Thurston Dart and the New Faculty of Music at King's College London

Thurston Dart and the New Faculty of Music at King’s College London

A 50th anniversary biography

By Edward Breen

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Copyright © 2015 Edward Breen All rights reserved

Published by King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS

About the author:

Edward Breen was a choral scholar at King’s College London and returned fifteen years later to write his PhD under the supervision of Professors Daniel LeechWilkinson and Emma Dillon: The Performance Practice of David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London: Medieval Music in the 1960s and 1970s.

Edward writes for Gramophone and Early Music Today magazines and has lectured at many conferences and music festivals including Dartington International Summer School, The Southbank Centre and The British Library. He has also worked as a music researcher for the BBC. 2

Foreword by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Professor of Music and Head of the Department of Music at King’s College London

The academic year 2014-15 offers King’s College London the opportunity to look back over fifty years of teaching and research in Music. When the new Music Faculty opened for business, in 1964-5, Thurston Dart, King Edward Professor, had just two lecturers on his staff. Fifty years on we are seventeen, plus teaching fellows, research assistants, early career fellows, visiting professors, and a team of support staff. In the interim we have sought to excel in historical musicology, analysis, composition, performance studies, and now ethnomusicology, everything in fact that Dart envisaged for a healthy music faculty.

To commission an online biography of Thurston Dart and Music at King’s from Edward Breen – one of our own PhDs, whose doctoral research reconstructed the age of Morrow, Munrow and early music in Britain in the 1960s and 70s, itself empowered by Dart’s example – seems the best possible way to celebrate all that has followed.

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Contents Overview

5

A Short Biography of Thurston Dart

6

King’s College, London

22

To Educate Through Music Rather Than In It

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Teaching Advice

33

An Englishman Abroad

38

A Hunted Life

39

The Brandenburg Concertos

43

Conclusions

45

Select Bibliography

47

Thanks

48

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Thurston Dart and the New Faculty of Music at King’s College, London

Figure 1: Thurston Dart (centre) with the King's College, London Faculty of Music.

1967-681

Overview The world’s first music degree was awarded by Cambridge University in 1463, but it was not until 1903 that degrees in music were given at London University, and not until 1908 that a part-time King Edward Professor of Music was appointed at King’s College, London.2 The chair was endowed by a gift of £5,000 from Trinity College of Music in 1902; sufficient to draw a salary from the interest. There were no teaching staff and no faculty but, rather, a Board of Studies in Music overseen by the Faculty of Arts.3 In 1964, that Chair became a full-time position and the Faculty of Music was created. Thurston Dart was appointed as Professor and he began teaching with just three other staff. It was no coincidence that this development happened in the wake of two groundbreaking reports on education—The Newson Report and The Robbins Report—which questioned the very foundations of the British education system and, in the case of the latter, called for an immediate expansion of the number of universities. In turn, these reports ignited a long debate 1

Photograph by kind permission of Greg Holt and King’s College, London. Another faculty photograph from this session is preserved in MSDart/5/17, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library. Back row left to right - Robin Bowman, Tim Daniel, Ron Powell, David Scott, Leslie East, Paul Tanton, Peter Holman Middle row left to right - Laurence Libin, Benedict Sarnaker, Adrienne Simpson, Pamela Dickinson, Patsy Chew, Anne Smith, Maurice Rogers, Stanley Boorman, David Fallows Front row left to row - William Oxenbury, Colette Harris, Jim Harding, Miriam Wilmott, Thurston Dart, Lucy Duran, John Milner, Janice Bentley, Ian Bent.

2 Notes of the Steering Committee, October 9, 1967, KDMU 1/4, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music.

Kings College London, College Archives. This section of the report is based on information in: Thurston Dart, “The Origins of Music Degrees,” The Musical Times 105, no. 1453 (March 1964): 190.

3 Reginald Hunt, “London’s Full-time Chair,” The Musical Times 107, no. 1479 (May 1966): 414.

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over what constituted a university music education and with this in mind Dart was keen to situate himself and his new faculty as different from a music-college education.

The influence of Dart’s faculty was not limited to King’s College since he had to plan on a London-wide basis because his Chair oversaw music examinations across the whole university. Any change to the existing regulations would affect all music exams including those taken at teaching colleges, and as such the idea of a new approach was not met with universal acceptance. Dart understood this challenge as an opportunity to renew the entire music degree and its regulations ‘from bottom to top’. Change was swift: by 1967 the new Faculty had a full quota of sixteen undergraduates, and Dart could report that fifteen candidates applied for every position offered. Ten postgraduate students were also present as well as over forty students from London music colleges who attended faculty-lectures on a part-time basis. At this point, the entire operation was still run out of 34 Surrey St, a building of just 1300 sq ft (121 Sq M) originally intended to house the new faculty for a single year but which continued in service until 1969 when the Music Department was moved to a converted shop-building on The Strand.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the faculty of music at King’s College, London this essay offers an overview of Thurston Dart’s life, his development as a musicologist and his appointment to The King Edward Chair in Music. It outlines his ‘newlook’ approach to music education for the University of London and explores why it was so different from the traditional approaches taken by other faculties.

A Short Biography of Thurston Dart Robert Thurston Dart (1921-1971) was born in Surbiton, South-west London and attended Hampton Grammar School. His father worked in the metal industry, later re-training as a teacher and his mother was originally from Devon but with Austrian parents.4 As a child, he sang in the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court which offered him an important introduction to choral and organ music. He was a boy treble performing with a local madrigal society when he met the musical scholar Edmund Fellowes, a key figure in the revival of early choral music, and when he attended a musical summer school in Yorkshire he took lessons from the harpsichordist and conductor Arnold Goldsbrough.5 In 1938 during his last year of school, Dart studied piano accompaniment at the Royal College of Music and also took harpsichord lessons with Goldsbrough. The following year, however, he moved with his family to Devon and studied mathematics at the University of Exeter, taking an external London BA degree in 1942.

4

Susi Jeans, “Robert Thurston Dart, 1921-1971: An Appreciation by a Friend,” The Galpin Society Journal 24, (July 1971): 2.

5 For a more detailed account of Dart’s early life see: Greg Holt, “Thurston Dart – a biography,” 2006-2011, accessed September 1, 2014, http://gregholt.co.uk/rtd-biog.htm.

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Between 1942 and 1945 Dart was called up for war service, first serving with the Ministry of Aircraft Production and later with the RAF as a statistician and operational researcher.6 In November 1944, just four months after the Invasion of Normandy: D-Day, Dart was injured during a crash-landing and sent to hospital. He described the incident in a letter to his parents: Whilst flying back to U.K. earlier this week, one engine of the aircraft I was flying in cut on us and we had to force-land in the middle of a field staked, wired and mined against air-landings by the Hun long before D-day. We were all very fortunate in our pilot who made a magnificent job of our landing and we escaped with odd cuts and bruises and so on. So after an hour or so we were picked up by some army people stationed not far away and taken to a Field Dressing Station from whence they took us on to this very pleasant hospital to be looked after – and looked after is the right word: plenty of cigarettes, chocolate and so on. The food is excellent: the nurses charming and the attention over-whelming. […] So don't worry about me as I shall be quite myself again in a week or so.

You'll be pleased to hear that I've met some very musical people who live not far from my proper station – and, moreover, they're very keen on old music and have a couple of viols and some recorders. So I look forward to some pleasant evenings with them soon.7 Whilst the identity of these ‘musical people’ is not known it is nevertheless important to note that Dart’s interest in early music was already pronounced. Army records show that Dart was in convalescence at RAF Hospital Wroughton (Wiltshire) after the incident, moving to other facilities in Shropshire and Leicestershire thereafter. A letter from the Ministry of Defence in response to a posthumous inquiry makes reference to those injuries downplayed in the letter to his parents: We reiterate that this officer was granted an Honorary Commission as a Flight Lieutenant in the Administrative and Special Duties Branch of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve on 20 April 1944. Prior to his service with the Royal Air Force he was a junior Scientific Officer at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and we can confirm that he served under Sir Basil Embry at Headquarters No 2 Group, and we add that he was subsequently promoted to Scientific Officer on 1 April 1944.

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Ibid. Holt’s website contains a photograph of Dart in RAF uniform.

Thurston Dart to H&M, 1944. MS/Dart/2/15, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library. For more information about this archive see the blog of Cambridge University Library, MusiCB3: sw508, “Thurston Dart, a musician’s musician,” March 14, 2014, accessed February 2, 2015, https://musicb3.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/thurston-dart-a-musicians-musician.

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On 19 November 1944 Flight Lieutenant Dart sustained injuries whilst on a communication flight in an Oxford MK II aircraft which crashed in Calais Marck airfield. He suffered from arm injuries and was admitted to a mobile field hospital and later moved to the Royal Air Force Hospital Wroughton on 5 January 1945. Flight Lieutenant Dart was then transferred to the Royal Air Force Hospital at Cosford on 8 January 1945. After about 2 weeks, Robert Thurston Dart was finally transferred to the Royal Air Force Rehabilitation Unit at Loughborough Leicestershire for further exercise treatment, and finally returned to duty after approximately 3 weeks in May 1945.

After relinquishing his Honorary Commission on 1 August 1945, Robert Thurston Dart applied to resign from the Ministry of Aircraft Production in order to go to Cambridge for post graduate statistical research work at the University. His resignation was accepted by the Ministry and became effective from 30 September 1945.8 A more dramatic version of this crash accident was told by a Cambridge colleague who suggested that due to his unexpected escape Dart experienced a religious sense of deliverance: He had been navigator in a plane which, on returning crippled from a wartime mission, had had to make a crash landing in a remote country part of England. Every other member of the crew if not already dead had died in the crash. Bob miraculously survived. He staggered from the large field in which the plane had come down, and managed eventually to get back to his unit.

He subsequently discovered that the large field had been copiously mined, but that there had been one possible safe course weaving out of it. Without knowing, Bob had weaved this course. He was convinced by this further miracle that the Good Lord spared him from some particular purpose but he wasn’t sure what it was.9 Given the evidence of Dart’s official military record, it is reasonable to assume that this is the same story but with the field erroneously located in England. Many years later in an obituary, Robert Donington recalled that Dart had also injured his hand in the accident.10 Whatever the actual circumstances, it was certainly an important event in Dart’s life because it was during the subsequent period of convalescence that he met the young violinist Neville Marriner.11 Lady Marriner explains that this 8

R C Fox [Ministry of Defence] to W J Oxenbury, August 14, 1975, MS/Dart/2/16, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

9 Peter Tranchell, “Robert Thurston Dart (1921-1971),” The Caian, November 1971, 53.

10 Robert Donington, “R. Thurston Dart (1921-1971)” Journal of the American Musicological Society 24, no. 3 (Autumn 1971): 502.

11 Marriner cites this meeting as taking place in Swanley, Kent. Speaking on: Mining the Archive: Thurston Dart, aired November 6, 1996, BBC Radio 3. A recording of this broadcast is available as Ms/Dart/9/2a-b, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

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meeting was entirely coincidental, owing to the two servicemen recuperating in adjacent beds at a nursing home.12 Marriner himself has recalled the location of their meeting as being in Swanley (Kent): When we first met, we were both slightly shop-soiled by the war, and were convalescing in and around London. Bob [Thurston Dart] was a mathematician who had been fortunate enough to verify the misapplication of his talents by trying them out on the Royal Air Force. He was mentioned in dispatches for his considerable pains, but turned away from this experience and the tutelage of his London degree towards music.13 Marriner also recalled that Dart ‘spent his ex-service gratuity on a course of study with [Charles] van den Borren, the distinguished Belgian Musicologist.’ Presumably this connection was encouraged by Goldsbrough since Dart may have encountered van den Borren’s publication Sources of Keyboard Music in England whilst studying the harpsichord.14 Dart would also have known L'Anthologie sonore recordings by Safford Cape and Pro Musica Antiqua de Bruxelles, therefore his decision to study may have also been influenced by the knowledge that van den Borren was musicological advisor to that Brussels-based ensemble (and, incidentally, Cape’s father-in-law).15 Once accepted by van den Borren, Dart was both pupil and house-guest of the great musicologist during the time he spent studying in Brussels. Occasionally travelling back to England he continued to meet with Marriner at the house of Anthony Hopkins where the three musicians explored a wide range of repertoire.16 Marriner recalled these meetings during a BBC interview in 1996: I met him once or twice during the time he was toing and froing with van den Borren. And then we had a friend in common, Anthony Hopkins, who really introduced us to playing together […] we used to get together at his house.

