News

CENTENARY OF EZRA'S DEATH

Ezra died in his home in Shirebrook on October 13th, 1922. He was sixty years of age. In his will, Ezra recognized that his brother, John Colley, was comfortably off and he left all that he had to the lady who had nursed him during his final illness. He has left a huge legacy of popular piano music for the world.

(My thanks to Paul Roe for reminding me)

Listening to Ezra's Music

It is now possible to listen to some of Ezra's piano music on this site.

Go to the LINKS page, select an URL, and click on it. The music should play.

The quality of the piano playing may not be as good as I would like it to be, but at least the melodies can be heard.

About the LINKS page:

Ida Hampden was Ezra Read's wife. She was an accomplished composer of popular and tuneful piano pieces. Her website is easily accessed by clicking the link on the Links page of this site.

A quite separate link will take you to a site called Musical Home Journal. The author of that site has published many pages from the jounal. Music from the same era as Ezra Read and Ida Hampden is free to download.

The third link will take you to my Art Gallery.

The Holding of Ezra's works in Derbyshire

The holding of Ezra Read's sheet music has been moved from  Chesterfield Library to Derbyshire Records Office in Matlock.

Jeffrey L. Noble in 1999 donated 50 of Ezra's works, a further 4 were donated by Mr C. Snowden and over 50 more of Ezra's works were donated in 2017 by Joseph and Simon Read, the author of this web site and his son.

Numbering the works of Ezra on this site

Pages listed as EZRA'S PUBLISHED WORKS are now numbered from 1 to 100, 101 to 200, etc. with the final ten spaces on each page left unoccupied. This allows newly discovered works to be inserted on any page without renumbering every successive page up to the last item, which now stands at over 900 works. The final page in this set will show the total number of Ezra's works so far found.