Reginald Smith Brindle served with the Royal Engineers in Africa and Italy during the Second World War, and later returned to Italy in 1949 to further his compositional studies with Pizzetti and Dallapiccola. The influence of Italian landscapes and culture can be found in many of Smith Brindle's works, including an extended combination of nostalgia and melancholy in November Memories dedicated to the poet Margherita Guidacci, and an evocation of the spirit of Gesualdo in The Prince of Venosa. The sheer variety of his guitar music is further represented in the expressive Preludes and Fantasias, the technical demands of the �le-de-France Variations, and the pedagogical but intriguingly atonal Ten Simple Preludes.