To begin with […] I remember we played quite a lot of contemporary music together because Bob was an absolutely first class keyboard player but then his over-weaning passion was obviously exploring the early music repertoire and I suppose I had a weedy sort of sound on the violin that appealed to him for making the sort of music that he wanted at the time. 17

12

Lady Marriner, interview by author, London. December 17, 2014.

Neville Marriner, “An English Musicologist,” The Gramophone, September 1971, 423. He specifically names Swanley when speaking on: Mining the Archive.

14 Sources of Keyboard Music in England Ed. Van den Borren. (London: Novello and company, 1914).

15 Jim Davidson suggests that Safford Cape was also a strong influence on Dart’s future career: Jim Davidson, Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of Oiseau-Lyre, 1884-1962, Miegunyah Press series, (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, at the Miegunyah Press, 1994), 420.

16 Holt, Thurston Dart – a biography. Holt’s website also contains a photograph of Dart and van den Borren.

17 Marriner speaking on: Mining the Archive.

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Marriner remembers that it was his year of advanced study which enabled Dart to develop greater technical proficiency as well as musicological experience: When Bob returned from Brussels, he was already quite justifiably an ‘important figure’ in English music. Primarily because he was a vastly improved keyboard player. Whereas before we had amused ourselves by pottering through the repertoire for violin and piano, now the amusement was tempered with concern for the potential of the music he was researching.

He had studied not only the harpsichord literature but also an enormous area of comparatively unknown old music for all groups of instruments and voices.18 During 1946 Dart began his long association with Cambridge University, first as research assistant to the music lecturer Henry Moule and then as assistant lecturer in his own right when he was awarded a Cambridge MA in 1948. This, it appears, was a pivotal year for Dart since the two sides of his career, musicologist and performer, both seemed to begin in earnest. Marriner recalled that ‘Dart as a performing musician emerged, fully armed, in about 1948. His début coincided almost exactly with the launching of the BBC: he was just what they needed.’19 Here, Marriner is referring to the Third Programme (launched September 29, 1946), since Dart’s relationship with the BBC had in fact begun just over 10 years earlier when he was engaged as a boy-treble to sing on Children’s Hour in 1936: first a song called ‘Clear and Cool’ from Charles Kinglsey’s Water Babies and, secondly, for a programme of Elizabethan songs.20 A decade later, his letter requesting to audition as a harpsichordist in 1947 displays a distinctly adult tone in approach: Dear Sir, It is too hot to compose an elegant preamble in an appropriately impersonal and severe style. Coming to it roundly then, without hawking and spitting, this is to ask for an opportunity to give an audition as a harpsichordist and/or clavichordist.

I stupidly omitted to inform the BBC of various performances of mine at the galleries of the Royal Society of British Artists earlier this year, for it is always pleasant to be heard in congenial conditions and surroundings.

18

Marriner, An English Musicologist, 423.

Ibid.

20 The first reference to the BBC among Dart’s papers is a letter of engagement to perform Elizabethan songs for Children's Hour dated: February 11, 1936, MS/Dart/2/12, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library. Two Children’s Hour contracts are preserved in BBC archives along with a carbon copy of a letter to Dart’s father asking permission to broadcast his son: [Children’s Hour Executive] to Henry Thurston Dart, January 31, 1936, RCONT1 – Thurston Dart - Artists File I 1936-1948, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham. In the second broadcast, Elizabethan songs, Master Dart was accompanied by lutenist John Bickendike (‘Have You Seen but a White Lily Grow’, Anon; ‘O eyes, O Mortal Stars’, Ferrabosco) and by The Bronklehurst Trio (‘Cherry Ripe’, CE Horn arr Cyril Scott; ‘My Lady Greensleeves’, arrangement supplied by BBC).

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Good wine needs no bush, they say, but this, like so many proverbial sayings, is curiously difficult to verify. As a diffident vintner may I therefore submit two small boughs. The Times music critic found space for some pleasant comments. I enclose a cutting, which I should be glad to see again when you have done with it. So much for my musicianship. The scholarliness of my work is best attested by the fact that I have just been honoured with the position of an assistant lecturer in Music in the University of Cambridge […]

I shall also be contributing to the new edition of Grove's Dictionary.

My boughs, I see, are becoming not a bush but a positive shrubbery. I shall check the spreading undergrowth […]21 The audition was a success and Dart was immediately engaged for several broadcasts including an organ and harpsichord recital with Susi Jeans for Professor Dr H. F. Redlich’s programme entitled 'Early Keyboard Music on the Continent' (itself part of the series A History in Sound of European Music). 22 His diary quickly filled and by the turn of the new decade, Dart had already appeared on air 37 times.

Consort music formed the backbone of Dart’s performing career from the beginning of his new relationship with the BBC and amongst his early broadcasts were appearances as a keyboard player with The Boyd Neel Orchestra, and performances with The Jacobean Ensemble which he founded with Neville Marriner and Peter Gibbs (Violins) and Desmond Dupré (bass viol).

The 1950s were explosively busy as Dart’s reputation and influence grew in several fields at once: his promotion as a lecturer at Cambridge University, a well-received book on the performance of early music, a visiting lectureship at Harvard University (1954), his prolific musicological writings, his position as secretary of Musica Britannica, an active board-member of music publishers Stainer & Bell, editing The Galpin Society Journal, contributions to Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians and all this alongside a busy career as a keyboard player and conductor.23 Importantly, Dart also began to work with Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre which led to a close friendship with its founder, Louise Dyer and her husband Dr Geoffrey Hanson, a literary scholar.24 Through the patronage of Dyer, Dart made recordings of early keyboard music and her unstinting support was also the driving force behind many of his orchestral discs. Clearly Dart enjoyed these recording projects and felt them a worthy enterprise, yet after a decade of such recording activity a letter in response to 21

Thurston Dart to [BBC Executive], August 20, 1947, RCONT1 – Thurston Dart - Artists File I 1936-1948.

BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.

22 Remembered in: Susi Jeans, Robert Thurston Dart, 1921-1971: An Appreciation by a Friend, 2.

23 Thurston Dart, The Interpretation of Music, (London and New York: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1954).

24 For details about Louise Dyer, her publishing house and archive see: http://vcamcm.unimelb.edu.au/oiseaulyre/about. In his biography of Louise Dyer, Jim Davidson states that Dart was recommended to her as a harpsichordist by the musicologist Robert Donnington. Davidson, Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of Oiseau-Lyre, 418. The date of their first meeting is not recorded but the earliest extant letters in the Thurston Dart archive (Cambridge University Library) are from March 1948.

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an enquiry from a record-buyer registers Dart’s frustration in combining university work with his hectic solo timetable: I hope one day to record the remaining [Handel Suites], but the difficulty is always time! One has only one life to live, and I’ve got so much to do here in Cambridge that it’s hard to find room for the practice needed before one goes into a recording studio. My two most recent discs were of Bach & Froberger, on the clavichord, which – and I say it quite without conceit, but simply as a matter of fact! – are two of my best discs I’ve ever made. […]25 It is true that Dart owed much to his association with Louise Dyer and her Éditions de l'Oiseau-Lyre in the earliest days of LP technology. Aside from their obvious intellectual connections, a strong sense of friendship pervades his letters to her and her husband (often addressed as ‘Philomel and Jeff’, or ‘My dear Both’) in which he frequently enjoyed telling them news and sharing details of his new musicological discoveries. In particular he shared his vision for the Boyd Neel Orchestra on the cusp of his new directorship: I promised last time I saw you to write about the news that I was not then able to make public. Indeed, it’s still not public, though there will be a pressrelease about it in a fortnight’s time, or thereabouts.

Viz., & to wit: I’ve been invited to become the Artistic Director of the Boyd Neel Orchestra, & I have accepted. As you know, Boyd is now permanently in Toronto – only visiting this country for about ten days each year – and the Orchestra has therefore been drifting rather without direction for the last two years. I won’t bother you with listing all the things that the Orchestra & I have in mind for the future; but I must tell you of one particular aspect of it, since it’s one that’s very close to my special interests. We propose to make a very real study of music composed before 1700 or so. To this end we have had made for us a complete set of ‘Corelli’ bows – not these awful ‘Vega Bach Bow’ nonsenses, which are the most scandalous spoof that’s ever been foisted on a long-suffering public, but the true bows for which all this early music was composed.26 Dart went on to explain that the orchestra would also play from new editions prepared by himself from original sources and ‘with the utmost attention to authenticity, […] and sonority …’ and that he would direct them from his position as continuo player.

25

Thurston Dart to Mr Stafford, April 16, 1963, MS/Dart/2/3, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

26 Thurston Dart to ‘Philomel & Jeff’, September 20, 1955, MS/Dart/2/23, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

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Exactly one month later, Dart wrote again, bubbling with enthusiasm for the new bows: Next, the bows: you have never heard string tone before. The clarity of articulation, the sweetness of the sound (so gentle, so un-wiry), the precision of the attack, the elegance – all that one had hoped for from 18th-century music, in fact. So far our rehearsals have been entirely devoted to Handel organ concertos – which we’re probably going to play at the Festival Hall in the spring – and the wider fields of music lie ahead of us. But this kind of operation has to begin slowly, as I need hardly tell you, and the first thing to do was to get the players used to working with me in my new capacity & to working with the bows & getting the feel of them. After our first two rehearsals, I’m on top of the world for we’ve certainly made a fine beginning.27 Boyd Neel had, in fact, been appointed Dean of the Music Faculty at Toronto University. Now that he was living overseas for the foreseeable future, the name of the orchestra was changed to ‘The Philomusica of London’ to reflect both a change in directorship as well as a move away from the general repertoire favoured by Boyd Neel. Allen Percival, a student of Dart’s, describes this change as coming from within: The Boyd Neel Orchestra, in which he had played since 1948, had lost its eponymous founder to Toronto and some of its stalwarts – Granville Jones, Neville Marriner, Cecil Aronowitz and Bernard Richards among them – felt, with Dart, that there could be a more specialized chamber orchestra in London. The broader repertory favoured by Boyd Neel was against this and the breakaway became inevitable. The name of the new orchestra was in some sense disproportionately important to [Dart].28 The new name enabled Dart to reposition the orchestra and to expand its repertoire.

He referred to this with characteristic word-play in a letter to Louise Dyer: Glad you can bear PHILOMUSICA of London – the time it took us to settle on this surpasses belief, of course. We are now using it everywhere in as big a publicity campaign as we can manage. […] A further advantage of Philomusica as a title is steadily becoming apparent; viz. that it will cover a vocal/instrumental ensemble if necessary, as well as a quartet or an orchestra.

This is known as a pair of Elastic-Sided Bobs.29

27

Thurston Dart to ‘Philomel’, October 22, 1955, MS/Dart/2/23, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

28 Allen Percival, “Robert Thurston Dart,” in Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music, ed. Ian Bent (London: Stainer & Bell, 1981), 25.

