to introduce his music to England; as an admirer of Haydn, he sent him 6 pairs of cotton socks, made at his factory, decorated with musical phrases from Haydn’s Quartets. In 1832 he wrote on acoustics in The Music of Nature; he also published 3 lighter volumes of autobiography. No.95=632=688, 444.