News

Musical Times, Spring 2000

Professor Simon McVeigh, Head of Music at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Cyril Ehrlich, Visiting Professor, have been awarded a grant of L160,118 over three years for a research project entitled 'The transformation of London concert life, 1880-1914'. The grant has been awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB). Professor McVeigh explains that `during the decades around 1900, London witnessed an unprecedented profusion of concert activity This grant will help to fund the first thorough study of London's rich and diverse musical culture.' The project will analyse how changing patterns of consumption, leisure and organisation marked the beginnings of the modern music industry. The grant has enabled the purchase of equipment and the appointment of a research assistant. Professor Cyril Ehrlich is Emeritus Professor of Social and Economic History at Queen's, Belfast. He became a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College in 1998. He is currently working on a history of London's Wigmore Hall. He has written books on the history of the piano, and on the music profession in Britain since the eighteenth century.

A Robert Schumann rarity, his only opera Genoveva, is the highlight of Garsington Opera's millennium season, which runs from 11 June to 9 July 2000. The production, directed by Aidan Lang, designed by Ashley Martin-Davis and conducted by Elgar Howarth, will be the first in this country since 1893. Premiered two months before Lohengrin, the opera, written to the composer's own libretto, adapted from plays by CF Hebbel and L. Tieck on a medieval theme, was a failure during his lifetime, but marks an important stage in the evolution of German romantic opera from Weber to Wagner. In an important publishing development, the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (Publishing) Ltd has renewed its world-wide sales and distribution agreement with Oxford University Press, thus continuing their fruitful partnership for a further three years. The signing of the new contract follows on from a successful sales and distribution agreement operative since ABRSM (Publishing) Ltd first appointed OUP as its exclusive world-wide distributor in 1989. Until then, ABRSM had been supplying customers from its late eighteenth-century premises in Bedford Square. For the last ten years, in contrast, it has enjoyed the efficient state-of-theart warehousing and delivery systems that OUP offers. Since inception, OUP has handled and despatched many millions of copies of ABRSM music - in 1998 reaching over two million for the first time, to over eighty countries - and both companies are looking forward to continuing and building on their long association into the new millennium.

In a further development - a publishing first - the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (Publishing) Ltd has published for the first time Twenty-two keyboard pieces by Henry Purcell and one by Orlando Gibbons. The manuscript for this work was discovered in 1993, and it is now in The British Library. Clearly intended as an instruction book for a keyboard beginner, the manuscript presents a systematic introduction to the principles of basic hand positions and correct fingering. Purcell's first seven pieces introduce various fingering combinations, simple ornaments and key signatures. Gibbon's Praeludium is then included to consolidate what has been learnt so far. A further five pieces by Purcell teach more sophisticated hand positions, ornaments and fingering in increasingly complicated keys, more rapid passages, and over a wider range of the keyboard. Finally, the composer collects together two suites so that the player who has mastered the first thirteen pieces may move on to study and perform unified sets, typical of the period. Five facsimile pages are reproduced, and the introduction provided by editor Davitt Moroney provides insights into the collection's background and importance.

The composer Thomas Ades has won the Grawemeyer 2000 Music Prize for his orchestral work Asyla (1997). At $200,000 the most prestigious and lucrative of all classical music awards for contemporary music, it was established in 1985 through the generosity of H. Charles Grawemeyer, and has been won by British composers only three times in its fifteen-year history. The first recipient was Witold Lutoslawski for his Third Symphony Previous award winners have also included Gyorgy Ligeti, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Toru Takemitsu, John Adams and Tan Dun. Asyla (the plural of asylum) received its world premiere in Birmingham in October 1997, from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, and has since been heard worldwide. A recording, featuring the original performers, was released in July 1999, and won

a coveted Mercury Music Prize. Robert Cowan of The Independent commented: 'Within seconds, you're gripped. Ades ushers you among cowbells and assorted percussion, then a solo horn unveils a world inhabited by woodwinds, strings and snarling brass. The pulse is gentle but more or less constant, the climate consistently humid. Its a sickly half-light, the sort you often dream of escaping from but somehow cannot abandon.'