29 Thurston Dart to ‘My Dear Both’, October 7, 1957, MS/Dart/2/23, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

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Editing and directing music for the Philomusica was a huge commitment for a busy lecturer at a university based outside of London, and in choosing to direct from the harpsichord Dart had set himself a unique challenge. Initially, his rehearsal process was not always efficient until concertmaster, Granville Jones, became a key source of support as Neville Marriner recalled: It was a strange conjunction. Granville was by far the most gifted of my contemporaries, wild and Welsh, a manic-depressive who played like a god or a gypsy, depending entirely on instinctive musicianship. Bob by now tended to pontificate alarmingly until deflated, but the general chemistry of this association was positive. […] Bob directed from the harpsichord until Granville told him to stop waving his hands around, and Granville put down his violin and conducted whenever the boat rocked too alarmingly.30 Aligned to this partnership with Granville Jones and the support of other ‘stalwart’ players, including Anthony Hopkins, was the appointment of William (Bill) Oxenbury as Secretary and General Manager. Bill was already involved with the administration of Musica Britannica, a research assistant and general factotum to Dart, and was to become a permanent member of staff at King’s College, London some years later. His involvement with the orchestra in 1956 happened rather suddenly since not all employees were as cooperative as Dart had expected. In an especially candid letter to Louise Dyer he recounts problems with outgoing staff but enthuses about his appointment of Bill Oxenbury as acting secretary in their place: You’ve been having a difficult time, you say in your letter this morning; so have I. The Gregorys resigned from the Orchestra, giving one hour’s notice, three weeks ago – nothing to do with Artistic Policy, I’m happy to say….

The result was messy for a fortnight; but we’ve now got a first-rate office staff, and things will never go so badly again. The man was a fool and a muddler of the worst description, and his wife no better; ditto the inefficient hangers-on they’d gathered round them. We can now run things at less than half the cost & twice as efficiently, and without them sabotaging things behind my back as I fear they’d tended to do, as I now discover. This all in strict confidence, please; I tell it to you only to blow off steam a little, for there’s been plenty to blow off. The new acting secretary I know you will like: he was being my secretary before the eruption, and consequently had learned something of the routine. He’s a glutton for work – an ex-choral scholar of King’s who read law, and has a clear mind and the most agreeable character. But the last three weeks of taking the strain have been most unpleasant and exhausting for the Chairman of our Directors, for me & for

30

Marriner: An English Musicologst, 423.

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him; and we all of us find it hard to forgive the Gregory’s precipitate and spiteful action. However.31 This letter is particularly interesting because we see both Dart’s extreme intolerance of inefficiency and an acknowledgement of the reliance on his young factotum. Bill Oxenbury was already working for Dart in Cambridge and was to become an increasingly important figure in the background of Dart’s professional life. Overall, the Philomusica was not an entirely happy experience for Dart and was apparently referred to as ‘Musophobia’ by some.32 Yet no one could deny Dart did much to improve the profile of the orchestra. Concerts, broadcasts and recordings were generally well-received during the latter half of the decade but still Dart found that with such a busy schedule he regularly needed administrators to help him manage his workload—a task which Allen Percival remembered he had nicknamed ‘BobsDoggying’.33 Despite increasing responsibilities in the academic and musicological quarters of his life Dart maintained directorship of the Philomusica for four years and eventually resigned due too poor-health in 1959 after which he took a convalescence trip to Taormina (Sicily). Again, he reported this to Louise Dyer in a letter that contains a rare acknowledgement of his wartime injury: It’s most unlike me to buckle under the strain & to be forced to send gloomy cables to my friends, but since I last saw you I really have been very much out of sorts. The continued cold weather has been giving me continuous aches & pains in that left arm of mine which is all held together by screws & pins (thanks to that war-time air crash), & it won’t by any means always do what I tell it to do; en plus, the added strain of coping with the Orchestra as well as my University work here had been showing itself in some of the worst lectures & teaching I ever remember – and I can’t bear that, when there are so many good young people here who expect me to help them & not to woffle mixedup-ly or to bark at them like last Tuesday’s dirty washing; en plus, I’ve had another bad bout of not sleeping very well (now ended, but damnable while it lasted); and enfin, I had to be vaccinated about a week ago in readiness for a very brief trip to USA late in February, and the vaccination certainly ‘took’ […] and the result is – utter uselessness. […]

One result of all this worry and malaise is that I’ve written to Trevelyan saying that I cannot continue with the orchestra after July – which is already one year more than I’d promised them. […]34

31

Dart to ‘Dear Jeff & Philomel’, (“that way round because it’s a business letter”), May 17, 1956, MS/Dart/2/23, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

32 Tranchell: Robert Thurston Dart (1921-1971), 53.

33 Percival: Robert Thurston Dart, 23.

34 Thurston Dart to ‘My dear Both’, January 28, 1959, MS/Dart/2/23, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

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This was not the first time he had tried to resign. John Trevelyan, chairman of the Boyd Neel Orchestra at the time Dart took over once wrote: Like other artists he was not always easy to deal with. He once submitted his resignation to me at 8.30 in the morning, and I remember replying that I never accepted a resignation before midday; later in the day he changed his mind!35 This final resignation from The Philomusica of London did not put an end to Dart’s performing career but it did mark a new emphasis on his activities in music education, an area which, arguably, was to become the main focus in the last decade of his life. Even after the reduction of his performing workload, the early sixties appear to have generally been a rather unhappy time for Dart both at Cambridge and in several other areas of his musical life. Louise Dyer Died in 1962, and Dart’s mother passed away a year later. Dart’s correspondence continued with Dyer’s widower, Dr Hanson, and showed a marked change of tone as the two men frequently discussed university politics and the education-system at large.

Dart’s promotion to Professor coincided with a period when he tried, and failed, to stimulate change within several musical establishments simultaneously. One pertinent example of this resulted in Dart withdrawing his labour from the BBC in 1963. It began, somewhat mischievously, with a letter to Desmond Osland, a senior music assistant at BBC Television enquiring about the BBC’s forthcoming music education policy for its new network. Later correspondence suggests that Dart knew full well Huw Wheldon had already been appointed as Head of Music, so his letter to Osland must have been a protest that the appointment had not yet been publically announced.

It’s about the new BBC-tv network. What plans is it making for the teaching of music by TV? […] My anxiety, which is shared by others in University music, is that the Corporation may once again be tempted to ‘go it alone’. Not that the new network wants to be given over to Dons for Heaven’s sake; but I think that the Corporation sometimes forgets that any of us have been teaching the various techniques of music for 15 & 20 years.36 Dart went on to bemoan, once again, the use of Hans Keller’s Functional Analysis— itself the subject of a separate chain of correspondence between Dart and BBC producers a year earlier.37 He continued by explaining that ‘things like harmony and 35

John Trevelyan, “obituary for Thurston Dart, [clipping from the letters page of an unknown newspaper], MS/Dart/4/6, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

36 Thurston Dart to Desmond Osland, August 24, 1963, R25/75 Dart, Robert Thurston. Music General. 19491965, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.

37 Dart felt the functional analysis was limited because it could be used to prove just about anything. See, in particular: Thurston Dart to William Glock, November 7, 1962, R25/75 Dart, Robert Thurston. Music General.

1949-1965, BBC Written Archives, Caversham.

16

counterpoint […] can be taught with tremendous ease by means of the auditoryvisual techniques possible on TV’ and that ‘The history of music, that resistant topic, can be illuminated & transfigured by the help of the visual aids that TV alone can offer’. Dart also devoted a whole paragraph to explaining that he was not seeking the job himself but, rather, simply seeking an assurance that the in ‘cylindrical & enigmatic edifice known as the TV centre’ these points were being considered carefully. He signed off with a revealing paragraph: You may say that all this is none of my business. In a sense it isn’t – yet music is the thing I care about most, as I hardly need to say to you, & its teaching is (quite literally) now my Profession. So I make no more than the most conventional of apologies for writing to you about it. I apologize, too, for presuming upon an old acquaintance – yourself – in sending this letter to you.

But, you know, I have not the faintest notion of the musical hierarchy in TV – how can one have? The point, by the way, is one that the Corporation ought most seriously to consider. There are enough faceless ones in the world already; it is rather shaming that the Professor of Music at Cambridge has not the slightest knowledge of who is in charge of television music policy, and the fault doesn’t lie – I fancy – with Yours very sincerely […]38 The letter is revealing for two reasons: Dart often used to refer to himself as wearing ‘many hats’ within the music profession, but here he seems to suggest that he considered teaching to have now become his main profession, and secondly that he was experiencing a sense of disconnectedness from the BBC, and potentially other areas too. It is as if Dart perceived a loss of influence at the very moment he became Professor or, perhaps, wanted to sound a note of defiance in asserting that he was still important, still relevant, now that he was no longer director of the Philomusica.

The correspondence did not end there but, rather, began to snowball. Osland circulated the letter to colleagues before replying. Huw Wheldon, the new head of documentary and music programmes for television, then circulated the letter further across the music department: I enclose a letter from Bob Dart to Desmond Osland which speaks for itself. I gather from Humphrey Burton that Dart is hopping mad about my appointment.

I know, of course, that he is not alone in this, and for my part I don’t give a damn. However, it doesn’t do good to let these things boil and simmer so I have drafted this letter to Dart, which however I won’t send without your advice.

Humphrey Burton got the impression that Bob Dart was in a very excited state

38

Dart to Desmond Osland, August 24, 1963, R25/75 Dart, Robert Thurston. Music General. 1949-1965, BBC Written Archives, Caversham.

17

last time he saw him. Anyway, I would be glad for any response or reaction from you if you think fit.39 William Glock gave consent for Wheldon to respond directly to Dart and Wheldon did so seeking to reassure that if he did not know about music directly, he certainly had good colleagues to support him and ‘a reasonably generous heart’. As for music teaching: Quite what the position will be about the teaching of music on Channel 2 I cannot say in any detail: we are only just starting our considerations. I think, however, that we can claim that we are beginning to think about it quite actively.40 This particular response infuriated Dart whose reply began with one of his regular complaints—that he had no typist—and became increasingly enraged as he wrote: There has been a Professor of Music at Cambridge since 1684. The new one has been studying the various skills of music for thirty-five years, since he was seven; he has been teaching some of these skills, in class and to individual pupils, for 16 years; and he first played in public in 1938. Nothing I have learned in all this time, and in all these manners, disposes me to believe that the interests of the art and craft of music will be furthered by appointing to a key position a man who is entirely unskilled in its various techniques, and who has no first-hand acquaintance with the increasingly grave problems of the profession, whether in orchestra, opera-house, school or university. Your large-heartedness is not, and never has been, in question. But have you any technical qualifications?41 Dart also complained that he had not seen Wheldon’s new position advertised to the public and that there was ‘a widespread dismay’ shared at the appointment ‘by many members of the profession, among them singers, players, composers, scholars, publishers, even conductors.’ And then he explained what action he himself was taking: I have felt obliged, as you no doubt know, to withdraw my own services until further notice from a Corporation – and a public one, at that – which appears to the uninitiated to conduct its affairs in a manner lacking both principles and propriety. The professions of music and of education seem to have been flouted. […] You, Sir, have done great things for television already. I do not doubt that you will do great things in the future – anyone who has working with you or 39

Huw Wheldon to C. Music, October 8, 1963, R25/75 Dart, Robert Thurston, Music General. 1949-1965.

BBC Written Archives, Caversham.

40 Huw Wheldon to Thurston Dart, October 8, 1963, R25/75 Dart, Robert Thurston. Music General. 19491965, BBC Written Archives, Caversham 41 Thurston Dart to Hugh Wheldon, October 18, 1963, R25/75 Dart, Robert Thurston. Music General. 19491965, BBC Written Archives, Caversham

18

followed your progammes will be convinced of this. But I simply cannot see how you can possibly do great things in music, which is my life and the lives of thousands of others who teach it and practise it. I hope that it is not too late for reconsideration, and for this area of your operations to be entrusted to someone else. I have worked for many broadcasting companies outside this country. I know of none in which a post such as the one you now hold is held by a man without qualifications or musical experience. I should be obliged if you would circulate this letter to William Glock. I have no typist, as I’ve already said, and I type at the expense of my pupils and my own work, to say nothing of my fingers.42 Wheldon was, again, unconvinced. He circulated Dart’s letter to colleagues with a note that stated simply ‘Bob Dart seems to me to be going round the bend.’43 This prompted William Glock to visit Dart in person, a meeting which spawned more correspondence culminating in a five-page letter from Wheldon detailing his vision for music policy at the BBC. Dart’s final letter in this chain offered some explanation for his initial ‘terse & brusque’ tone and is an invaluable insight into his frame of mind in early 1964: I think no-one can in present circumstances expect anything else from secretaryless Professors, you know, who have great public responsibilities (not only in this country) but no private means, & wretched salaries, & heavy duties, calls on their time […]

Please try to do me the justice of assuming that there is something in what I say: my life is, & has been for 16 years, music – amateur, professional, educational, public, private, scholarly, & the rest. You must not take it ill that I & many others […] are obliged, as part of our job, to review every aspect of it all the time.

