The story of a fascinating, controversial man who influenced almost every sphere of musical life in Britain and helped to change the face of music performance and education in this country. George Dyson (1883-1964) was a highly influential composer, educator and administrator, whose work touched the lives of millions. Yet today, apart from his Canterbury Pilgrims and two sets of canticles for Choral Evensong, his music is little known. In this comprehensive and detailed study, based not only on Dyson's own writings but on unpublished papers, personal correspondence, and interviews with his family and friends, Paul Spicer brings this remarkable man and his lyrical, passionate and engaging music to life once more. Born into a working class family in Halifax, West Yorkshire, he rose from humble beginnings to become the voice of public school music in Britain and Director of the RCM. As a scholarship student, he met and studied with some of the leading musicians of the day, including Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and Sir Hubert Parry. He went on to work in some of the country's greatest schools, where he established his reputation as a composer, particularly of choral and orchestral works, of which Quo Vadis was his most ambitious. A member of the BBC Brains Trust panel, Dyson was also the 'voice of music' on the radio for a number of years and helped to educate the nation through his regular broadcasts. A fascinating, controversial man, George Dyson touched almost every sphere of musical life in Britain and helped to change the face of music performance and education in this country. This seminal book, examining every aspect of his long, colourful career, re-establishes him as the towering figure he undoubtedly was in his time. PAUL SPICER was a composition student of Herbert Howells, whose biography he wrote in 1998. He is well-known as a choral conductor especially of British Music of the twentieth century onwards, a writer, composer, teacher, and producer.

Documents the innovations of a group of eccentric geniuses who developed computer code in the mid-20th century as part of mathematician Alan Turin's theoretical universal machine idea, exploring how their ideas led to such developments as digital television, modern genetics and the hydrogen bomb.

Named one of WIRED’s "The Best Pop Culture That Got Us Through 2020" In Analogia, technology historian George Dyson presents a startling look back at the analog age and life before the digital revolution—and an unsettling vision of what comes next. In 1716, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent eight days taking the cure with Peter the Great at Bad Pyrmont in Saxony, trying to persuade the tsar to launch a voyage of discovery from Russia to America and to adopt digital computing as the foundation for a remaking of life on earth. In two classic books, Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson chronicled the realization of the second of Leibniz’s visions. In Analogia, his pathbreaking new book, he brings the story full circle, starting with the Russian American expedition of 1741 and ending with the beyond-digital revolution that will complete the transformation of the world. Dyson enlists a startling cast of characters, from the time of Catherine the Great to the age of machine intelligence, and draws heavily on his own experiences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and onward to the rain forest of the Northwest Coast. We are, Dyson reveals, entering a new epoch in human history, one driven by a generation of machines whose powers are no longer under programmable control. Includes black-and-white illustrations

"Project Orion describes one of the most awesome 'might have beens' (and may yet bes!) of the space age. This is essential reading for anyone interested in government bureaucracies and the military industrial complex." -Sir Arthur C. Clarke