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Denis Stevens: FRAGMENTA AUTOBIOGRAPHICA 2006

Revised, copyright and published 2006 by the ACCADEMIA MONTEVERDIANA TRUST


www.BaroqueMusic.org/AccademiaM.html

Front cover: Portrait of Denis Stevens, 1985 by Evan Wilson oil on canvas, 44x34 inches now hanging outside the main concert hall at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Page 33: Claudio Monteverdi, c. 1740. Back cover: Denis in Santa Barbara. ISBN 0-9782256-0-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS
3 4 5 9 11 13 14 15 16 17 19 21 25 27 29 32 34 37 38 42 44 45 46 47 48 50 51 54 55 58 68 69 71 Introduction by Daphne Stevens-Pascucci Foreword by Sir Nicholas Jackson Early Years Calcutta 1942: Was this War, I wondered Postwar Oxford and the BBC Third Programme Wilhelm Furtwngler Kirsten Flagstad Beecham and Klemperer The Launching of Musica Britannica Manfred Bukofzer Of Books Collected and Dispersed The Move to Cornell Thomas Tomkins and the first stereo recording Penn State Ambrosian Singers and the Accademia Monteverdiana Herbert von Karajan A Promenade Concert and Salzburg Festival Music in Europe, Unrest at Columbia University A Private Romance Yehudi Menuhin Leopold Stokowski John Mosely Edgar Fleet John Frost CBE A Tribute by Anthony Pryer Monteverdis Vespers, Westminster Abbey, 1962 Concert in St. Marks Basilica, Venice 1972 A Marriage of Music and Art - Sheila Stevens Denis in Santa Barbara - Lilian Kwasny-Stevens Retirement at Sir Christopher Wrens Morden College Bibliography Musical Editions and Discography

INTRODUCTION
It gives me great pleasure to present to you the posthumous and 2nd edition of my fathers autobiography Fragmenta Autobiographica with additional chapters by both his wives, Sheila Holloway and Lillian Kwasny as well as his funeral tribute so finely delivered in London by Professor Anthony Pryer in 2004. In this edition (2006) I have proofread and corrected a few discrepancies such as dates and also tried to improve the quality of the original illustrations since many of the black and white photographs were not satisfactorily reproduced in 2001. I have also searched to provide further material in sketches and other photographs from personal collections so that there are more informative descriptions of the many people and events which my father speaks of so eloquently. I wanted my fathers memoirs to be made available to a wider public than the original limited run and thanks to the far-sighted thoughtfulness of one of the Accademia Monteverdianas new trustees Michael Meacock, we have been able to see this through its re-publication. We have worked together as editors on this manuscript. I have inherited the organisation my father began in 1967 to further the presence of Early Music in the contemporary world and wish to continue his fine work in publications, recordings and performances and to that end have been promoting various concerts and research in his name. The first Denis William Stevens Memorial Prize in Music has been given earlier this year at Jesus College, Oxford University. There was a beautiful memorial concert at St Pauls Church, Covent Garden London which took place in July 2004 and several other concerts are planned for the future in both New York and Europe. I would like to thank my younger brother Michael Stevens for researching the family photographic archive while being heavily involved on the verge of fatherhood again, as well as Sheila Stevens for providing original charcoal sketches from her early portfolio and Lillian Kwasny for her colour photograph collection. I hope many people will enjoy the travels and anecdotes of a 20th century musician and musicologist whose sense of humour and charm clearly reach us while he tells his story of the world of Early Music over the last half century in Europe and America.

Daphne Stevens-Pascucci President, Accademia Monteverdiana Inc., Corfe Castle (2005)

Foreword by Sir Nicholas Jackson


Denis Stevens was one of the most respected musicologists who did more than anyone to revive the importance of Monteverdi. His intelligence and skills as a linguist enabled him not only to translate Monteverdis letters and texts of the madrigals, but also to study manuscripts which gave him an advantage over others in his field, not least when ill informed pseudo-musicologists made groundless claims for the instrumentation needed to perform such works as the Vespers. As a producer in the BBC he introduced listeners for the first time to the world of composers such as Dufay, Fayrfax and Tallis, using performers like Alfred Deller and the Ambrosian Singers, directed by himself. Refreshingly, being an expert in the field of early music did not preclude Denis from knowing and loving many other kinds of music and he was, for example, a devotee of Delius. At a 1995 Worshipful Company of Musicians dinner I found myself sitting next to Denis Stevens whose pupil I had been 35 years previously when on a post-graduate early music course at the Royal Academy of Music, where I also had harpsichord lessons with George Malcolm. Denis, who in the RAF had deciphered Japanese codes, had subsequently also mastered the art of deciphering the strange riddles of early English choral music notation which he now patiently tried to impart to us. He would hand out sheets of separate voice parts for us to piece together. Initially this task proved to be quite beyond me, although there was little that Denis could criticise in the manuscripts that I returned to him as they often consisted of blank pieces of paper! Denis had been transcribing a fascinating collection of early keyboard music called The Mulliner Book for Musica Britannica and when I asked him about the title of a little piece called Las shy myze Denis pointed out the existence of a word play on the chemise which protected the modesty of the Shy Miss. A code breakers mind at work again! Nevertheless we now had much to talk about, as when I was organist at St Davids Cathedral 1977-84 they still remembered the erudite lecture that Denis had delivered in the Tomkins Festival to celebrate the 400th anniversary of his birth at St Davids in 1572. Denis invited me to lunch at the Garrick Club and a firm friendship developed from which I benefited enormously and soon became the regular recipient of tapes with contents ranging from Deniss broadcasts of Monteverdi to Beecham talking about Ethel Smyth. My musical education had begun again and it was fascinating to hear at first hand about the many distinguished people that he had been associated with. I had recently composed some Concert Variations for organ, to which Denis took a liking, so I dedicated them to him before recording them for Naxos at Chartres Cathedral. I hoped that this might go some way towards making amends for the blank pieces of paper of 35 years ago at the RAM ! Denis had become very keen to make known the importance of the organ as a continuo instrument as opposed to the harpsichord for such works as Vivaldis concertos, and to emphasise these views I was asked to play continuo in a performance of Deniss edition of the Monteverdi Vespers at St Johns Smith Square. Denis insisted on the organ being placed centre stage and right at the front and he himself sat right in the front row. Despite being so exposed it was a wonderful experience to really get to know this masterpiece, which Denis had done so much to revive. Being a linguist and musicologist with a fund of knowledge on any amount of topics made Denis the most charming, stimulating, and generous companion, and I feel greatly privileged to have known him. London, January 2006

WILLIAM & DENIS STEVENS, SHEILA, EDITH, DAPHNE AND ANTHONY PHOTOGRAPH BY CLIFFORD A. HOING

SOME WOULD CALL my encounters good fortune or good luck. But I never believed in luck, because competitions or games of chance almost invariably saw me the loser. Whenever I won something, it was clearly the outcome of good work rather than good luck. As a child I said my prayers, but in a rather perfunctory way, hardly believing that anything concrete would result. I knew that my father was a chapel man, with a sense of religion that favored the forthright and honest. My mother was definitely church, with a taste for high church ceremony that she remembered from her native town of Hastings. My father, although born in Hartlepool, lived in High Wycombe, commuting to London for his work as a maker of artificial limbs for the wounded survivors of the Great War.

