Robin Hull

Robert Hoare Hull (18 October 1905 – 6 August 1960), better known under the name Robin Hull, was a music critic specializing in contemporary British music, particularly Arnold Bax and Frederick Delius.

Early career Born at Limpsfield, Surrey, Hull was educated at Malvern College in Worcestershire. While there he studied with the organist and composer Frank Henry Shera (1882-1956), and also learned piano and clarinet. He went on to the Royal College of Music, studying composition with George Dyson, organ with George Thalben-Ball, and playing clarinet in the student orchestra under Malcolm Sargent, while taking additional private harmony and counterpoint lessons from Harold Darke. There is a portrait of him at the age of 17, painted by Henry Harris Brown. From 1925 he continued music and English literature studies at Worcester College, Oxford. There were also a few piano pieces and settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. During the war he served in the Royal Artillery between 1939 and 1942. and Delius in 1928, and another on Bax four years later for Murdoch & Co, analysing his first four symphonies. He was a contributor to the Pelican mass-market paperbacks British Music of our Time (1948) and The Symphony (1949). In 1958 he began work on another book, Music in England, 1760-1860, but it remained unfinished.

Last years Persistent ill-health dogged his professional career. At the end of his life he was living in the village of Belmont, near Sutton in Surrey, where he died.