Much of what the BBC has done has been of great value to us in what we try to do: but much—& I must stress this—has added to our load of work & thought & worry, & has increased the need for us to give counsel & instruction to the young. You (the BBC) have 50 times the musical resources of all the Universities put together; you have 500 times the power, & a medium that guarantees freedom from interruption; we—for I do not just write for myself—are appointed publicly, by public methods, always open to public view, & always subject to elaborate checks & balances. Is this the case with you, Sir?44 Dart had indeed formally withdrawn his services from the BBC as he confirmed in a letter to the Music Booking Manager: 42

Ibid.

Huw Wheldon to C. Music, November 6, 1963, R25/75 Dart, Robert Thurston. Music General. 1949-1965, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.

44 Thurston Dart to Hugh Wheldon, February 13, 1964, R25/75 Dart, Robert Thurston. Music General. 19491965, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.

43

19

I’ve withdrawn my labour from the BBC, as the result of the set-up in music for television, which seems to me to have nothing whatsoever to do either with music or with education. These topics are now my whole future life – as you probably know, I was elected to the Chair of Music at Cambridge a year ago – and the demand a great deal of very active work from trained & experienced musicians. Men who are without musical qualifications or even the minimum requirements for musical literacy seem to me to be out of place in such an operation, so I am not available for anything to do with music or education for the BBC until it takes more serious account of its responsibilities towards those engaged in music.45 Dart never performed again for BBC television broadcast but did return to BBC radio in 1965 for This Week’s Composer: From Tallis to Tomkins and to play for a concerto broadcast. His next engagement after that was not until 1968 when he gave an Invitation Concert of works by Couperin. This sudden and complete withdrawal was a protest move, and in no way dulled Dart’s interest in the BBC. In 1965 he took another stand against the formation of a BBC ‘training orchestra’ for young players which he felt would isolate your players from regular contact with established professionals. He published an article openly opposing the scheme in The Musical Times and, wrote to individual BBC managers in an attempt to exert his influence.46 The taking of such stands was not limited to the BBC and this somewhat irascible side of Dart’s nature appears to have flared at the moment his responsibilities as a new Professor brought with them an even larger workload. Known affectionately by some of his as pupils as ‘Thruston Drat’, the 43 year old was teaching some of the most important musicians and musicologists of the next generation.47 A skilled administrator and tireless in his advocacy to expand the MusD beyond composition, Dart’s Cambridge career had begun at St John’s College in the 1940s when he was employed by Henry Moule as a researcher. It was through working with Moule that, according to one commentator—the composer, Precentor and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College (1960 – 1989) Peter Tranchell—Dart gained two important influences: ‘[A] rigorous style of detailed research of a standard hitherto unknown in British musicology […] and a penchant for revising academical regulations.’48 Tranchell also commented on the later decline of Dart’s diplomacy:

45

Thurston Dart to Noman Carrell [Music Booking manager] December 18, 1963, Rcont 1 910. Dart, Robert Thurston, artists file 14 1963-1967, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.

46 Thurston Dart, “Musical Dinosaurs and Operational Research. Some Notes on the Goodman Report’” The Musical Times 106, no. 1470 (August 1965): 591-593.

47 Charles Brett, interview by author, London, February 18, 2013.

48 Tranchell: Robert Thurston Dart (1921-1971), 52.

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He could, in the 1960’s be witnessed rebuking an audience for traffic noise in the street, or for allowing an artist’s life to be made so difficult that practice (of say, the Goldberg variations) was an arduous task.49 According to Tranchell, much of Dart’s time at Cambridge in the early 1960s was marred by his urge to reform the MusD and when he realized he could not do this, he attempted to reform the MusD gowns instead.50 He lists Dart’s various disagreements with his Faculty and superiors during his time as Professor at Cambridge University reasoning that such details ‘[show] how men of genius can be destroyed by their environment unless they get the chance to escape to more congenial pastures.’51 On the rare occasion that these disagreements surfaced in Dart’s musicological writing we are offered a powerful summation of his vision for music education in universities: And what ought the story of [music degree’s] future to be, post-Robbins, post-Newsom, in an age when the organ-loft is no longer the principal repository of musical talent up and down the country? When musical scholarship can stand beside scholarship in any other branch of humane learning, as a proper subject for advanced study? When composing, performing, interpreting, teaching and researching are seen to be sister elements in music, and no longer rival suitors for public esteem? 52 The reports to which Dart referred were both commissioned in 1963. The report of the Robbins committee on higher education (chaired by Lord Robbins) in particular concluded ‘that university places should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment.’53 In particular it stated that the purpose of a university was to aid the development of ‘general powers of the mind', so as to create 'not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women'.

It was during the academic year 1963/4 and in the midst of this climate of reform, development and expanse of the university network, that Dart’s letters show most frequent disagreements with both BBC and Cambridge University colleagues. When situations on these fronts were coming to a head the chance to move to more ‘congenial pastures’ emerged.

The summer of 1964 was a defining moment for British music: the famous offshore Radio Caroline had just begun broadcasting and The Beatles, having just returned triumphant from their first international tour, were celebrating the release of A Hard Day’s Night. The build-up to Britain’s status as focal point for the swinging sixties 49

Ibid.

Ibid., 54.

51 Ibid., 55.

52 Thurston Dart, “The Origins of Music Degrees,” The Musical Times 105, no. 1453 (March 1964): 190-191.

53 Robert Anderson, “The ‘Idea of a University’ Today,” History and Policy, March 1, 2010, accessed February 27, 2014, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-idea-of-a-university-today.

50

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had begun. In London, The Proms devoted a whole evening to the Twentieth Anniversary of the death of Henry Wood, and a few evenings later Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas made its Proms premiere, the performing edition by Margaret Laurie and Thurston Dart. While that may sound like a trivial juxtaposition it illustrates an intriguing development: that the quick rise to fame and commonplace acceptance of the new pop/rock sound of The Beatles happened alongside the same swift process of assimilation that early music was making in the concert life of Great Britain.

Working alongside this growing movement of early music performance was the academic discipline of musicology – sometimes leading the way in excavating old repertoire, at other times struggling to catch up and explain the behaviour of performers – and it was in this heady, often experimental, atmosphere of the early 60s that The University of London created its first full-time chair in music to be held at King’s College. The person they recruited would have to be a leading name in both musicology and performance as well as a shrewd administrator, capable of steering a fledgling faculty through the first years of existence in a large and diverse University during the remainder of a decade that had already promised unprecedented economic and social change.

King’s College, London The potential for more congenial pastures first came to Dart’s attention when the University of London approached him to advise on the creation of their new musical professorship. The ultimate outcome of this involvement was that Dart himself was offered the Chair and felt he could not refuse. Dart wrote to the Master of Jesus College, Denys Page, to explain the situation and to offer his resignation from his college society: The University of London has invited me to its newly-established Chair of Music – hitherto only part-time – and, after the most careful thought, I must accept the invitation. It will mean starting all over again; but I am now clear that this is what I should do. I’ve tried to serve the art & craft of music to the best of my abilities, since I was first appointed to teach in Cambridge in 1947. When the Electors signified their choice in 1962, it was an immense gratification & encouragement, and I’ve done my best to justify the confidence they reposed in me at that time. I was not certain then, & I am not certain now, that they made the right choice. What I am certain about, however, is that this new challenge is one I can’t decline. 54 This letter was not a mere politeness, the zeal with which Dart described his appointment frequently made it sound like a calling rather than an escape, and the imperative to accept the new position recurs in Dart’s resignation correspondence

54

Thurston Dart to Denys Page, July 10, 1964, KDMU 1/1, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

22

elsewhere on that same day. Writing to The President of Pembroke College, Basil Willey, he expressed a similar sense of duty: I do not seek to go in order to cast dust into the eyes of those who chose me, or into the ears of my colleagues with whom I have worked happily for so long; but there is a job to do in London, and I must try to bring to it what thoughts and experience I can. The thoughts and experience have, in large part, come from 17 years of teaching at a University in which there have been musicians for half a millennium. London is just beginning, from scratch.55 But perhaps the most revealing comment was reserved for the vice-chancellor of the University when Dart wrote to resign his Chair: I write to you today with the greatest possible regret. I would not have done so, Sir, did I not feel that this new challenge at London is one that must be accepted, and accepted without delay. The state of music there calls for the best efforts of everyone, and I must go and help with the battle.56 Dart’s time at Cambridge, if not an overall happy experience, had been an extremely productive period and the general tone of the response to Dart’s departure seems to have been one of resigned congratulation rather than outright relief. Colleagues realized that Dart was being offered a unique opportunity in a city where each strand of his musical life could flourish and where he would be free to develop his own academical regulations. This viewpoint was voiced with particularly muted tones by Denys Page: I can think of nothing more to say than that this is a dark day for us; I am very sorry indeed that you are going. London is the [fairer?] & I suppose I really must try not to be so parochial and personal. From all you have told me, you will be happier, & music will be better served, in a London chair than in this University’s; that’s what really counts, & we must try to take a balanced view of it.57 Page closed with lines from Hamlet. Professor Willey, however, begin his response by quoting Wordsworth before coming to the direct business: I can’t deny that the news gave me an awful shock. Yet I cannot blame you; I do most entirely understand and sympathise. And I ought also to congratulate you on this wonderful opportunity to build a music school from 55

Thurston Dart to Basil Willey, July 10, 1964, KDMU 1/1, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

56 Thurston Dart to Vice Chancellor [John Sandwith Boys Smith], July 10, 1964, KDMU 1/1, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

57 Denys Page to Thurston Dart, July 16, 1964, KDMU 1/1, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music. King’s College London Archives.

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its very foundations, and in London, where your genius will find such ample scope. Especially, though, I congratulate London on their wisdom in picking the best man, and their luck in persuading him. But alas ! poor Cambridge.58 It was left to a friend at a different college to put it more bluntly, a revealing hint of the pressures that Dart been under: One thing, of which there can never be any question is the great debt that we owe to you in Cambridge. For many years you had to carry the whole burden of the musicological side unaided. In itself that has been a great achievement, and, speaking as a ‘middle of the road’ sort of musician, I have realised the strain that you must have felt, sometimes, owing to the difficulty of striking a just balance between the claims of scholarship and the other activities of an oddly musical faculty!.59 Despite expressing regret at his departure, none of Dart’s colleagues ever seemed to have doubted that he was the right person for the job in London nor did they try to persuade him to stay on in Cambridge. London was Dart’s future.

As the new academic year of 1964 began, Dart retained rooms in Cambridge in order to continue some supervisory activities whilst simultaneously taking up new lodgings in London. This led to a particularly busy first term and much of Dart’s surviving correspondence is testimony to the complexities of having three postal addresses and at least as many telephone numbers. At King’s College, his arrival met with little comment by the in-house musical community, such as it was. The minutes of the Music Society in October 1964 address the foundation of new faculty quite briefly: 1. The question of our policy towards the new Faculty of Music was revised, but it was agreed that the Faculty/Society relationship was not much of a problem in the current session, but future committees should assess the problems of each year if and when they arose.

2. It was felt that the Society should try to integrate Prof Thurston Dart in some way. Dr Smith suggested that we should elect him to an Honorary VicePresidency. […]60 The society handed Dart the responsibility for organizing professional concerts but then found that he was too busy to organize any during his first year.

58

Basil Willey to Thurston Dart, July 16, 1964, KDMU 1/1, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

59 Philip [Radcliffe? writing on King’s College notepaper] to Thurston Dart, July 19, 1964, KDMU 1/1, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

60 Minutes of the Executive Committee Meeting held on Thursday 15 th October, 1964, Music Society 1962-71, Music Department Archives, King’s College, London.