My parents were my best friends, although I realized this far too late in life. Mother paid for my music lessons by saving money from her housekeeping allowance. Father gave me my first record player (an HMV cabinet model) and a collection of classical 78s. He also gave me my first typewriter, an American Yost with three characters to each key, and my first violin was originally his. I was born on March 2nd, 1922 next door to Clifford A. Hoing, a pupil of Eric Gill in wood-engraving, who later took up violin-making. I spent many youthful hours in his workshop, watching him create beautiful violins and violas. A companionable man, he also excelled in photography, and would take some excellent pictures of my young family. My father played the violin in his youth, and possessed a small collection of violin music that I later took over. He would play, for my mothers enjoyment, Edwardian hits such as Elgar's Salut d'amour, a well-constructed melody that earned its composer great fame but little money. We led a comfortable life, and I received every help in my schooling. By the time I began to attend High Wycombes Royal Grammar School, my father had bought a house only a few hundred yards away, near a new church designed by Giles Gilbert Scott. I could make my way there through a gap in a fence, and enjoyed being a member of the choir. At school I joined the orchestra as a violinist, a much preferred alternative to a second afternoon of sports.

In the High Wycombe Orchestral Society, I attempted to mingle music and musicology at 17. My programme notes on the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto suggested everyone listen for the bassoon B continuing the final chord of the first movement, which moves to a C and the key of the slow movement. Nobody heard the B: the bassoon player was fast asleep. So much for musicology. I first became conscious of a mysterious helping hand when I took the Higher School certificate. Not a terribly bright student, I found it hard at first to choose a third main subject, but decided to take music, and assured the headmaster E. R. Tucker that, though there was no music teacher of rudimentary theoretical subjects, I could teach myself but I would need instruction in harmony. He saw the point and assisted by sending me one afternoon each week to the neighboring High School for Girls. Making myself as inconspicuous as possible, I went to my lessons, struggled through them, and dealt with history and theory as best I could. Then came the examination for a County Music Scholarship. This took place at Eton College, where the adjudicator was Dr. Henry G. Ley. There was one other competitor besides myself, a brilliant young lady pianist. I heard her play as I was answering my theory paper, and knew that my violin playing was not of that standard. Yet in the end, because her theory was weaker than mine, I won the Scholarship, having fought my way through a weird French edition of Vitalis Chaconne. Invited that afternoon to attend chapel, I heard the choir sing Haydns Insan et van cur invadunt mentes nostras (from The Return of Tobias). The ordeal was over, and I began to develop a taste for church music. The Scholarship set me on a career from which I have rarely faltered. Obsessive and haunting cares take hold of our minds. I always made a rough translation of texts in another language, but my classics master found them rather too free at times. However, I went on and on, translating madrigal and motet texts, continuing until recently. Although music undoubtedly radiates its own meaning (which ought to reflect the text), there is often an extra shade that we ought to know. The Scholarship helped me to go to Oxford in 1940 where I soon discovered that music was classed as a research degree. I had to begin with regular courses, all resulting in a war degree, which did not amount to much. Still I was at Oxford, enjoying membership in the Oxford Orchestral Society and opportunities to play chamber music. I roomed in Jesus College with a school friend, Richard Lear, who shared my interests. One day I went to New College for a tutorial with Hugh Allen, and as I sat waiting for him in his rooms a burly gentleman entered and asked after Sir Hugh. I could not guess the newcomer's name, but found him extremely knowledgeable about music. Sir Hugh had obviously forgotten about his appointment, so the visitor left abruptly, saying to me, If you come back from the war - and I hope you will - call and see me at Glyndebourne! I had been speaking with John Christie, the founder of the Glyndebourne Opera. When years later I contacted him, he invited me to attend a wonderful rehearsal of Glucks Orfeo with the great contralto Kathleen Ferrier.

Allen, said Sir Thomas Armstrong, now he was a man-and-a-half! Armstrong was one of several musicians (the others being R. 0. Morris, H. K. Andrews, and Egon Wellesz) who helped me enormously at Oxford. He admired Hugh Allen because, above and beyond his great musical abilities, there was the man's powerful personality. When Douglas Fox returned from World War 1, having lost his right arm in 1917, he told Allen that he was ready to give up music as a career. But Allen, as organist of New College, took the chapel services for a while, tying his right arm behind his back. When Fox came to evensong one day, he heard irreproachable organ-playing in the voluntaries, anthem, and in fact throughout the service. He saw and heard what could be done, and got on with the job of being a practical musician. He was for many years music master at Clifton College. That action was typical of Sir Hugh, who would never waste words when demonstration would better serve his purpose. Instead of lecturing his choir about dynamics and voiceproduction in the Qui tollis peccata mundi of Bach's B-Minor Mass, he would say, Remember He is bearing a heavy burden. He invited me once to a wartime lunch in New College, where the service in hall was very slow. Borrowing the title of a Bach cantata, he remarked, God's time is best. I was no organist, so he referred to me as a fiddler. But he did so kindly, and his fierce expression half cloaked a heart of gold. A recent and surprising pleasure was to meet his granddaughter, Annie Thomson, a lawyer who is now helping to publish church music. Allens rehearsal language was not always polite, as Dorothy L. Sayers noted in her copy of the B-Minor Mass. On one occasion he asked a recalcitrant lady cellist, What the devil do you think you are doing? Answered the cellist: I'm damned if I know, Sir Hugh! As Director of the Royal College of Music and Heather Professor, he sometimes did the London-toOxford train journey four times a day.

After a while I joined the RAF in 1942 (for my father had been in the Royal Flying Corps), and being a linguist was summoned to the Air Ministry in London and told to learn Japanese. My colleagues and I lodged in London not far from the British Museum. I soon obtained a Reader's ticket, and busied myself in the North Library, the wartime refuge for scholars. There I tried to find the music that went with my small collection of gramophone records, and so discovered Monteverdi for the first time. I had a strange feeling of being guided to places that would prove congenial or helpful. Perhaps it was that Oxfords libraries and churches set my brain in motion, for I accepted each new experience as it occurred. Meanwhile, my friend Richard had become an infantry officer, and from Oxford days our ways parted. Eventually I was posted to India, and, although a commission was promised, it never came through. Downcast at first, I was uplifted by the news that I would spend much of my time near Calcutta. I still carried my tropical model violin (reinforced with pins and metal), and was soon a member of the multinational Calcutta Symphony. In addition to Indians, there were Europeans and members of the American military. Two special friends were Milton Lipschutz, a fine viola player from Philadelphia, and Gordon Epperson, a gifted cellist who had worked under Goossens and Beecham. The orchestra was conducted by Philippe Sandr, who would tell me of his meetings with Debussy, dIndy, or Saint-Saens. I traveled into Calcutta by rail or road, and met (to me, a young man) fascinating people. I was befriended by a former Jesus College man, W. C. Wordsworth, Assistant Editor of the Calcutta Statesman. Other friends were the Richardsons, whose daughter, Fay, played in the orchestra, and the Blank family. A High Court judge, A. L. Blank had a musical wife and three charming daughters. Was this a war, I wondered? WITH TERRIBLE SADNESS I read of the loss of my dear friend Richard, killed at the age of 22 in Normandy. I never forgot him, and by a strange chance was helped by him many years later. His sister, who married an airman named Bush, had a son whom they christened Richard. Almost at the end of my tether in California in 1976, I came upon a note I had written to Richard Bush at Jesus College, and got in touch with him again. He lived in Greenwich with his family, who with great hospitality allowed my daughter to stay with them upon her arrival in London from New York City in 1992.

