Lecture – Stanford 100 – Professor Jeremy Dibble
Lecture on Stanford and his music given by Stanford expert, Professor Jeremy Dibble
Queens’ College Cambridge, 13 July 2024
Lecture
Charles Villiers Stanford is justifiably renowned for his brilliantly original church music, but he is perhaps less well known for the extraordinary range of other work he composed across his highly creative life. This lecture will explore some of that repertoire which will include extracts from his operas, symphonies, choral works, songs and partsongs, and it is hoped, that hearing some of this unfamiliar music will provide a useful prism through which we can derive a fresh appreciation of his unrivalled composition for the Anglican liturgy.
Biography
Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music, Emeritus Professor of Music at Durham University and a specialist on British and Irish music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jeremy Dibble is the author of monographs on Parry (1992), Stanford (2002), Stainer (2007), Esposito (2010), Hamilton Harty (2013), and The Music of Frederick Delius: Style, Form and Ethos (2021). The musical editor of the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology (2013) and the joint editor (with Julian Horton) of British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought 1850-1950 (2018), he has recently published a revised and expanded edition of his book Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician. He has also contributed chapters on Sterndale Bennett, Elgar, Frank Bridge and Vaughan Williams as well as the British symphonic poem to various publications. Although he has devoted much time to music in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, he is now working more in the twentieth century which includes studies of music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Thomas Pitfield and William Alwyn. He has also spent much time over the last 30 years working with commercial recording companies in the capacity of consultant and editor. He is currently President of the Stanford Society and an Honorary President of the Association of English Speakers and Singers.