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Dart was not alone in his new Faculty at King’s; the College also created three teaching lectureships to which Ian Bent and Anthony Milner were directly appointed by Dart. William Oxenbury, who had assisted Dart in Cambridge with the Philomusica and Stainer & Bell was made sub-Dean of the new faculty. His was a controversial appointment since the position was technically an academic one, but Dart relied on Oxenbury’s keen administrational skills and insisted on his support. In addition, Margaret Bent was employed on an hourly basis. Under this arrangement she too made a major contribution to lectures, seminars and supervisions (undergraduate and graduate) and her involvement with the departmental is reflected in the fact that Dart frequently wrote jointly to her and Ian when discussing the new directions and policies of the faculty (they married in 1964).

During those first years Edward Lockspeiser, Nazir Jhairazboy, Julian Brown and others were also brought in for lectures, and their wide range of skills is testament to Dart’s broad plans for the degree programme.

To Educate Through Music Rather than In It Having developed his taste for reform in Cambridge, Dart wasted no time in restructuring the music degree programme at King’s so as to establish it as a ‘proper University subject’. At the beginning of the new Autumn term of 1964, the first year of the new Faculty of Music at King’s College, Dart was full of enthusiasm: The London Faculty is already running – five students at King’s College, and a large number from the various teaching institutions. Our first lecturer has been appointed (Anthony Milner), and we are shaping rather well for full courses of study from October ’65. This year is a pilot scheme, in rather temporary quarters; but the University & King’s College has given me the most wonderful encouragement, & we are already well equipped with things like stereograms, stereo headphones, an electronic organ, blackboards, score & books, with more to come as the year rolls on. I’m particularly anxious to develop good courses & syllabuses for those who are studying Music as a subsidiary subject (so many hundreds of people have a keen interest in Music & would like to study it at a rather subordinate level during their University career; but at Cambridge there’s no way at all of doing so, and at London the existing syllabus is simply a watered-down course of harmony & counterpoint & a little history, which is no use at all to the kind of student who’s been asking me abut Subsidiary Music). And, of course, in due time there must be an Institute of Advanced Study in Music, where people can play around with everything from electronic music to the lesser-known works of Pérotin & the interpretation of Bach – but all this is for the future, rather than for the current academical year, which is pretty fully occupied. […] the assignment London University have honoured me by offering me is

25

the most exciting I’ve encountered in many years – perhaps since I took on the Orchestra in 1955…….61 Dart worked quickly scoping the needs of London University and planning his new syllabuses. Just a few months later, during January of 1965, he published a full-page article in The Times Educational Supplement (TLS) outlining the broad plans for his new faculty.

The article was entitled ‘End of the overture: Cecilia allowed to join the big seven’ and Dart began by summarizing the history of music degrees at London University: Music has been one of the eight constituent faculties of London University ever since the university was granted its Statutes of 1900. There were no funds for a full-time teaching staff at that time, and for many decades to come the needs of other disciplines were to remain overwhelmingly urgent. A parttime chair of music in the university was endowed by Trinity College of Music in 1902, its most recent incumbents being Dr. George Oldroyd and Dr Herbert Howells, but it was not until 1964 that the university was moved to establish music as a subject on an equal footing with its seven sister faculties.62 His tone throughout reflected the same urgency and zeal revealed in his resignationletters from Cambridge University. He went on to explain that 1964-65 would be a pilot year as the new staff ‘take stock of the special problems confronting music in a university of some 30,000 internal students and 20,000 external ones.’ He also added: We have also had to try to recollect the past, to review the present, and to plan for the future ; all this at a time when the foundations of musical education in the schools, colleges and universities of this country are being exposed for the first time in many decades.63 Why did Dart feel that ‘foundations of musical education’ previously unseen were being exposed at that very moment? It is most probably a reference, again, to the Robbins and Newsom reports of 1963 that called for a university education to be made available to all those who attained a suitable entrance standard. Anxious, perhaps, to expose the foundations of his own vision for musical education, Dart went on to detail that the King’s Faculty would now undertake music teaching on six concurrent levels ‘as an ancillary subject ; as a subsidiary subject ; as one of two 61

Thurston Dart to Norman Carrell [Music Booking Manager, BBC], October 12, 1964, Rcont 1 910, Dart, Robert Thurston, artists file 14 1963-1967, BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham.

62 Thurston Dart, “End of the Overture: Cecilia Allowed to Join the Big Seven,” The Times Educational Supplement, Friday January 29, 1965. This is preserved as a clipping: MS/Dart/4/5, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

63 Ibid.

26

subjects forming a joint course ; for honours (B.Mus.) ; for the master’s degree (M.Mus.) ; and as a post-graduate study.’64 It is in the descriptions for each level of teaching that Dart’s plans began to emerge. The most radical departure appeared in BMus description which stated that musical topics would only represent four fifths of the curriculum with remaining time spent studying a non-musical subject. Dart invoked a humanist agenda which he carefully aligned to the recommendations of the Robbins Report to explain his reasons for this apparent dilution of musical studies: Music as a university study is not entirely suited to 100 per cent courses, we consider, since it is apt merely to sharpen the ears, speed the fingers, nourish the emotions, and gratify the self-esteem. We believe it can also quicken the perceptions, stretch the mind, and temper the judgment.65 The BMus course included musical history, organology, non-European music courses, electronic music and courses in the history of teaching music. Later in the article, when speaking of the department as a whole he also discussed several things that his new faculty would promise not to do, including compulsory composition, academic fugue, orchestration and counterpoint.

The apparent desertion of these traditional bastions of music education was not limited to undergraduate studies: composition was also mooted as problematic for doctoral studies which were also to undergo radical change: We shall, moreover, do all we can to persuade the university that the future role for its doctorate in music – the highest degree it can confer in our faculty – should be exactly comparable with the roles of the higher doctorates in such subjects as Letters or the Natural Sciences. It ought to mark the university’s recognition of an outstanding contribution to the advancement of knowledge, and it should normally be conferred on men and women around the midpoint of their working lives, by reason of their distinguished services to learning, education and research.

We do not altogether exclude composition from our thoughts about this degree ; but to discern excellence in the creative arts by the award of degrees is in no part of a university’s real or supposed duty towards the artists of its own time. We are not sure that it can be done, anyway. Even if it can, are universities the best places for such ineffable diagnosis to be carried out ? If so, are examiners the best touchstones ?66

64

Ibid.

Ibid.

66 Ibid.

65

27

Here lay the nub of Dart’s over-all plan for a complete university musical education as different to that offered by music colleges. Doctoral composition, like the harmony and counterpoint pastiches of Bachelor’s degrees, was not something that he felt a university ought to teach. Not that compositional craft was useless, rather, Dart felt it should be taught elsewhere. In this case, the comparison he made with Letters and Natural Sciences is illuminating.

The acceptance of these new regulations by the University of London was enormously important to Dart and his relief is evident in a letter to Ian and Margaret Bent: Newsflash: new BMus Regs went through last Thurs., with only unimportant amendments. [...] so don't take too much time/thought on the lectures aimed at the present Regs.; & concentrate on the brave new world of jazz/sociological-cultural-bumblepuppy/medieval music/& whatnot.67 There appears to have been no initial reaction to Dart’s bold, confident piece in the TLS until May of the same year when Reginald Hunt wrote to the Musical Times to protest that ‘the University of London appointed a musicologist, whose high university qualifications do not include a B Mus degree, and gave him a very free hand as to policy.’ Indeed, it was this free hand that so enraged Hunt. He felt that composition was relegated to a subject of secondary importance by being only an option for study rather than a core subject. ‘Thus the only subject that deals with the very stuff of music is treated as of secondary importance, and a candidate can succeed in the B Mus by offering, in the Final paper work, subjects which are only ‘about’ music and not music from the inside.’68 Hunt’s letter is the first explicit exposition of the central disagreement over Dart’s vision for university music education and his letter did not go unchallenged. The first to respond was musicologist Clifford Bartlett who drew analogies with the English degree pointing out that in other faculties, students were not expected to pastiche the works they studied. ‘Imitating past compositional methods,’ he argued, ‘is not necessarily going to help us […] create music ourselves’. Furthermore he justified Dart’s ‘conversance with conventional harmony’ despite his lack of BMus by pointing to his continuo performances and editorial reconstruction work.69 Before Hunt had opportunity to respond, a somewhat opportunistic article appeared in The Daily Telegraph which drew directly on The Musical Times’ correspondence to report on this apparent demotion of composition. The writer, Colin Mason, drew 67

Thurston Dart to Ian and Margaret Bent, April 12, 1965, MS/Dart/2//21/d, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

68 Reginald Hunt, “London’s Full-Time Chair [letter to the editor],” The Musical Times 107, no. 1479 (May 1966): 414. Mr Hunt published several didactic music tutor-manuals including Harmony at the keyboard (Oxford University Press, June, 1970) and light songs such as I Had a Hippopotamus, (published: Edwin Ashdown).

69 Clifford Bartlett, “London’s Full-Time Chair [letter to the editor],” The Musical Times 107, no. 1480 (June 1966): 50

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attention to the stark differences between approaches taken at King’s College and York University—whose faculty was founded the same year by Professor Wilfred Mellers—and where several composers were attached to the department. He suggested that whilst some might applaud the demise in compulsory harmony and counterpoint exams some ‘may feel that the new requirements are more suitable for the award of a B.A. in music than for a B.Mus. degree.’70 Mason went on to question the usefulness of harmony by wryly invoking the composer Edward T. Cone who once bemoaned the rise of the ‘trained musician who exhibits no comprehension of his art’. In his column, Mason captured the sense of expansion that characterized the proliferation of new universities in the 1960s since with faculties opening in York, Liverpool and Canterbury there had been an inevitable re-evaluation of the content of music degrees and a concurrent development of combined courses. The differences between the Honours BA in music, the BMus and the postgraduate BMus were discussed, and with this in mind Mason concluded: since the complete and easy accessibility of nearly all music in recorded or live performance has made it possible to know the whole musical literature well with little or no proficiency in the techniques of composing or performing it, an arts-type degree in music today meets the needs of many more musically interested people than does a music degree of the traditional type.

And the general trend in university music departments towards granting such arts-type degrees might be regarded as an academic recognition of the fact that it is now possible to be well-enough educated in the art of music to justify a university degree, without first having mastered its craft (as used to be required) at that level.71 Swift support for Dart’s innovative new regulations came from Professor Paul Steinitz, the Bach scholar and conductor, in the August Musical Times issue of 1966.

He argued Hunt’s original assertion that harmony and counterpoint classes explored the ‘the very stuff of music’ was incorrect, pointing to evidence from past exam papers as proof that there was very little ‘real music’ being studied in the old style syllabuses at all. The example he used from a past paper requested that candidates ‘Add an appropriate counterpoint to the following’:

And he further claimed that: 70 71

Colin Mason, “Mastering the Art, Not the Craft,” The Daily Telegraph, July 2, 1966.

Mason: Mastering the Art, Not the Craft.

29

it is only since the advent of Professor Dart that the London B Mus degree (old style) has concerned itself with imitation of ‘real’ music at all. 72 The study of music through examples taken from ‘real music’ rather than ‘textbook nonsense’ was where Steinitz felt that the key to understanding Dart’s innovations lay. Steinitz further argued that this method of study would instill a genuine musical enthusiasm in BMus candidates which would trickle down through the educational strata, even to O level students.

In the same issue, a second letter from Reginald Hunt was printed. He felt the gravity of the situation was misunderstood and turned his attention to what he saw as the ‘destruction’ of the DMus degree by Dart: Formerly a keen musician, even working obscurely, could embark on the long and exacting course leading to the London D Mus, knowing that the final examination would comprise bona-fide musical studies such as harmony, counterpoint, composition including canon and fugue, orchestration and history, followed by the submission of a major orchestral work or choral work with orchestral accompaniment, and that this 'exercise' would be judged from a perusal of the full score without the candidate being put to the great expense of publishing the work or arranging its performance.73 Hunt objected to the expense caused to students by Dart’s new regulations which stipulated that a DMus would only be awarded for ‘published work of a high standard containing original contributions to the advancement of musical scholarship, composition or practice’. Publishers, Hunt argued, rarely ran the risk of backing an unknown composer, and this state of affairs would exclude them from the DMus. This was, of course, already dealt with by Dart in the TLS when he posited the DMus as acknowledgement of the mid-point in a professional career.