Daphne discovered Morden College in nearby Blackheath and thought it would be just the place for her dotty old father out in Santa Barbara. It proved to be so, and it was thanks to Richard Lear, Richard Bush, and my daughter Daphne that I eventually came to live at Morden College. I have moved far ahead, but do so to relate the sometimes unusual relationships between death and life. I thought Richard had gone for ever, but redivivus he guided my path in 1993. The remainder of the war years were unspectacular for me. After Calcutta, I played sonatas in Rangoon and talked to groups of airmen about music. One or two recalled those talks fifty years later, so perhaps my life as an educator began in 1945. Suddenly called to play in a trio in New Delhi, I spent some time there, and in October appeared in the New Delhi Court Circular as having arrived. We three musicians gave a recital in Viceregal Lodge and performed music by classical composers and by the romantic Delius. Lady Wavell honoured us with her presence. After that, I returned to England via the Suez Canal and attempted to learn Italian. I never spoke it as fluently as my daughter did later (she married an Italian), but eventually knew the language well enough to translate all of Monteverdis letters, my original Faber edition being published in 1980 and an updated version in 1995. In this way I felt that unseen hands guided my path from a tentative beginning in 1945, reaching maturity many years later.

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UPON MY RETURN, I found a vastly different Oxford. Sir Hugh Allen and my friend Richard Lear were no more. I lived in a house on Boars Hill, and found a new companion who also played the violin: Albi Rosenthal, a seller of antiquarian books and a noted scholar. It was from Boars Hill that I ventured into a new and lively field, the BBC Third Programme. Begun as a cultural offshoot of the corporation, it later achieved world fame. At the BBC, I had dealings at first only with church music, for Dom Anselm Hughes had turned up one day with a series of medieval programs. Realizing these would require singers skilled in the Latin liturgy, we formed a group from Brompton Oratory and Westminster Cathedral choirs. It became the starting point of the Ambrosian Singers, which soon added women members. These groups I directed anonymously in BBC studios. So far, little contact with secular music, although I met and heard ensembles of that kind. Finding a book of text and music by Angles titled La Musica en la Corte de Carlo V, I somehow grasped the essence of the Catalan and transcribed pieces by Palero and Cabazon for string quartet. My commentary and a selection of harpsichord pieces & quartet music proved so popular a BBC program that it was repeated three times within eight weeks. My violin teacher, Jack Kessler, led the quartet, and from that time onwards I became closely associated with the Third. On vacation in Adelboden in 1949, in which Swiss village I unsuccessfully tried to ski, I telephoned Dr. Percy Scholes, who lived in a magnificent house overlooking Montreux. I had met him in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and on being introduced told him that I was a musicologist. He drawled only one question in his dry Yorkshire accent: Have you got a private income? So here I was, about to meet the lion in his lair. He met me at Territet station, and turned out to be a kindly old gentleman, famous for his Oxford Companion to Music, also for his editions of Burney and of Hawkins. I marvelled at the view from his house and gazed in awe at his library. We exchanged books and gossip. But I little knew that some years later (at the suggestion of Albi Rosenthal) I would try to interest American universities in purchasing his library as a unit. Nobody made offers, so I contacted Ottawa, home of the National Library of Canada, and there it rests today. To it was added my own collection in 1988. In 1949 I was married to Sheila Elizabeth Holloway, an artist, in St. Thomas, Regent Street, a church long since destroyed. I did not see eye to eye with her family, but the marriage lasted for twenty-five years and bore fruit in three children: Anthony, Daphne, and Michael. I joined the BBC full-time and worked hard for five years, supplying fresh repertory that the new wavelength desperately needed. My first opera production was Monteverdis Orfeo, my second consisted of complete acts from Charpentier's Mede. In the field of instrumental music, I broadcast for the first time such works as the complete Musique de Table by Telemann, his remarkable violin concerto in seven movements, and the complete La Cetra, Opus 9, by Vivaldi. The BBCs lead, under its first DirectorGeneral Lord Reith, was a benevolent dictatorship. We know precisely what the public wants, he thundered, and by Heaven they are not going to get it! Although that method of maintaining good taste did not last for ever, it certainly played its part in the early years.

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In 1952, immediately upon leaving the International Congress of Musicology at Utrecht, I traveled to Zurich for my first recording sessions. These were for Dr. David Josefowitzs label, Concert Hall. After meeting Louis Kaufman and his wife, Annette, I learned that the sessions had been moved to Holland, which I had just left. But they went forward at last, and we recorded the Telemann violin concerto. David remained a good friend beyond my middle and later years, and when he moved to London he conducted my editions of the Monteverdi Christmas Vespers and the Vespers of 1610. THOUGH I WORKED HARD, I did ride roughshod over BBC customs and practices. Just as I was being eased out due to the activities of certain jealous characters, I once again felt the powerful arm of support when the BBC's Transcription Service made a bid for my help. There, instead of facing a dreary office grind, I was paid by the session. These delightful three-hour periods took place in a converted school in Maida Vale, and it was there at St. Hildas that I first learned to work with tape. BBC recordings had usually been made on disc; I found that tape was a much more flexible medium. In my spare time I encountered stars of the recording world - Kirsten Flagstad, first at a Furtwngler recording session and later at the Mermaid Theatre, and Klemperer at an EMI session. I also served as producer for one of Beecham's radio programs - French Operatic Music Before the Revolution.

Wilhelm Furtwngler
DR. BERTHA GEISSMAR has told the story of the early 1930s battle for Berlin: how it was that farfamed Furtwngler traveled between Berlin and Vienna, each great orchestra hoping to hook the maestro. She describes how it was really a battle for funds, and how in the end Berlin secured the services of Furtwngler because support money was found in the state, the county, and the city - three rich sources that promised to sustain Germanys greatest orchestra. Both had been founded as military bands, which is why to this day women members are (at least in theory) not allowed. Beecham's rationale was far more practical: if the lady is not handsome, the men do not want to play beside her; if she is handsome, they can't. Shortly after Furtwngler took over, a young Russian cellist became principal of the cello section. His name was Gregor Piatigorsky. He and the conductor found themselves lacking in social graces, so they went to ballroom dancing classes. But, after the second lesson, the dancing master called the musicians aside. You gentlemen, he said, have absolutely no sense of rhythm. The reputation of the Berlin Philharmonic remained unrivaled for many years. Furtwngler would not willingly conduct another orchestra until Beecham launched his London Philharmonic in 1932. It soon became the orchestra of Covent Garden Opera. Beecham and Furtwngler held each other in mutual respect and friendship, and the story goes that, when the eminent German tapped on the director's door, a voice from within could be heard calling, Come in, young feller-me-lad! Their Covent Garden seasons were star-studded and superb. Today, even the cast-lists excite awe and amazement.

