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Dennis Brain
Summary
Dennis Brain (17 May 1921 1 September 1957) was a British horn player. From a musical family – his father and grandfather were horn players – he attended the Royal Academy of Music in London. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force, playing in its band and orchestra. After the war he was principal horn of the Philharmonia and Royal Philharmonic orchestras, and played in chamber ensembles.
Among the works written for Brain is Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (1944). Other composers who wrote for him include Malcolm Arnold, Lennox Berkeley, Alan Bush, Gordon Jacob, Humphrey Searle and Mátyás Seiber.
Brain was killed in a car crash at the age of 36.
Brain was born in Hammersmith, London on 17 May 1921 to a musical family. His mother, Marion, née Beeley (1887–1954), was a singer at Covent Garden and his father, Aubrey Harold Brain, was first horn of the London Symphony Orchestra and regarded as "the leading exponent of the instrument in Britain at that time". Aubrey's father, Alfred Edwin Brain, Sr., and elder brother, Alfred Edwin Brain Jr., had been prominent horn players in Britain, and in the latter's case the US. Brain's elder brother, Leonard (1915–1975), became a leading player of the oboe and cor anglais, principal of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Brain was educated at Richmond Hill Preparatory School and then St Paul's School, London. Although it was assumed that he would become a horn player, his father kept him largely away from the instrument as a boy, in the belief that it should not be played until the adult teeth developed. Brain was allowed to blow a few notes on his father's horn every Saturday morning, to maintain his interest, but his first musical studies were piano and organ.
In 1936 Brain was admitted to the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) to study horn under his father, who was professor of the instrument there. He also studied piano with Max Pirani, organ with G. D. Cunningham and harmony with Montague Phillips.
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