But Dart wasted no energy mounting either a counter-attack or a charm-campaign in the press. He published no public response to such correspondence.74 Rather he turned his attention to other faculties of the University of London, and interested institutions. A little over a year after taking the Chair he outlined his scheme in a letter to a colleague at the British Museum, rebuffing the term ‘musicology’ as he did so: 72

Paul Steinitz, “London’s Full-Time Chair [letter to the editor],” The Musical Times 107, no. 1482 (August 1966): 685.

73 Reginald Hunt, “London’s Full-Time Chair [letter to the editor],” The Musical Times 107, no. 1482 (August 1966): 686.

74 A series of articles exploring university-music education took place shortly after Dart’s death in The Musical Times. It is interesting to read that the founding Professor and head of the music department at the University of York believed that unlike the other arts, music did not lend itself to ‘discursive abstraction’ and wrote ‘to separate [music’s] theory from its practice is patently idiotic’: Wilfred Mellers, “The Study of Music at University 2: A Question of Priorities,” The Musical Times 114, no. 1561 (March 1973): 245.

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The menu to senior students, as you’ll see, comprises explorations of two special aspects of music-as-a-University-subject: what may be termed ‘musicology’ (though it is a word we have sworn never to use, since it does more harm than good) and also ‘aesthetics, criticism, interpretation’. Now the musicology side includes a fine course that our Professor Brown (Palaegraphy: snatched by King’s I believe, from the very jaws of the B.M.) has laid down for us, in which he is aided and abetted by Anthony Petti. My own course on text criticism (badly named) roves widely over questions of basic bibliography, diplomatic, & the like.75 Each time Dart wrote to one of the colleges of the University of London he felt beholden to outline the history of his appointment and the broad purpose of his new faculty. In a letter to University College, we can see how he described this development from the faculty’s origins as a part-time chair in his own inimitable style and the enthusiasm with which he proposes intercollegiate teaching: In 1964, the University took a great gulp, and decided to make an honest Faculty of this Cinderella. It asked me if I’d consider accepting the Chair; after a good deal of hard thinking, one decided to move and to try one’s best.

At the present time, King’s is the only School of the University with a paid teaching staff of musicians, coping with undergraduates and postgraduates at all levels and from all lands. (Well, quite a few from abroad, frankly….).

Since 1964, the entire Regulations for every area of music studies in the University have been totally transformed, from Music in BA General right up to the D.Mus. […]

These sweeping changes have been made with several ends in view: first, to place music studies on a proper footing as a University subject, so that we may seek to educate through music rather than in it & so that we may play our proper part in the advancement of education, learning and research.

Secondly, to differentiate between what we teach & what we examine, (formerly the whole subject had become some kind of degree-mill, rather a notorious one at that). Thirdly, to allow great flexibility, so that other Schools and Institutions of the University could carve out their own courses if they wished, to suit their own needs. Fourthly, to allow for music to play its part in two-subject & three-subject degrees, and for the examination system to be re-orientated – if the University saw fit - along the course-unit system of the new B. Sc. […]

To what extent we’ve succeeded in all these ambitious plans I really cannot tell. I think we’ve not done too badly, though there have been areas of 75

Thurston Dart to Pamela Willetts [British Museum], October 26, 1965, KDMU 1/5, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

31

disappointment or of non-comprehension, of course; but musicians encounter these in every concert, so that we are habituated to them. Other elements in the University are following our trail; Goldsmiths’ for instance, is now allowed to present full-time evening classes in the autumn for more mature students. Other elements are working well with Music for B.A. (General) on the new lines we have laid out, both for External and Internal students.

My letter today, therefore, is just to give you this background; and to say that, should your School wish to explore two-subject or three-subject degrees, in which one component was music, the present syllabuses make this an easy & - I hope – quite stimulating thing to do. We are hardpressed for staff and accommodation down here, by we do all we can to foster intercollegiate teaching. We are opening up, with SOAS, lecture-courses in the autumn on one aspect of non-European music (the music of South Asia); this […] should serve as an element in the Area Studies programmes of the University, should the need arise, and our new B. Mus. Syllabuses permit this in other areas than South Asia, too. 76 Such correspondence shows that Dart’s ideas of what, in music, constituted a ‘proper University subject’ were broad and inclusive and that intercollegiate teaching was high on his agenda at the outset of his tenure at King’s.

To be sure, Dart worked quickly and decisively to set up his faculty and lay out new syllabuses and regulations catering for a great number of different needs. It is admirable too that he was able to adapt so swiftly to the needs of a complicated London-wide network of colleges. However, it would be a mistake to assume that his vision for the future of music education was spawned entirely after unhappy experiences in the Chair at Cambridge University in the earlier 1960s. Indeed, much of Dart’s philosophy for music education had been laid out long before in his authoritative and succinct book The Interpretation of Music (1954). Taking a somewhat imperious tone from the outset Dart had identified a ‘problem’ with the then commonplace understanding of musical notation which was all too often ignorant of the fact that ‘the present-day significance of the symbols may be, and very often is, utterly different from their significance in eighteenth-century France or sixteenth-century England or fourteenth-century Italy.’77 Whilst this was primarily a call to arms for editors to provide good, clear texts which would inform and enable performances it was perhaps, more subtly, also an attack on the way old music eclipsed contemporary music as a tool for teaching:

76

Thurston Dart to [unnamed staff at University College, London: the sequence of these files suggests William Coldstream], March 1, 1967, KDMU 1/3, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

77 Dart, The Interpretation of Music, 12.

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We are imprisoned by the past. The whole upbringing of a modern musician […] is based on playing, hearing, reading and analysing old music. His musical experience has been warped away from the present towards the past; yet the sonorities he hears and the symbols he sees in front of him are those of his own time, so that the past itself is set askew.78 Dart’s philosophy therefore contained a two-pronged approach: to recalibrate early music performances using appropriate sonorities (e.g. Corelli bows) and reliable texts, and to liberate education from the warped view of the past to which it was shackled. This latter point promoted a healthy interest in as wide a musical diet as possible. In fact, a preoccupation with world music, electronic music and contemporary music stands out readily from his 1960s correspondence.

Teaching Advice Dart’s generous approach to letter writing in these early years of the new faculty was not limited to discussion of course-content. He also had clear ideas about the way materials would be delivered and took time to impart some of his own hard-won wisdom to new staff. Ian Bent, Dart’s research student in Cambridge, was appointed to King’s College London before he finished his doctoral studies. Dart wrote in advance with some advice: Do get that dissertation out of the way before you begin [at KCL]. I hate to harp on this: but experientia docet, as she has a habit of doing. And do not overprepare lecture-courses, since (in mathematical terms) they are a function involving many variables, among them :You; Time; Your audience; The weather; Your colleagues (principally RTD for the moment, since he's been at the job the longest: but this is a team operation); Your peace of mind; Your divine discontent, for which Laud Deo.79 Later that year he wrote again and expanded on this theme. Like many of his letters it addressed jointly to Ian and Margaret Bent since they both contributed to teaching and supervision at King’s in the early years of the Faculty: Take your first term gently: one's Lectures are complex variables, in which one element is the audience & another the surroundings. Both will be new to you; but Play It By Ear! (at least in part). It's a v. sound plan to lay the courses out with some care & prepare them as well as one can, without getting addled. But it's also good to learn as one goes....One may consider

78

Ibid., 163.

Thurston Dart to Ian Bent, March 16, 1965, MS/Dart/2//21/d, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

79

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oneself an idiot after the first three or four lectures but students, like the best dairy cattle, are kindly & well-disposed towards their herdsmen.80 As well as Ian and Margaret Bent, Dart attempted to retain nominal supervision of several other research students in Cambridge during his first term at King’s College but was soon forced to admit that this arrangement was unworkable alongside his new commitments in London. One of his Cambridge students was Alan Brown, whose topic: 'A Critical Edition of the Keyboard Music of William Byrd' was published as vols 27 and 28 of Musica Britannica in 1969 and 1971. When Brown was appointed as an Assistant Lecturer at Cambridge University in 1966, Dart also wrote with advice that revealed a little of his own baptism into the world of University teaching. He begin with a familiar trope: insisting that Brown should not let teaching interfere with his PhD since ‘[o]nce such things go off the boil they are the very devil to reheat’: Don't just cut-and-dry your courses too much, since they depend to some extent (just like a public performance of music) upon audience reaction. Try to get to know, fairly intimately, one or two members of your classes who can explain to you afterwards about faults in what you have said or done. I owe a very great deal to the kindness of the present music critic of the Times and to Allen Percival, who took me out to coffee after many of my lectures at Cambridge in 1947 to 1949, and politely told me what hadn't come off. One doesn't want to get neurotic about this; but it's a technique, like any other, and the Cambridge courses of study do not prepare one for giving either a single set lecture or a course. (I hope that we may remedy this in the Faculty here, in our NewLook approach).81 Indeed, teaching was at the core of the ‘NewLook’ approach in London and Dart said as much when writing to the Secretary of the College to appoint a tutorial studentship: Our job, in my view, is to breed up young teachers, above all for tertiary education. These Assistantships are a wonderful way of doing this. I want to offer the existing Assistantship to Michael Nyman, who is Our Man in Rumania this year: he is an outstandingly gifted young student, and the moment we have a staff appointment to offer, I shall wish to appoint him.

Meantime, we can get his teeth into tutoring, seminars, etc by way of an Assistantship.82

80

Thurston Dart to Ian and Margaret Bent, April 12, 1965, MS/Dart/2//21/d, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

81 Thurston Dart to Alan Brown, April 27, 1966, MS/Dart/2/20/f, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

82 Thurston Dart to The Secretary [of King’s College, London], February 22, 1966, KDMU 1/4, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

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Despite the genial nature of these letters, Dart could present a difficult side to students on occasion, especially to his research students with whom he often took provocative musicological stances. This side of Dart, and the way it is reflected through his correspondence, is summarized by Margaret Bent as she reflects on her own correspondence with Dart, now in the archives of Cambridge University Library: The letters on the whole show him as a warm, generous, concerned mentor.

But several are in fact compensations for prior viva voce explosions often of a distressing nature. He often admits and apologises for being ‘irascible’ and ‘churlish’.

Dart always used to say, of the teaching relationship, that you have to attract a little and repel a little. He was a volatile man, and he did both, sometimes violently, as attested by his stormy relationship with the Cambridge Faculty.

This correspondence records some instances of that […], mostly the repairs to tantrums, but not always the background.83

World Music, Contemporary Music and Electronic Music Shortly after his appointment to King’s College, Dart wrote to Ian Bent discussing the subsidiary music proposals for the new regulations at University of London, Dart indicated that he was keen to move away from traditional topics such as orchestration and arranging since he felt these would be ‘time consuming to teach’ and have little relevant to the needs of subsidiary students. He also discussed the proportion of sacred music that was currently proposed and the need to make ‘provision’ for those studying at the School of Oriental & African Studies ‘in which Sacred Music could include the musics of the religions of the East’ or in the School of Slavonic Studies ‘in which Sacred Music could mean the music of the Orthodox Church’: I am anxious to spread music’s wings, & to make it less European-centred.

Remember that the University of London comprises something like 30,000 internal students & 20,000 external ones as well, all of whose diversified interests have to be borne in mind, Heaven help us! […]84 This view, however, was not intended to be dictatorial. He again stressed the need to run ‘the London operation as a team job’ and discussed the new regulations and course content frequently with his staff.