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I first heard the Berliners and their conductor in postwar Oxford, where they acquitted themselves famously in a city known for its preponderance of German scholars. In the meantime, there unfolded the drama of Furtwngler and Yehudi Menuhin, the first Jewish musician to play in post-Nazi Germany. That one Berlin Philharmonic concert helped heal the damage of years. On March 26, 1948, I stood in EMI's No.1 Studio at Abbey Road, transfixed, as a massive Philharmonia Orchestra, complete with Wagner tubas, recorded the closing scene from Wagner's Gotterdmmerung, with Furtwngler conducting and Kirsten Flagstad bringing her golden tones to soar over the orchestra. It was an unforgettable evening that seemed to be the end of an era. The conductor himself would describe this juncture: "The great works of the past depend to a large extent on intuition; but today, instead of being allowed to come to the fore in performance, the quality of intuition is played down, scorned. (Alles Grosse ist einfach 1954) The Philharmonia, with seventy men including many of their finest players, had made glorious sounds that evening, and by 9 p.m. had been in a state of Wagnerian perspiration for three hours. Everyone hoped that, with less than ten minutes to go, it would be the end of the session. But no: Walter Legge's voice came over the talk-back: "That last side again, please, and give it all the glory you've got. A storm of Bronx cheers drowned him, but Furtwngler, apparently unruffled, repeated the last section with Brnnhilde still in powerful voice. Thanks to digital remastering, those moments can still be enjoyed.

Kirsten Flagstad
TOWARDS THE CLOSE of her glorious career, Kirsten Flagstad ventured into the field of early music. It was a fairly sudden change, for it seemed that I had only recently heard her singing the closing scene from Gtterdmmerung under Furtwngler's baton. Now she came forward not as Brnnhilde, but as Dido in Purcell's opera. She performed in a fledgling Mermaid Theatre in St. John's Wood, with an orchestra directed by Geraint Jones. After a few successful performances, she let it be known that she had come to love the work so much that she would take the score to Stockholm and sing the role at the Royal Opera. There was a major problem. Dido contains no love duet. As a musicologist looking for problems to solve, I offered to find a suitable duet for the great lady. Not knowing Purcell's theater music well, I chose the hard way and went through several hefty but promising volumes. I cannot now remember which duet I chose, but I brought it to the rehearsal studio one day when she, Geraint and I were all assembled. I gave the score to Geraint, who began the opening bars of the duet. I looked at Madame expectantly. She looked at me expectantly. I had only a light baritone voice, quite inadequate for such a scene. But she began so coaxingly that I realized I was the one being coaxed. How I got through that "audition" I shall never know, but she soon expressed her approval of the music and decided that, yes, it would go to Stockholm. I believe she performed it there with considerable success, and transformed Purcell's opera into a convincing vehicle for soprano, tenor, and a full cast.

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Thomas Beecham
FOUR OF US IN 1939, members of an amateur string orchestra, had fallen in at once with our cellist's idea to take an excursion from High Wycombe to London, where at Queen's Hall the Wednesday concert by the BBC Symphony Orchestra would be conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham, Bt. CH. None of us had seen or heard him "live, and this would provide the missing experience. We had all heard some of the Beecham stories, but had no idea that we would "see" a Beecham story without words. Arriving at the Hall, we found some members of the orchestra already in their places. Startlingly, to us, there were rows upon rows of chorus singers. We looked for a slip in the program notifying an amendment, but nothing appeared. The program was unchanged: Wagner's Faust Overture, Delius' In a Summer Garden, "The Royal Hunt and Storm" by Berlioz, the "Prelude und Libestod" from Tristan, and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. So why the massive chorus? We found out, soon after the Berlioz began. Whooping and shaking his fist at the singers, Beecham brought them to their feet at the moment in the opera where Dido and Aeneas take shelter in a cave, there to found the Italian race. The orchestra leapt into action, and the chorus cried "Italie, Italie, Italie!" The storm abated. The Italians were there! The chorus sat down and remained silent. That was the Beecham joke. Heaven only knows what it must have cost to book that chorus, and all for five minutes' music.

Otto Klemperer
SITTING IN MY BBC OFFICE one morning in 1949, I received a secretary's call from EMI: "Mr. Legge is away in Geneva, recording Dinu Lipatti, and we urgently need someone to take a Klemperer session at Kingsway Hal!. "I have only just joined the BBC, and they wouldn't approve if I ran out on them!" The secretary buzzed on: "But Mr. Alec Robertson recommended you!" After a few minutes, I agreed. It wasn't often that a chance to work with Klemperer came up. Giving an excuse to my own secretary, I left for Kingsway Hall and found the giant, accompanied by his daughter, in a mild rage about the ways of record producers. Klemperer was EMI's latest "catch, and I wondered how I could allay the old man's anxiety. He looked at me suspiciously, and only relented when I told him I was a student of Egon Wellesz. We were to record Beethoven's Leonore Overture No.2. All went well at first, for the Philharmonia was playing. Disaster soon came with the slow introduction, where long empty beats prepare for thunderous orchestral outbursts. Just before the explosion of sound, I could hear a distinct rattling as the maestro raised his arms. It happened time and time again, until the recording engineer burst into the studio.

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"Let's make him empty his pockets, I suggested. Klemperer did so, and out came a noisy collection of objects ranging from coins of several varieties to penknives, pens, and pencils. We asked Klemperer to leave them on the table, and the session proceeded. This time and thereafter, there were no interruptions.

The Launching of Musica Britannica


LEAFING THROUGH a copy of The Strad (price sixpence) one lazy Indian monsoon afternoon in 1946, I read a review of an unusual book: The Notation of Polyphonic Music, 900-1600, by Willi Apel. Writing to the publishers, the Medieval Academy of America, I requested a copy for which I offered to pay cost and carriage. Situated somewhere in Burma, I had no idea how I would transfer the money to Cambridge (Massachusetts), but, in wartime, life was one long hope. Some three months later, when the book miraculously arrived, a "With Compliments" slip was inside from the Academy's secretary. It was my first taste of Uncle Sam's generosity. The sticky months following saw me carefully transcribing keyboard and lute tablatures by the light of a hurricane lamp. These I copied out in RAF office ink and brought them back to Oxford, where I had studied music with Sir Hugh Allen and Dr. Thomas Armstrong. But in 1947 Allen, killed in a road accident, was no more, and his place had been taken by J. A. Westrup, to me an unknown quantity. I lent him the Apel book and my transcriptions, which he kept for the best part of a term, then returned with a fierce glint in his eye. "Page 27, he rapped out. "A mistake!" I could not then have known that Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, had written to his friend Patrick Hadley, Professor of Music at Cambridge, that [Westrup was] not at all clever and not, apparently, interested in music. He likes to know how music was printed in the 17th century, how many boys there were in a choir, what pay the choirmaster got. I don't think he will cause trouble, but he will hardly advance the cause. Quoted in Eric Wetherell's Paddy; Thames, 1992, page 86. As Bowra hinted, J. A. W. didn't cause trouble, at any rate not at first. I decided to study for a Ph. D., and asked Westrup to supervise my dissertation. Every week he managed to be away in the provinces, picking picayune pennies for examining theory candidates. I therefore took to studying on my own, and buried myself cozily in the Bodleian. John Griffith, Junior Dean of Jesus College, took his Leica down to Christ Church Library and made useful microfilms of keyboard manuscripts. Dom Anselm Hughes invited me to tea at Nashdom. The intervening time was given up to playing viola in a quartet led by Peter Gibbs, with whom we explored chamber music by Mozart, Haydn, late Beethoven, and Ravel. As a sop to me, they added music from Bach's Art of the Fugue. Enter subplot. At the time I served as Treasurer of the Oxford University Opera Club, which used to meet for gramophone evenings. At one session I mentioned that in the 1920s they actually produced opera.

