Memories of the London College of Music
At the age of about 15 I won a scholarship to become a Junior Exhibitioner at the London College of Music. I don’t know how that came about, but I suspect my clarinet teacher put me in for it. Having won it I was forced to spend my Saturday mornings travelling by tube from Kentish Town to Oxford Circus, and descending into the gloom of the Great Marlborough St building for what seemed like hours of mystifying ‘music appreciation’ and harmony lessons, a clarinet lesson, a piano lesson and a junior orchestra rehearsal. The orchestra, directed by Peter Turton was the only bit I remember enjoying, apart from the break time when I snuck out with a couple of friends for a wander in Carnaby St (this was 1966).
Things changed for me towards the end of 1966 when the Junior College announced a composition competition, with a prize of (I think) £50. It had never occurred to me that I was a composer, except that I was writing lots of songs for my ‘beat group’ with whom I played rhythm guitar and sang. That was my musical world really – Beatles, Stones, Otis Reading. Clarinet was just something they got me onto at school, and I seemed to be reasonably good at. But the music I was hearing in school music lessons and playing in orchestra (classical music) was all a new world to me.
Around the time of the composition competition I had started listening to Benjamin Britten, and I found a real connection with Britten’s vocal music. I started setting Psalm 47 for choir and brass instruments, and began to write out my first musical score (with a fountain pen). The competition was judged by the composers Ian Kellam and Patrick Stanford. To my amazement they awarded me second prize, and furthermore recommended to the college that I be given composition lessons. Ian Kellam in particular took me under his wing, and with him I proceeded to compose a number of short carols and part songs. I learned a great deal from him, and gained a lot of confidence in my own musical ideas. In 1967 he suggested I write a carol for the choir of St Johns College School in Cambridge where he was choir director. There I had my first proper ‘premiere’ in a programme which also included the first performance of John Rutter’s ‘Shepherd’s Pipe Carol’; I met John Rutter and had tea ‘in his rooms’. I can’t describe how out of my depth I felt in those surroundings!
The second significant event for me at LCM was when the orchestra played a new piece by Wilfrid Mellers, presumably commissioned for us by the extraordinary and energetic Peter Turton. The piece was Runes and Carolunes, settings of poems by Wilfrid’s young daughter Caroline for voices and instruments. In it I got to play high glissandi, which I could do because I had spent hours practising the opening of Rhapsody in Blue. I loved the piece for its primitivism and jazzy additive rhythms. When I later found out that Wilfrid was Professor of Music at the University of York, I decided that was where I would go. Ian Kellam advised against. He didn’t want me to go and join the ‘donkey braying set’. But the York prospectus included reference to the Beatles, so I was never going to take that advice. I did a bit of braying in the seventies, and still do occasionally. Anyway, the path I set out on, to be a composer, was begun at the LCM on Saturday mornings, and for that I will always be grateful.