83

Margaret Bent, “Dart Materials,” explanatory guide for MS/DART/12/21-23, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

84 Thurston Dart to Ian Bent, November 13, 1964, MS/Dart/2/21c, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

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Dart’s correspondence also illustrates his interest in electronic music. Keen to encourage its study, in May 1968 he chaired lectures by Daphne Oram at the University of London’s Senate House entitled ‘A Course of Two Illustrated Lectures on Electronic Music from Concrète to Computer’.85 He also compiled a detailed and somewhat optimistic list of equipment which he thought suitable for the faculty at King’s (based on the studio at the University of Utrecht):            



    

4 tapedecks (standard speed: 15”p.s.) One must be stereo, one must be loop (up to 3 seconds maximum) 1 sinewave generator (continuous output) = 120 motor needed 1 variable speed tapedeck (3-phase motor needed) 4 loop-rollers 2 loop-standards 11 or 12 sinewave generators, to give a full scale: Phillips GM 2315 are excellent 1 squarewave generator (diode): peekel no 5922, type 10v is excellent [ Peekel NV | 1 Alblasstraat | Rotterdam] 1 pulse-generator 1 noise-generator (Peekel R 230 is quite good) 1 multi-octave filter (Peekel TF 823, no 5902) which is most important 1 band-pass filter (less important: best is probably Bruel & Kjaev of Copenhagen type 1612) [Danish firm: ask Danish commercial attaché for address] 1 Allison Filter (Variable LP & HP, model 2-B) + amplifier (source impedance & load impedance both need to be 600 ohms). [Allison Laboratories Inc., La Habra, Calif., USA: they also do a good random noise souce, model 655] Mixing board (600 ohm impedance); 7 straight line pots. (NB: NOT rotating), fitted with dtops, plus a master-pot; series resistance of 1dB, 5 k.ohms. [excellent ones are made by K. Danner, 1 Berlin 62 | BerlinSchönberg | Akasienstr. 28: 200 ohm model] 1 peak-meter 1 oscilloscope 1 stroboconn (made by CGConn Inc., Elkhart, Indiana, USA: expensive, but worth it) NB: important to have low impedance at output end (amplifiers of about 50 ohms internal resistance) with high input impedance.

Cathode followers are useful; so are microphones, and a trautonium (not an ondes martenot, which is too inflexible).

85

Daphne Oram, “A Course of Two Illustrated Lectures on Electronic Music from Concrète to Computer”, University of London, Senate House. 5.30pm May 7/8, 1968. Programme preserved in KDMU1/4, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

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

Metronomes and stopwatches are required, of course; so are 6 standard amplifiers, tape cutters, timer, reverberation machine [Phillips EL 6911 is fine]. The whole needs to be in a Faraday cage, shielded.86

Considering Dart’s legacy to early music it comes as a surprise to learn that he was such a champion of contemporary music.87 His envelopes bore a rubber stamp which read ‘A penny in the pound for the living artist’.88 Somewhat quixotically he argued his was an historical viewpoint rather than a modern one. In a letter to the BBC discussing problems with the 1965 Gulbenkian Report on musical education he outlined his stance: [O]ur museum culture in music is of very recent growth, and is leading to the most disastrous consequences in music as a whole. As recently as the 1840s, Ceasar Frank won the supreme pfe-playing award of the Paris Conservatoire with a programme of 95% contemporary music (about half of it composed by himself); the comparison with the Leeds International Competition is too painful to contemplate. It was just the same with the young orchestral musicians of that time; their training began (technical problems aside) with the study of contemporary music, and when they had come to terms with that they began to work on the music of the dead.89 Dart also highlighted what he saw as a persistent British ignorance of the history of music education. He suggested that the roots of the problems which beset classical music lay here, and the fact that this state of affairs was not even discussed by the Gulbenkian Report served only to strengthen his argument.90 In terms of encouraging a diet high in contemporary music, Dart practiced what he preached. In a letter discussing the examination candidates from the college of SS Mark & John he urged a focus on the works of living composers: I think it is desirable, for the health of music, that those doing a performance option in BA (General) of B.Mus. should be guided firmly towards including

86

Thurston Dart, “A List of Essential Apparatus for an Electronic Music Studio”, Nov 8, 1966, KDMU 1/4, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

87 Greg Holt (who studied at King’s from 1968) remembers that twentieth-century music was a compulsory part of the Final examination and that final year undergraduates went to ‘Reconnaissance des musiques modernes’ in Brussels. Greg Holt, email message to author, April 9, 2015.

88 Margaret Bent, email message to author, August 28, 2014.

89 Thurston Dart to Kenneth Corden, November 1, 1967, KDMU 1/9, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

90 Sir Gilmour Jenkins, et al., “Making Musicians. A Report to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 1965 (London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1965). This report recommended a reduction of the number of Music Colleges. See: Natasha Loges and Colin Lawson, “The Teaching of Performance,” in The Cambridge History of Musical Performance, ed. Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 164.

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one piece by a living composer – else we shall inhabit a musical museum to the end of time.91 Once Dart’s new regulations became fully operational, the student appetite for music courses at King’s was palpable despite, as Dart put it, ‘many prognostications from people outside the circle at King’s that no-one could possibly be interested in such extraordinary syllabuses…….’92 The summer of 1968 attracted 40 candidates for the preliminary examinations alone.

An Englishman Abroad In 1966 Dart was booked to play the harpsichord for performances of Dido and Aeneas in Kansas City. Before this he stayed in Seattle to visit the Director of the School of Music, William Bergsma: I’m planning my life for the next ten years, which shows that I have an Optimistic and Life-Affirming Nature (or that I am Foolishly Naif).

Consider, my dear Bill, whether it might be possible to work out – between your University and mine – a way whereby Dart’s working time was split fifty-fifty between them, huh? I make this suggestion molto serioso. If there is any sign of a favourable reaction from your end, then I would explore the matter further at this end (where Universities are less willing to be original, since they confuse this with unsoundness).93 Dart’s plan was to be able to spend Autumn in London and Spring in Seattle with his summers kept free for research and playing. Dart envisaged that ‘the London Faculty will be fully in orbit, booster rocket dropped away (me), by 1967 or so; and that thereafter all it will need is a touch or two on the steering jets.’94 Dart thought that he might even be free for a full-time position in 1968. Yet a position in the USA is never hinted at in his faculty planning at King’s. It appears, however, that the University of Seattle took this seriously and offered him a position right away because a few months later a deflated Dart wrote back to Bergsma to say that he had ‘spent a great deal of the summer in a kind of all-in wrestling match’ with himself, London, Seattle, his students and his country and that after all that deliberation he had decided that he couldn’t accept the position.95 I am too old now to change my ways, to cut loose from Europe or from the damp muddle of the island I have inhabited for all of my 45 years. […] My 91

Thurston Dart to Bernarr Rainbow, January 29, 1968, KDMU 1/2, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

92 Thurston Dart to the Secretary of King’s College, London, June 14, 1968, KDMU 1/4, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

93 Thurston Dart to William Bergsma, March 14, 1966, KDMU 1/11, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

94 Ibid.

95 Thurston Dart to William Bergsma. September 26, 1966, KDMU 1/11, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

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desire to join in some of the exciting things you are bringing about in Seattle was not feigned; but I think that I overestimated my flexibility, just as I underestimated the impact that my work in London was beginning to have on the ways of thinking of my British colleagues. When I was with you […] my beliefs in the possibilities of change at London […] were lower that they had ever been. Two years of slog seemed only to have landed me in a deep ditch.96 Dart went on to explain that finally things in London were looking up and that there had been financial improvements for his Faculty and that the music colleges were finally beginning to cooperate with his plans. Most touchingly he said ‘those four or five friends to whom one always looks for guidance have said, firmly though gently, that they think I am more needed here than at the other side of the world.’97 In 1967 Dart was invited to give the Walker-Ames lectures at UW: ‘The English keyboardists, 1560-1630’.

A Hunted Life Having previously advised on the foundation of the King Edward Chair in music, Dart would have known, more than others, of the need to overhaul the University of London’s music regulations at the outset of his tenure at King’s. So we can assume that this was a challenge he undertook with good understanding of its magnitude.

However, what Dart could not have known, or predicted, before his arrival at King’s would be the shortage of suitable accommodation and the financial constraints which would come to bear on his fledgling Faculty. At the end of 1965, Dart was obliged to officially outline his development policy for the next quinquennium, 1967-1972 in writing to the college Principal. Such long-range planning was only to be expected, nevertheless Dart began with a characteristically defensive tone: Obedient to the UCC’s ukase, I write to you, as briefly as I can, on behalf of the new-fledged Faculty. You will not need me to underline to you that too chilly an environment for the new-born leads to an early demise.98 Dart expressed concerns that long-range plans were being curtailed at their very outset despite his department having already become ‘the bell-wether of musical developments in London’s educational establishments’. Dart went on to demand ‘reasonable conditions’ for his Faculty which he hoped would lead to a roof-top building entirely devoted to music by 1970 and also a use of the larger lecture-room within the main building for 2-3 hours a week. He also asked for an increase of his staff with new positions for a lecturer, an assistant lecturer and a (female) clerk to the 96

Ibid.

Ibid.

98 Thurston Dart to The Principal [of King’s College, London?], December 8, 1965, KDMU 1/4, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

97

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Faculty. He predicted that the faculty would have thirty full-time students by 1967 and sixty by 1970 alongside the current thirty part-time students.

Two months later his polite façade was crumbling even more quickly. Writing to the Secretary of King’s College, Dart outlined his needs for the 1966-67 season and began with a complaint about 34 Surrey Street. Apparently, the hasty conversion had only ever been intended to be temporary and it was on this understanding that Dart had turned a blind eye to the incomplete nature of the works since he thought his department would only be in residence there for a year, possibly a year and a half. The conversion, incomplete as it was, had gone seriously awry. Despite the availability of architects’ plans, at a late stage of the works London County Council inspectors had forbidden the use of either the attics or the basement of the building, leaving the faculty with significantly less space than it had been planning for. On the main floors, now converted into teaching spaces, a promised ventilation system had never materialized leading Dart to complain that ‘staff & students have to work in slum conditions.’99

Figure 2: 34 Surrey Street (photographed in 2014) Temporary or not, 34 Surrey Street was in need of a porter. Being an entirely freestanding house, with no interconnecting doors to the main University building, Dart found that either he or one of his staff had to be present and ‘on duty’ if his diminutive Faculty was to be open and available to students at all. He took it as a particular affront that he had to supervise the opening of the building to enable students to access his own personal library, which was on permanent loan to the college despite Dart’s concerns about its deterioration in the unventilated, damp conditions. A porter, secretarial help, a librarian, a prefabricated classroom in the garden and more part-time lecturers to cover (amongst others) Folksong and Electronic music were all requested in this most curt of letters.

99

Thurston Dart to the Secretary of King’s College, London. February 22, 1966, KDMU 1/4, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

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For all its problems, Dart was not blind to the architectural charms of the Surrey Street house. He described it fondly when writing to Dr Valerie Pearl at University College when he initiated plans for Slade School students to attend lectures at the new music Faculty as part-timers: We work in a tumbledown house, the Music Building, which is as no. 34 Surrey Street: a rather nice merchant’s house of about 1730, I fancy, which you may be interested to see anyway. We lead hunted lives, since there are only four of us and we have to oversee all music studies within the University, both for Internal and External students.100

By June of 1967 there was no change to this situation and Dart was again hinting that he might not be able to continue with the Faculty of music unless some of these demands over staffing and accommodation were met. ‘ I do not see how it will be possible to continue our enterprise at all,’ he wrote ‘either on behalf of myself or my very hard-pressed colleagues, without extra staff for 1968 onwards’.101 And in 1968 he had cause to complain to the secretary of King’s College more strongly: Lastly, but not least: we are a University problem, Sir. I have been repeatedly assured since I came to the Chair that the College is right behind me. All too often, when I turn to look, I find that the College is receding over the horizon in an entirely different direction, and that the musicians are marooned on a desert island.102 Unable to see how expansion could continue in Surrey Street, Dart took it upon himself to seek rented accommodation, chiefly at The Guildhall School, the old City of London Girl’s School building and The St Bride’s Institute on Fleet Street.

Somewhere in all of this upheaval, a suggestion was made that the Faculty of music could move into an old shop-building on the Strand which had been the former premises of Thresher and Glenny, one of the oldest tailors and outfitters in London and that was earmarked for use by the Student Union. Dart was appeased, and switched his energies towards consulting closely with the architects on the planning of the conversions to an impressive address: 152/153, The Strand.

