Captain Thomas Williamson of India

Abstract

Thomas George Williamson, soldier, composer, music publisher and author, died in Paris in 1817. Though neither a great soldier nor particularly a significant creative writer, his attainments have qualified him for a short mention in various biographies and encyclopedias. None of these presents anything approaching an account of the whole man, however, because Williamson had a wide range of interests in which he invested his creative energies and he is known only from the standpoint of each of the subject specializations concerned without reference to the others. The present study was initiated by a commission to write an article on Williamson the composer for the new Grove's Dictionary of Music & Musicians, on whom in the previous edition three sentences had been devoted. Besides adding to a knowledge of his musical activities, source material has been brought together which could be of interest to historians and sociologists, not least in Asian studies. For Williamson's story has very much to do with the twenty years he lived in India before his return to England in 1798, both because this period was the career part of his life and on account of the wealth of experiences that it provided for him to draw upon later in his literary and musical compositions.