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Casting a jaundiced eye in my direction, someone asked how much was in the kitty. Fourteen pounds three and tenpence. But I maintained that, if we announced a production, the public would support it. Primary tasks included finding a producer, a conductor, and an opera. I suggested Anthony Besch from the university's drama society, who had been active all those years ago, and Prof. Westrup. Boldly I rang Westrup and received a "harrumph" that I took to be positive. He chose Idomeneo, and our quartet led the string sections. We all helped put the parts in order, and gathered about us an excellent wind and brass section. The curtain went up, the London critics came down, and the general opinion seemed encouraging. They were hearing a fledgling Philharmonia, and many of us did join that or the London Symphony Orchestra on leaving the university. I left on a skiing holiday to finish my dissertation. But I had little luck skiing, and none at all with the Ph.D. Anthony Lewis joined Westrup for the orals, but my transcription of the Mulliner Book, a 16thcentury organist's commonplace book, was rejected by J. A. W. as insufficient in musica ficta. I refused to change my transcription, and left the university. Undeterred, I contributed much to the then new BBC Third Programme. One day the telephone rang and Frank Howes, at that time senior music critic of The Times, explained that a new series of national music was being launched. Its provisional title was Musica Britannica. Would I let them have my edition of the Mulliner Book, which he had heard about from Anthony Lewis? In acquiescing, I pointed out that it had been rejected by Westrup. A few weeks after sending it off, I heard of its acceptance, and a year later it was published as Volume 1, with a royal dedication. It is still in print, fifty years later, and still selling. As for the doctorate, I was later awarded an honourary one in Humane Letters at an American university. Some time afterwards, at the Garrick Club, I found myself seated next to a lawyer who said he remembered Westrup as a stringer on the Daily Telegraph. Apparently Sir Malcolm Sargent, annoyed by repeated sniping, had a solicitor write to say that the next time a bad review appeared, there would be trouble. There were no subsequent reviews. Later still, I once again met that vindictive man at a congress in Venice. Bearing down on me somewhere near the Riva degli Schiavoni, he harrumphed, "I thought you were dead. Sidestepping neatly into my launch, I recalled the title of an old Ealing comedy film. Im all right, Jack!" quoth I on my way to Santa Lucia.

Manfred Bukofzer
CERTAIN HINTS escape detection so long as the point they hint at is not understood. This remark concludes a footnote in Manfred Bukofzer's chapter on the music of the Old Hall Manuscript in his remarkable book Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York, 1950). His aim to integrate philosophy with musicology caused suspicion allied with admiration. The British sector was not always capable of understanding the complex vein of thought that ran through the writings of the top-ranking German scholars. One English writer who caught the message was Alec Robertson, a popular broadcaster who nevertheless ranked as an authority on the Roman liturgy, and it was his review in the Times Literary Supplement (March 7, 1950) that showed scholars the new frontiers being set up in musicology.

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Manfred Bukofzer, born in Oldenburg, Germany, had left his native country for several reasons. The aftermath of the Nazi regime had indicated that a better future for higher education lay in America. He had learned English partly through his study of English music. His leaning towards socialism caused him to be aware that this was not exactly a popular topic in American universities. But he was a discreet man and loved his musical topics more than ideological theories. He was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley when he wrote his book on baroque music and the succeeding one on medieval and renaissance music. He came to Oxford in 1954 to work at the Bodleian and other libraries. His presence was inspiring, his knowledge of apparently superhuman proportions. Alas, his full flowering as a scholar was denied him by leukemia. In 1954, while I was in charge of early music at the BBC, I lost no time in contacting him about his edition of Dunstable. We had met briefly at the IMS Congress at Utrecht in July 1952, when I was conscious of an overwhelming personality in the frame of a modest and congenial man. We corresponded about Dunstable, and he gave useful advice on performance. His return to Oxford gave me the opportunity to bring Manfred Bukofzer him to the microphone, where he gave his illustrated talk The Discovery of Medieval Music, drawn from the Studies. He was a wonderful broadcasting collaborator, able to tell the world fearlessly and convincingly that musicology was not an abstruse or obscure subject but one that made for lively, compelling topics of immediate interest. Bukofzer's ingenious solution to the "Caput" enigma (i.e., his discovery of the source of this melodic phrase, used frequently as a cantus firmus) led me to a reassessment of Elgar's Enigma Variations. Here again we are faced with a theme that does not occur at the beginning of a melody. It is heard in the middle. It has to combine with harmonies in the major and minor and go with both.

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A clue as to the source was given by Elgar in the notes he fed to the writer of the Crystal Palace concert program when the piece was first performed in 1899: "The principal theme never appears. Elgar loved a play on words. Did he not rather mean, "The principal theme, NEVER, appears? What, then, is NEVER? It was an interpolation by Arne into his famous song: "Rule, Britannia, Britannia rule the waves, for Britons NEVER, NEVER, NEVER shall be slaves. The phrase is set to the notes B G C' A D; in the minor, B flat, G C' A D. This tiny phrase appears in all the variations, as well as in the theme.

"Habent sua rata libelli" (Hrabanus Maurus)


IN 1949 OR SO my library began its peregrinations. Now, fifty-two years later, my books are still on the move. I have shifted mine to California and back again, and John Blackley tells me that he has moved his between the States and Puerto Rico four times. One wonders why this is, yet it seems clear that the bond between the scholar and his or her books and music is a strong one, strong enough to outweigh all considerations of cost and convenience. Sir Thomas Beecham, that most literate of conductors, would ask his librarian to bring a book while he was writing an article. "Second shelf down, fourth book on the left-hand side!" And sure enough it would arrive, and would be the correct title. Scholars know this feeling because they know their books. A phrase haunts one, and he must find it out, track it to its source, even though that source be only secondary. And particular books console by inscribed messages, as these by two of Columbia's resplendent faculty in the 1960s. On the flyleaf of Rudolf and Margot Wittkower's Born Under Saturn; The Character and Conduct of Artists: Dionisio nostro inter Ecclesiae Columbiensis lumine splendidissimo trepidis manibus adscripserunt Rudolphus etMargot Kal Jun. ACD MDCCCCLXIX To our Denis, among Columbia University's Faculty a very brilliant light, Rudolf and Margot signed their names with trembling hands in April 1969. On the flyleaf of William T. H. Jackson's The Anatomy of Love; The Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg: Amice si in hoc libro res litterarias quieris, invenies musicas, et musicas, litterarias. Harmonia corona operis est, harmonia regina coelorum. Gullielmus Johannis- Filius. 0 friend, if in this book you look for literary material, you will find musical, and if musical, literary. Harmony is the heart of the matter, harmony is the queen of heaven. The books went from a large family house in London to the Port of Philadelphia, where my son Anthony and I collected them in a U-Haul that was to be unloaded in State College, Pennsylvania.

