Today marks the 143rd anniversary of the birth of the imaginative Sir Arnold Bax. Born in London on November 8, 1883 he was one of the most individual and imaginative British composers of the first half of the twentieth century. His music is characterized by romantic intensity, Celtic mysticism, rich orchestration and extraordinary atmospheric beauty. An important influence was the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Bax was so fascinated by Irish culture that he wrote poetry and prose under the pseudonym Dermot O'Byrne. Although Bax received important royal honours, he was essentially an independent-minded romantic who preferred artistic freedom to musical fashion. "I can't help being (fundamentally) a very primitive being. I believe in conditions of ecstasy – physical or spiritual – and I get nothing from anything else. I think all the composers who appeal to me – Beethoven, Wagner, Delius, Sibelius – were primitive in that they believed that the secret of the universe was to be solved by ecstatic intuition rather than by thought." A remarkably revealing statement indeed.