Eric Francis Harrison Coates (27 August 1886 – 21 December 1957) was an English composer of light music and, early in his career, a leading violist. Please support my channels: https://ko-fi.com/bartjebartmans Summer Days, Suite for Orchestra (1918) Dedication: Alick Maclean 1. In a Country Lane (0:00) 2. On the Edge of the Lake (3:28) 3. At the Dance (7:34) Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Wilson Coates's first appearance as a composer-conductor was when he directed his Summer Days at the Queen's Hall in 1919. Since then he has toured extensively abroad, and has always enjoyed a great welcome in such countries as Norway, Sweden, Holland and Denmark. It is now many years since he wrote his world-famous London Suite. The BBC was partly responsible for its phenomenal success, because the ‘Knightsbridge March’ was chosen for that remarkably popular feature In Town Tonight. Within a fortnight of its debut, the BBC was swamped with over twenty thousand letters from listeners eager to know the name of the jolly tune. When the London Suite was performed in Copenhagen the audience went almost mad with excitement, and the members of the orchestra joined in by applauding on their instruments, creating the most cacophonous furore ever known in the capital. There is of course the old story of the provincial gentleman who told the ticket-clerk of a London tube station that he had forgotten his destination but knew that a song had been written about it. The clerk immediately burst into an ear-splitting whistle and issued a single to Knightsbridge! Eric Coates's Sleepy Lagoon was a success as soon as it came from the publishers' hands, but when someone in America added words to it, the sales went up to something like half-a-million within a few weeks. Coates knew nothing about it until he received a cable from the States congratulating him on having written ‘No. 1 song hit in America.’ His latest [1946] works include the Three Elizabeth’s Suite, the ‘Eighth Army March’ and the ‘Salute the Soldier March’. It can be said with little fear of contradiction that Coates is responsible for the great ‘march vogue’ we are experiencing at the present time. Although he specializes in light music, he is absolutely sincere about it, and takes the greatest care with his work. ‘Sincerity is the keynote of existence’ he says, and he abominates people who write with their tongues in their cheeks. He listens critically to all new music, and although he enjoys the work of such people as Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Arthur Bliss and Arnold Bax, he feels very doubtful about much of the modern music we are expected to accept to-day. He finds difficulty in appreciating the modern trend one finds in the work of many of the American and Russian composers and feels that they concentrate too much upon effects because they are afraid of being thought conventional. There is now such a craze for originality that in trying to be ‘different’ people wi