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The books were given temporary shelter in the university library; from there they went to Riverdale and Claremont Avenue in New York City. As adviser to the Gregg Press, I received a copy of every music book it published, which meant that the library overflowed into my office on Columbia University campus. From New York it all went to Santa Barbara, where I had been invited on a permanent basis, without a contribution towards moving expenses. The majority of the books were sold in 1979 to the National Library of Canada in Ottawa. The remainder came home with me when I returned to England in 1993. Recently many have made their way back across the Atlantic, to be enjoyed by my elder son, who periodically receives a ten-kilogram box from Federal Express. My Monteverdi Library rests in Goldsmiths College, University of London, while other books were donated to the Royal Academy of Music and Trinity College. Bound sets of periodicals have gone to the former East Germany, to the Vatican, and to many other parts of the world. Good luck to them! They served me well for many a year, may they now help others! I CANNOT UNDERSTAND why I decided to become an itinerant lecturer. I remember being fascinated by color slides, and bought an Exacta camera, later to be exchanged for a Nikon. These and their attachments enabled me to make useful slides of original miniatures in the Bodleian Library, with the quiet agreement of the Keeper of Western Manuscripts. His only caveat was that flash not be used, but I always preferred the naturalness of daylight. In 1953, after Daphne was born, I was asked by the British Council to tour Italy, lecturing on the music of John Dunstable. I set off on visits to Milan, Bergamo, Bologna, Modena, Venice, Florence, and Rome. But to ensure projections and the playing of discs, I had to carry a heavy transformer that enabled me to cope with the wildly varying electricity supply. In America, home of the audio-visual aid, I ran up against immediate trouble. While at Cornell I was invited to talk at Harvard, and brought along an open-reel tape. Setting off from Ithaca, I slithered in Donald Grout's car over snow-covered ice to Syracuse, remembering not to change gear too often and not to brake suddenly. At Syracuse I went on by train. But once at Harvard, we checked the equipment but could not persuade the machine to issue a sound. Someone looked underneath and discovered that the machine had no motor. A quick visit to a radio station provided us with a working model, and we were at last in business. But throughout my career the audio-visual aspect has been very chancy. One department will own a carousel that tends to get stuck. Another won't have the correct plugs. General disorganization was sometimes wild. In one situation, otherwise well-prepared, the apparatus was held up in another classroom. Late arrival meant that I had to do immediate and skillful cutting of the talk, and this involved slides, music excerpts, and script. I blessed my radio-producer background, and scraped through by the skin of my teeth. Sometimes the going was miraculously good, as at a plenary session of the American Musicological Society at St. Louis. The projectionist gave me a concealed button to press for the next slide, and all I had to do was talk and run the tape machine. Invisible button-pressing brought on the new picture as if by magic. It was an early version of my standard lecture Music in Venice, and some scholars have remembered the occasion to this very day.

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I recall arriving at the Institut des Hautes Etudes in Brussels and finding a projector for my 2" x 2" slides that was straight from c. 1899. Fortunately, someone ran home to fetch a modern carousel projector. Most of the time, a visible struggle slowly set things right. In Santa Barbara, a session went so perfectly that the rest of the faculty rushed out to buy single-lens reflex cameras. Unfortunately, they had no idea what to photograph or where to find it. I built up a collection of several thousand slides, and they now repose in libraries such as Princeton and Yale. It was a forty-year obsession, but the materials are still available, so I suppose it was all worthwhile.

Donald Grout
AT AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN UTRECHT I was asked by Donald Grout to teach at Cornell, and the family and I were there for one semester in 1955. There was still a night sleeper from New York City to Ithaca then, and we three, Sheila, Daphne, and I, after our first day in the city, took the old fashioned train. Next morning we were greeted at Ithaca station by Donald and Mrs. Grout, and taken to our temporary dwelling, a small motel. Later we moved to Donald's house, when he left for Minnesota. His house lay outside town and comprised excellent living quarters, with a barn that served as the musicological wing for books, reference materials, and a microfilm reader. It was from this machine that I transcribed Robert Carver's "O bone Jesu, a nineteen-part motet from the Scone Choirbook. Soon at home, we were visited by faculty members and their wives, who made our settling-in much easier. My classes were small, almost like seminars. Robert Hall from the Italian Department came regularly and added an optimistic note. Ivan Waldbauer, I discovered, was the son of the first violinist of the original Hungarian String Quartet, in which my teacher Jack Kessler had played second violin; Ivan recalled playing football with him in Budapest. The voice teacher was none other than Sir Keith Falkner, there for a year with his wife Christabel and their two daughters. We sometimes went on country walks, but had first to drive several miles to reach the real countryside. William Austin, a close colleague, was a fine pianist and played sonatas with me by Walter Piston and the Bostonian Schapiro. Thus did I make my way through at least some American moderns. I also played in the orchestra and in several string quartets. Karel Husa was a delightful composer-in-residence. A flourishing concert series, run by the university, suddenly ran into trouble. The listed artist cancelled, and I helped to find a replacement. Reading that the Russian violinist David Oistrakh was just paying his first visit to the States, I contacted his agent and found that he would be free for the date, and we all looked forward to his arrival. He proved to be a charming character, and tried out my Hoing violin with evident approval. The recital he gave with Yampolsky was well attended and enthusiastically received. And so, "far above Cayuga's waters, my first visiting term in America came to a delightful end. But not before I had driven over to Eastman School of Music in Rochester to meet Charles Warren Fox, resident musicologist, and Howard Hanson, both men of charm and distinction. WHILE AT CORNELL, I had received a phone call from Paul Henry Lang, one of the musicological giants of the New World. Would I extend my stay and teach at Columbia?

