Gordon Langford

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Gordon Langford (11 May 1930 – 18 April 2017) was an English composer, arranger and performer. Although well known in the brass band community as a composer and arranger, he is less well known as a composer of orchestral music, despite winning an Ivor Novello award for his March from the Colour Suite in 1971. Langford was born in Edgware, Middlesex in May 1930 as Gordon Maris Colman. His father was a precision toolmaker. He was a precocious child, beginning piano lessons aged five. At nine, one of his compositions received a public performance. He attended Bedford Modern School and he went on to win a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music where he studied piano and composition with Norman Demuth. It was Demuth, his professor of composition, who suggested that he should change his surname or use a pseudonym. Hence, he changed his name to become Gordon Colman Langford. In 1951, during his army service, he made his first BBC broadcast as a solo pianist with the Royal Artillery Band, of which he was also a member. For many years he worked with seaside orchestras, a touring opera company and as a ship's musician. During the 1960s he was featured as pianist, arranger and composer on BBC programmes such as Music in the Air, Melody around the World and Ronnie Barker's Lines From My Grandfather's Forehead. He lives in East Devon, mainly composing but occasionally appearing in recordings, concerts and broadcasts. In 2011 he was nominated for a Fellowship of the Royal Academy of

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