Books on the topic 'Royal Northern College of Music'

This chapter looks at collaborative work between composers and performers in an educational setting, and using the case study of a postgraduate programme at the Royal College of Music in London, it explores the values and meanings attached to creative collaboration for students preparing to enter the world of work. The study showed how students found this sort of collaborative work to be potentially career-enhancing and creatively fulfilling. The study also found however that composer–performer roles were demarcated strongly enough to constrain the degree of collaboration and learning to satisfy all the participants. The chapter concludes with questions about the degree to which such programmes challenge the assumptions and roles of performers and composers. How do conservatoires both prepare students for the world of work and provide models that might challenge that world?

The performance history of Dido and Aeneas in the nineteenth century is marked by two, seemingly conflicting, trends: attempts to create a more authentic score and the increased use of added orchestration. Many of the most important contributions to the reception history of the opera in this era, including new editions and major revivals, can be attributed to the faculties at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music. The founding of the Purcell Society by William Cummings, his biography of the composer, and his edition of the opera mark a watershed in the modern history of the opera. Within the so-called “English Musical Renaissance” of musical composition, Dido and Aeneas became a stylistic touchstone to which composers through the mid-twentieth century returned.

Ethel Smyth's first orchestral work, the Serenade in D Major for Orchestra, was composed in 1889 (and possibly early 1890) and was premiered at a Crystal Palace concert on 26 April 1890. The work was received well by the audience and garnered positive notices in the press. This critical edition is based on a photocopy of the autograph manuscript, now in the Royal College of Music Library, with reference also to a fair copy of the score, now in the British Library. The extensive critical notes document the changes made by the composer, as well as editorial and performance suggestions made by both the composer and August Manns, who conducted the premiere performance. The present whereabouts of Ethel Smyth's autograph score for her Serenade in D Major are unknown. The facsimile supplement presents a photocopy of the score that was made, according to the label on the cover, in August 1993, and which is now in the Royal College of Music Library. The introduction to this edition includes a biographical sketch of August Manns, conductor of the premiere performance.

This book is the first scholarly biography of Madeleine Dring (1923–1977). Using diaries, letters, and extensive archival research, the narrative examines her career and explores her music. The story of Dring’s life begins with her formal training at the Royal College of Music, first in the Junior Department and then as a full-time student, a period that also covers her personal experience of events both leading up to and during the early years of World War II. Her career is traced in detail through radio and television shows and West End revues, all productions for which she wrote music, as well as her work as an actor. Dring’s most important contemporaries are briefly discussed in relation to her life, including her teachers at the Royal College of Music, professional connections such as Felicity Gray and Laurier Lister, and her husband Roger Lord. Her musical compositions are surveyed, from the earliest works she wrote as a student to the art songs she wrote in her last years, along with various popular numbers for revues and numerous piano pieces for beginning piano students as well as those suitable for the concert hall. Each chapter singles out one or more of these works for detailed description and analysis, with attention to the qualities that characterize her distinctive musical style.

This chapter focuses on the role of Harry T. Burleigh's wife and family in his career as an “eminent baritone.” Due to his success in singing for the English royal and noble families, Burleigh returned to perform in England the following summer, but it also led to his wife's determination to create an identity distinct from her role as the wife of “the eminent baritone.” In fall 1909 Louise took their son Alston to England, where she placed him at Malden College for Boys just outside London. Then, assuming the stage name of Princess Redfeather, she “played in her own Indian Act in London music halls.” After the “real” Princess Redfeather, Princess Tsianina Redfeather, appeared and demanded that Louise must find another stage name, Louise became Ojibway Princess Nadonis, and later Princess Nadonis Shawa. This chapter considers Louise Alston Burleigh's separation from Harry and her decision to pursue a career as a performer in New York City, with particular emphasis on her American Indian presentations and her joint recitals.

Alcohol has been used for thousands of years and, indeed, in very different ways. Two thousand years ago, the occupying Romans sipped wine regularly but reasonably moderately, and marvelled at the local English serfs who celebrated bringing in their crops with brief episodes of unrivalled drunkenness. The use of alcohol was not only tolerated but sometimes encouraged by the ruling classes as a way of subjugating the population and dulling their awareness of the conditions in which they had to live and work. The adverse impact of gin consumption was famously recorded by Hogarth’s painting of ‘Gin Lane’ but, at the same time, beer was reckoned a safer alternative to water for fluid intake and was linked to happiness and prosperity in the sister painting of ‘Beer Street’. It was against the ‘pernicious use of strong liquors’ and not beer that the president of the Royal College of Physicians, John Friend, petitioned Parliament in 1726. Some desultory attempts were made by Parliament in the eighteenth century to introduce legislation in order to tax and control alcohol production but they were eventually repealed. It was really the onset of the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century England that brought into sharp relief the wasted productivity and lost opportunity from excess consumption. England moved from a rural, relatively disorganized workforce to an urban, more closely scrutinized and supervised one—for instance, in factories, where men needed their wits about them to work heavy machinery, workers that were absent (in body or mind) were noticed. And, in Victorian Britain, there arose a greater social conscience—an awareness, for example, of the harm, through neglect, inflicted on the children of those who spent their wages and their days in an alcoholic stupor. Nonetheless, the per capita consumption of alcohol in the UK at the end of the nineteenth century was greater than it is today. It fell progressively through the first half of the twentieth century, with two marked dips. The first coincided with the introduction of licensing hours restrictions during the First World War, and the second with the economic depression of the 1930s. Following the Second World War, there was a doubling of alcohol consumption between 1950 and the present day, to about 10 l of pure alcohol per capita. There has been a small fall of 9% in the last 5 years; this may be, in part, related to the changing ethnic mix and increasing number of non-drinkers. There has always been a mismatch between the self-reported consumption in lifestyle questionnaires, and the data from customs and excise, with the latter being 40% greater. From the latter, it can be estimated that the average consumption of non-teetotal adults in England is 25 units (0.25 l of pure alcohol) per week, which is well above the recommended limits of 14 units for women, and 21 units for men. Of course, average figures hide population differences, and it is estimated that the heaviest-consuming 10% of the population account for 40% of that drunk. While men continue to drink, on average, about twice the amount that women do, the rate of rise of consumption in women has been steeper. Average consumption is comparable across socio-economic groups but there is evidence of both more teetotallers and more drinking in a harmful way in the poorest group. In 2007, 13% of those aged 11–15 admitted that they had drunk alcohol during the previous week. This figure is falling, but those who do drink are drinking more. The average weekly consumption of pupils who drink is 13 units/week. Binge drinking estimates are unreliable, as they depend on self-reporting in questionnaires. In the UK, they are taken as drinking twice the daily recommended limits of 4 units for men, and 3 units for women, on the heaviest drinking day in the previous week. In 2010, 19% of men, and 12% of women, admitted to binge drinking, with the figures being 24% and 17%, respectively, for those aged 16–24. The preferred venue for drinking in the UK has changed markedly, mainly in response to the availability of cheap supermarket drink. Thirty years ago, the vast majority of alcohol was consumed in pubs and restaurants, whereas, in 2009, the market share of off-licence outlets was 65%. However, drinkers under 24 years of age still drink predominantly away from home. The UK per capita consumption is close to the European average, but consumption has been falling in Mediterranean countries and rising in northern and eastern Europe. Europe has the highest consumption of all continents, but there is undoubtedly massive under-reporting in many countries, particularly because of local unregulated production and consumption. It is estimated that less than 10% of consumption is captured in statistics in parts of Africa.