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I agreed, because we were once more a united family: Anthony, who had initially stayed in England, joined us at Thanksgiving. After much traveling to and fro, he is still in New York State as a recording engineer, and his son Benjamin attends the University of Rochester. Living in New York City for the agreed-upon single semester presented problems. The university had no suitable accommodation for visitors. We were offered an old-fashioned hotel on Broadway, and this became our home until June. In the music department, new experiences awaited, and I absorbed them with enthusiasm. Duties included a lecture course and a seminar. The students ranged from New Yorkers to a future Arch-Abbot, Fr. Rembert Weakland. It was a friendly group, and I enjoyed being in the great city. Once I had to read a paper to the local American Musicological Society chapter, and felt I was running the gauntlet when I found that the audience included such men as Oliver Strunk, Curt Sachs, Gustave Reese, Erich Hertzmann, and Ernst Ferand. At Cornell I had begun collecting materials for a book on Thomas Tomkins, since his tercentenary was rapidly approaching. At Columbia I wrote the book and made a broadcast for the BBC in their New York offices, supervised by Lillian Lang (no relation to Paul Henry). Thus another term passed quickly and easily. LATE IN 1957 I was elected a member of the Garrick Club, an honour that has kept me in good humor and (I like to think) good health for the past forty years. Although the Club has changed, its spirit remains untouched. Friendliness and informality abound. When I joined, there were remarkably few musicians, but I was overjoyed to find Yehudi Menuhin, Malcolm Sargent, and William Walton already members. I felt immediately at home there, in the company of such convivial confreres as Arthur Crook, editor of the Times Literary Supplement. In those days the Garrick stayed open during weekends, and one was allowed to bring ones children to lunch on Saturdays. I can claim to have caused a short piece by Monteverdi to be heard there when, on a festive evening celebrating the inauguration of the elevator, a brass quintet made its appearance to play cheerful music that included the Toccata from Orfeo. Continually struck by the fact that music was always divided into secular and sacred, I began to invent a tertium quid that I called "Occasional Music. It stretched from the beginning of time onward, embracing all composers, countries, and topics of Western music. I gave the series under this name on the Third, and such was its success that I exported a branch to Brussels Radio, where friends helped to endorse the scene. For the BBC Transcription Service I inaugurated a series entitled "Music from Historic Houses. The idea came from the genial Head, Malcolm Frost, who outlined thirteen programs to be recorded in famous English historic homes, beginning with the Queen's House, Greenwich. Each program was to feature special artists, and the commentary, written by the historian John Harvey (with a little on the music by me), would be spoken by Richard Dimbleby. One of the best-known voices in what one might call ceremonial radio, his tones made an immediate impact on the series. My rage for repertoire never stopped.

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Gustave Reese with Aime Reese, Sheila, Anthony, Daphne and Michael Stevens, c.1958

Gustave Reese
REESE WAS DOING EXTENSIVE RESEARCH for his classic article on the "In Nomine, and requested help on a Bodleian manuscript. I was happy to receive a letter from such a renowned scholar, and dutifully went to the library to find the material he needed. Plain but impressive heading: 50 Park Avenue. This was some time before my acquaintance with American skyscrapers or musicologists of comparable stature. In 1955 I was to meet him - in fact, on my very first day in New York. Sheila and Daphne had just disembarked from the Mauretania, and, after a celebratory lunch with friends, we telephoned "Gus" (as he was later known to us) and were invited to his apartment for cocktails and supper. I had studied his daunting Music in the Middle Ages when I returned to Oxford after the war, and to meet such a scholar was a true test of ones equipoise. I need not have feared: here was a man of a quiet self confidence that could not conceal the fires of enthusiasm that lay beneath the surface. He was natural, outgoing, and immediately friendly, as indeed was his wife, Aime. Soon we were joined by another musicologist, Reese's great friend, Dragan Plamenac. We all proceeded to Schrafft's for dinner. For me, an Englishman, this was a musicological banquet: three men, two ladies, one little girl, and a completely new American culture.

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I had not realized all that aided his meticulous scholarship, but Schrafft's played a modest part. Gus and Aimee would daily take breakfast at home, rarely preparing other meals. Lunch and dinner were invariably at a restaurant, and it was this not having to do shopping, cooking, and washing up that released the great man for his serious work. The Stevens family, well content with the evening, boarded the overnight train to Ithaca, and I realized that my American adventure had well and truly begun. After having been called to teach for a term at Columbia, I made further and better acquaintance with this altogether delightful man. A lawyer by training, he had mastered the art and craft of cutting through heavy verbiage and tedious obfuscation, the stuff of most musicological articles and books. In fact, he was admirably equipped to be a musicologist, which he was to the highest degree, as was proved by his later masterpiece, Music in the Renaissance. I still treasure an inscribed copy: "To Denis, one of the very best friends of this book and of its author, with warm best wishes. We remained close friends always. When he came to England in the summer of 1960, he and Aimee stayed at a country hotel near us in Surrey, so we were able to meet fairly often. We had three children by then; Gus and Aimee appeared to adopt them, and there were excited moments before Christmas, when presents from both were eagerly awaited. Looking back in my later years, I realize that this must have been heady stuff indeed for a younger scholar to absorb, but I view it all with a great sense of thanksgiving and gratitude. A bonus was my summer course at Oxford in 1970, organized by Ian Lowson, in which I invited not only Gus, but also my old friend Alec Robertson to participate. They took to each other immediately, having so much in common. Gus may have been a formidable scholar, but there was nothing formal about his manner, and among the last friends he made in London were "the Poppets" - Julian Herbage and Anna Instone. We were all a part of education, high or low, it did not matter. We loved our early music, and we loved our Wagner. That's what it was all about! IN EACH OF THE TERMS at Cornell and Columbia there were pleasant surprises. In the middle of the Columbia term there came an invitation to lecture in Richmond, Charlottesville, and Fredericksburg. Meeting John White and my Oxford friend Roy Jesson, I saw some of the charm of the South. Hearing in 1956 of an opening for the post of Dean of Music at McGill University, I traveled to Montreal and, once before the assembled committee, solemnly recited Musicorum et cantorum magna est distantia "There is a great distance between singers and composers: some know about music, others perform it. I was promptly appointed Dean and returned to London to choose books for their library. In it, Musica Britannica had been indexed as "Collection of British Folksongs. The family returned home to England on the Seven Seas, a smallish vessel on which I managed to put the finishing touches to Tomkins. In London I heard that the McGill Music faculty boasted some thirty-five piano teachers and one downtrodden musicologist. I wrote suggesting an improvement in balance. Back came a telegram from the person who had appointed me, saying DON'T BOTHER TO COME. Once more a failure, I went to my BBC job and sued McGill for one year's salary, which they paid.

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The BBC work had changed to a "program contract" arrangement, whereby I would suggest a short or long series of programs for the Third, venturing as far as I dared. Simultaneously there were scripts and articles to be written, so that I continued in a frenzy of constant work. I would record domestic programs in Broadcasting House, and programs in French, German, and Italian at Bush House. The commercial world of recordings moved in when Vanguard began to make records with the Deller Consort. Our third child, Michael David, was born in London on September 30, 1956, and not long after that we welcomed a series of visitors who came down to us for supper, cooked by the ever-ready Sheila. Americans on summer visits were plentiful: Randall Thompson, Paul Henry Lang, Putnam Aldrich, John Ward, and many others. I supplied music for the York Festival, where the medieval plays were being produced by E. Martin Browne, filling in programs of Renaissance German music and English Medieval Music for the Third. A congress, Le Baroque Musical, was organized by Mme. Clerx-Lejeune in Wegimont, where during evening entertainments our lively four-year-old daughter would take part in everything that struck her fancy. Our first stereo records (Tomkins) were brilliantly engineered by John Mosely and released in New York. I could never complain of dull moments or boring half-hours. In the summer of 1958 I attended an international congress in Cologne, and afterwards traveled to St. Edmund's College, Old Hall, Ware, to photograph in color the famous Old Hall MS. The slides now reside in Princeton University Library. I tried never to throw valuable material away. Christmas, once more AMS conference time, took Jeremy Noble and me to America. In January my return to London was by the newly inaugurated Pan Am jet service.