100

Thurston Dart to Dr Valerie Pearl, October 10, 1968, KDMU 1/3, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

101 Thurston Dart to the Secretary of King’s College, London. July 19, 1967, KDMU 1/4, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

102 Thurston Dart to the Secretary of King’s College, London. June 14, 1968, KDMU 1/4, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives.

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Figure 3: 152/153, The Strand (photographed in 2014) Yet on the first day of August of 1968, in the middle of the University holiday, a huge and unexpected blow was to hit the faculty. The University Grants Committee announced ‘a reduction of Government capital expenditure on universities and a standstill upon major building projects in the 1968-69 and 1969-70 building programmes which have not actually been started or contractually committed.’103 This immediately endangered plans to move the Faculty of Music to the promised new quarters. Initially it was assumed that another quick conversion would be all that was needed (the top two floors had been uninhabited for some 15 years when the architects drew up their first plans) because it was already decided that the whole building would be demolished in 1975 when major building works were planned for the entire college. Dart’s demands for sound-proofing and, among other things, doorways wide enough to wheel his harpsichord through on castors, made the conversion more elaborate than had been expected. After extensive negotiations, the Architects plans were finally approved in 1969 and the faculty moved during the Christmas vacation at the end of that year.

103

J. R Stewart [Clerk of Court, Senate House] to The Principal of King’s College London, August 2, 1968, KDMU 1/6, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives. Attached to this letter was The University Grants Committee report by J. F. Woolfenden.

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Figure 4: An example of Dart's annotations to the architect's plans for the fourth floor of 152/153 The Strand.104

The Brandenburg Concertos It was in this climate of intense work that Dart fell ill with cancer. He took some time away from King’s, originally intended to be a sabbatical for him to work on research projects, but his letters tell a different story since he continued to advise and direct his Faculty from a hospital bed. In one letter he described how his physical condition made research impossible: Bach and Bull go not at all. Simply because my days are much cut into by snoozes, and having electrons fired into me at Addenbrooke’s, and radioisotopes of iodine, etc. All v. exciting, I dare say, but also v. unpropitious for sustained work. So I’m doing an edition of Melothe (Locke et al. 1673) instead. […]105

104

This is a single page from the complete set of plans in: KDMU 1/6, Papers of Department/Faculty of Music, King’s College London Archives. The ‘horror’ was a skylight illuminating the room below.

105 Thurston Dart to Ian Bent, June 24, 1970, MS/Dart/2/21i, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

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By early 1971 Dart improved enough to return to Bach and was once again working on the Brandenburg concertos with his long-time collaborators Neville Marriner and The Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Yet it quickly became obvious that the particular treatment he’d taken six months earlier at Addenbrooke’s hadn’t worked but he nevertheless remained optimistic of recovery. Marriner remembers the intensely busy climate in which Dart’s final illness struck: It was very harrowing. He took this announcement that he had cancer, he took it as something that was probably going to get better anyway. And so we went along like that and we behaved as if he wasn’t ill. Occasionally he would have bad times but at the time that we had the recording of the Brandenburg concertos the first day was pretty good, the second day he was obviously very tired, the third day he had a mattress by the side of the harpsichord because he really didn’t have the strength to come into the listening room to listen to the takes. The fourth day we lost him—he went off to hospital—and I, personally, never saw him again after that.106 Dart received visitors at his London Clinic and wrote letters to friends eager to stay abreast of social and musical events. One such letter to students at the Faculty suggests that Dart maintained an optimistic outlook following major surgery: Bulletin (?What is a Bulletout?) Thursday 11.ii.71 from The Prof. to all the musicians (being much missed) The surgeons have done a wonderful job & removed at least four double flats, three mordents, a faulty appoggiatura & two cases of ingrowing arpeggios. Though I'm still confined to bed, I get better & stronger each day & have been tremendously cheered & encouraged by messages from such as Janeforpres, Harry, Davitt, & many others. Much love to you all, & I shall see you again in the not too distant future. RTD107 In what was to be the last month of Dart’s life he received news that he was to be awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge. Margaret Bent wrote to congratulate him: Dear Bob, I must tell you what great joy that place’s (sh!) tardy recognition of you gives us. I can already hear you saying ‘tush, it’s only a piece of paper’ [*] But even if it were unimportant to you (which I can’t really believe), it is very important to many of us, as an articulation of some of the many things we feel unable to express directly to you.108 Dart, ever the quick wit, annotated this letter by inserting an asterisk [*] leading to his comment ‘Not so much a bit of paper – more a kind of dressing gown!’

106

Marriner: Mining the Archive, 424.

This transcription is taken from: Greg Holt, “Thurston Dart – a biography,” 2006-2011, accessed September 1, 2014, http://gregholt.co.uk/rtd-biog.htm. Holt’s website also contains a photograph of this letter which is now in the possession of Harry Wood, another KCL alumnus.

108 Margaret Bent to Thurston Dart, February 23, 1971, MS/Dart/2/21j, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

107

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He died a fortnight later on March 6th, 1971.

Conclusions Thurston Dart's musical career began with the quintessentially English choirboy education. After guidance from Edmund Fellowes and Arnold Goldsborough, both leaders in their respective fields, his studies at the Royal College of Music did not lead to a music degree, nor to music college training, but rather to Mathematics. We can only speculate over potential parental pressures or other factors which may have underpinned this decision to take a BSc or, indeed, if it was an attempt to recapture the musical-scientific grounding offered by the medieval quadrivium in which music was ranked alongside arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as an art of measurement. Yet, whatever his plans may have been at this time, like so many young men of his generation, Dart's early adulthood was disrupted by wartime experiences that resulted in a significant injury. Subsequent hospitalization sparked a chance meeting with Neville Marriner after which the young Dart pursued study in Belgium with Charles van den Borren. By the time Dart had his first employment at Cambridge University in 1948 he was recognized as a promising young performer who had received a considerable musical influence and advice from leading figures in early music.

Dart's Cambridge years were extraordinarily productive, and exhaustive. He combined his musicological editing and research skills, honed in Belgium with van den Borren, with many performances and teaching commitments. Added to this he excelled at academic and publishing administration. Considering such industry, it appears not to have surprised his colleagues when he seized a chance to become his own boss in London and design syllabuses that reflected his particular vision for music education. When that London opportunity arose it was announced just after groundbreaking educational reports had called for a significant expansion of the university system and encouraged university musical studies to be defined along the lines of Oxbridge degrees rather than as the extended practical qualifications offered by existing London music colleges. Dart took those reports as a justification to offer courses in musical 'text criticism' and advanced historical studies as alternatives to stalwart modules in harmony and counterpoint, thus aligning university music with disciplines across the humanities. Both undergraduates and graduates in Dart's orbit were to learn how music worked socially and practically through study and analysis of music of the present and stretching back to the music of the far past rather than through techniques of pastiche which drew on generalized style-guidelines abstracted for the purposes of study only. On Dart’s watch, the past was liberated from its role as arbiter of the present.

That is the overview that this essay has offered of Dart’s life—his development as a musicologist and the circumstances surrounding his appointment to King’s College, London—and in doing so it has attempted to highlight the main ideas behind what he called his ‘NewLook’ syllabus in the mid-1960s. What this essay could not do was to adequately summarize Dart’s many achievements with Musica Britannica, The Galpin Society, BBC broadcasts and his many academic publications. Neither did it explore Dart’s letter writing in national newspapers which ranged from noise 45

pollution to orchestra funding. Nor was this the place to discuss Dart’s private life, his many deep friendships or to explore his fascination with typography. However, it is hoped that the reader will discern between the lines, as it were, that Dart’s interests were many-splendoured and that his life was packed with so much activity that it is incredible to reflect he died before reaching the age of fifty.

What has emerged from the narrative presented here is the central importance Dart assigned to education in his career and how he hoped, through his new London syllabus, to influence and encourage musicology along the lines of research and performance as appropriate for university study. Although Dart faced many battles as his new Faculty strived for recognition and acceptance, it is heartening to note that his appetite to oversee reform and development at the outset of his London Chair led to a self-declared period of happiness and optimism. As he related in a letter to Jeff Hanson, the widower of his patron Louise Dyer: I’ve just finished a charming book I purchased in Lyons, of memoirs of the court of Lewis 14th, as seen by his sister-in-law the German Princess Palatine. From it the following, concerning an “anglais que l’on nomme Fielding…à Fontainbleau, Septembre 1690. Wendt [un abbé] lui demandait: ‘Etes-vous Huguenot, Monsieur?’ – ‘Non’ dit-il. ‘Vous êtes donc catholique’, répliqua Wendt. – ‘Encore moins,’ répond l’Anglais. –‘Ah’ dit Wendt, ‘C’est que vous êtes luthérien.’ – ‘Point du tout,’ dit Fielding. – ‘Et qu’ êtes-vous donc? reprend Wendt. – Je m’en vais vous le dire’, répond l’Anglais, ‘j’ai un petit religion à part moi’.

That’s how I feel at London—j’ai un petit faculté à part moi’……109

109

Thurston Dart to Jeff Hanson, April 17, 1965, MS/Dart/2/23, Thurston Dart Archive, Cambridge University Library.

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Select Bibliography Archives: Thurston Dart Files. BBC Written Archive Centre. Caversham.

The Jacobean Ensemble Files. BBC Written Archive Centre. Caversham.

The Philomusica of London Files. BBC Written Archive Centre. Caversham.

The Thurston Dart Archive. Cambridge University Library. Cambridge.

Papers of the Department/Faculty of Music. King’s College London Archives.

King’s College, London.

Books, Book Sections and Biography: Bent, Ian, ed. Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: A Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart. London: Stainer & Bell, 1981.

Bent, Margaret. “Early music editing 40 years on: Principles, techniques, and future directions.” In Authority, Historiography, Technology: Critical Perspectives in Early Music Editing, edited by Theodor Dumitrescu, Karl Kugle and Marnix van Berchum, 241-273. Epitome Musical edited by P. Vendrix, Turnhout: Brepols, 2012.

Carpenter, Humphrey, and Jennifer R. Doctor. The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the BBC Third Programme and Radio 3, 1946–1996. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996.

Dart, Thurston. The Interpretation of Music. London and New York: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1954.

Davidson, Jim. Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of Oiseau-Lyre, 1884-1962.

Miegunyah Press series, Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, at the Miegunyah Press, 1994.

Holt, Greg. “Thurston Dart – a biography,” Last modified 2011. Accessed September 1, 2014, http://gregholt.co.uk/rtd-biog.htm.

Loges, Natasha and Lawson, Colin. “The Teaching of Performance.” In The Cambridge History of Musical Performance, edited by Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell, 135-168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Percival, Allen. “Robert Thurston Dart.” In Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: A Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart., edited by Ian Bent, 21-25.

London: Stainer & Bell, 1981.

Obituaries: Robert Donington. “R. Thurston Dart (1921-1971).” Journal of the American Musicological Society 24, no. 3 (Autumn, 1971): 502-503.

Susi Jeans. “Robert Thurston Dart, 1921-1971: An Appreciation by a Friend.” The Galpin Society Journal 24, (July, 1971): 2-4.

Anthony Lewis. “Thurston Dart.” Music & Letters 52, no. 3 (July, 1971): 236-238.

Neville Marriner. “An English Musicologist.” The Gramophone. (September, 1971): 423-424.

Peter Tranchell. “Robert Thurston Dart (1921-1971).” The Caian. (November, 1971): 51-55.

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For a discography and list of publications please refer to: Davitt Moroney and William Oxenbury. “Robert Thurston Dart: Bibliography of Publications.” In Source Materials and the Interpretation of Music: A Memorial Volume to Thurston Dart, edited by Ian Bent, 431-450. London: Stainer & Bell, 1981.

Thanks The author would like to extend particular thanks to: Margaret Bent, David Fallows, Ian Bent, Jeremy Montagu, Greg Holt, Lady Marriner and Jeremy Noble for giving their time and sharing their memories of Thurston Dart during the preparation of this essay. Thanks also to the staff of the archives at Cambridge University Library, King’s College London and the BBC for granting generous access to their collections.

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