D.S., John Mosely, Sir David Willcocks

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AFTER A SPELL of teaching at Cornell and Columbia, I returned to fulltime work with Transcription Service and developed several series of programs. Concert work became extended, and eventually included tours that were often built around my quintet of singers, from 1961 called Accademia Monteverdiana. Nor did I neglect teaching, for in 1960 Sir Thomas Armstrong, the sturdy friend from Oxford days, invited me to teach at the Royal Academy of Music, of which he was Principal. Although my term at the Academy was an experiment, it led to a long friendship with the composer, harpsichordist, and organist Sir Nicholas Jackson, Bt. My mother, Sheila, & Daphne went on a motoring tour of Switzerland in May and explored the country more than we had been able to do previously. Switzerland had also become a favorite country of the Menuhins, and we were to meet there often in later years. In 1961 we repeated the experience, this time with all three children, who apparently enjoyed the stunning scenery.

Rehearsal for the Bath Festival, 1961: Yehidu Menuhin, Robert Masters, Kinloch Anderson, Denis Stevens

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Only a month later, the Accademia Monteverdiana made its debut at the Bath Festival, with our vocal quintet, Yehudi, Robert Masters, and Kinloch Anderson. It was a sold-out success, attended by no less than our heroine, Nadia Boulanger. Nadia Boulanger had inspired many famous American composers, teaching them modern music as fulfilled by, for instance, Stravinsky. She also went back to the music of the sixteenth century. Italian music of the baroque was proved fruitful by her advocacy of Monteverdi, whose complete works were being issued volume by volume in the Malipiero edition. In the late 1930s she issued a series of gramophone records that were to many a priceless introduction to his secular music. They had unlocked the gates for me, and I was a devotee from then on. To invite her to become a Founder-Member of the Accademia Monteverdiana was a joy and a privilege. One day early in 1961, I realized that two of the world's greatest countertenors were in London at the same time. Russell Oberlin had come over from America to take part in Britten's A Midsummer-Nights Dream, while Alfred Deller was about his usual business, giving concerts, touring, and making gramophone records. I invited both to lunch on the same day, and they delighted in each other's company. I recounted a story Stravinsky had told me from an audience he'd had with Pope John XXIII: "In what way can I help you, my son? Swiftly had come the reply: "Holy Father, GIVE ME CASTRATI!" LOOKING AT 1961 right-side up and upside down, Nadia Boulanger judged the year to be a very significant one. And so it proved indeed, for, along with the debut of the Accademia under the approving gaze of Madame, there were three concerts at the Mermaid Theatre with a small chorus and orchestra. In January 1962 we five flew to New York, and then on to San Francisco to begin a visiting term at Berkeley. We resided happily in a large house on Scenic Avenue, and the children all attended local schools. I taught a seminar on early Renaissance Spanish music, made possible by a splendid study by Robert M. Stevenson, already something of a myth among musicologists. A surprise visit by John R Kennedy saw me playing in an outdoor orchestra sounding forth "Hail to the Chief. My fortieth birthday was celebrated at a party in the Music Department hosted by Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica. A return to London via the polar route excited our imaginations. A recommendation by Noah Greenberg in mid-1962 led us to an unusual place for music: Penn State University, in the very heart of Pennsylvania. This was the year of "the new car, and I enjoyed the freedom of a Chevy Impala and countless miles of country roads with hardly another vehicle in sight. Although there was little formal teaching to do, I gave some guest lectures and conducted a university choir performance of the Vespers. The attitude to most ideas was "we don't know it, but we'll try it. Rowland Slingluff at the University Press office undertook to produce a Music Series, made up of shorter, lesser-known pieces, then later a record series in which I was able to place concerti grossi by William Boyce and Enrico Albicastro. These I recorded in St. Paul's Knightsbridge. It may now be revealed that I recorded at 7 ips and even contrived to edit the tapes. When dubbed to 15 ips, the results were reviewed in many of the hifi journals and none of the critics complained. Was I pushing my luck? I judged only by reviews, and most were encouraging.

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Also from Penn State came an invitation to translate from the French a book by Franois Lesure, Music and Art in Society, which gave Sheila and me great pleasure to work on. I began to commute by car and train to New York City to give graduate seminars at Columbia. The family finally returned to London after an absence of 621 days (much longer than the usual spell). The children went into prep schools, and I see from my notes that one of them was charging six and onehalf guineas a week for tuition, board and lodging! We were still living in the days of non-inflation! The singers appeared twice at Westminster Abbey, once in Cheynegates for a DGG recording session of music by Morley, then later in the Abbey for the second successive concert of Monteverdi's Vespers. A two-day appearance at the Edinburgh Festival gave us the opportunity to perform Monteverdian masterpieces such as the Combattimento, already one of Edgar Fleet's showpieces, and other madrigalian highlights.

The Accademia Monteverdiana John Frost, Patricia Clark, Denis Stevens, Shirley Minty, Edgar Fleet, and Ursula Connors

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The Singers
GROWING FROM THE AMBROSIAN SINGERS, the vocal quintet that became the Accademia Monteverdiana was intended to explore the madrigal repertory in much the same way that a string quartet might explore classical and modern masterpieces. But I knew that one could never really compare the two repertories as to size. Who could even count the vast number of compositions in Vogel's two-volume catalogue of the Italian madrigal? But I decided to try my hand at material that sometimes tried our voices. Realizing that the "session" singers of the 1960s had to deal with an enormous range of music, I gave the quintet some madrigals from Gesualdo's Fifth Book. To my secret amazement, they read these difficult works without any problem. Of course, Gesualdo was sung regularly by choirs with various types of vibrato; my quintet, one voice to a part, was on a higher level of musicianship. At first we had Mary Thomas, an excellent and versatile musician, as soprano. Later she left us for other work and was replaced by Patricia Clark, who had sung a boy's part (as P. Clark") in the 1957 Tomkins recording, which John Mosely organized. Pat's voice, unrivalled for purity of intonation and timbre, is completely at home in improvised ornamentation. She was soon joined by Ursula Connors, whose bright "straight" voice balanced well with Pat's. The contralto was at first Jean Allister, but her solo ambitions caused her to move on to other work. Edgar Fleet, a highly competent tenor, proved an excellent soloist as well as a fine ensemble singer. He, like Pat and Ursula, had studied at the Royal Academy of Music. This similarity of training made for a homogeneous group. For the lower voices we had three men from King's College, Cambridge: Leslie Fyson, a versatile tenor; Nigel Rogers, a good musician but somewhat flighty; and John Frost, a splendid bass whose sense of style was second to none. Although there were occasional temporary replacements, this team saw us through countless concerts, tours, and recordings. When John Frost retired, his place was most ably taken by John Noble, who had worked with us since the Westminster Abbey Vespers of 1961. A main point, apart from blending well tonally, was their friendliness and bonhomie. John Frost and Leslie Fyson would do The Times crossword puzzle (notoriously difficult) in the twenty minutes allowed as a session-break. Our contralto from 1966 was Shirley Minty, who has a beautifully controlled voice that one could easily imagine to be that of a fine countertenor. All these singers can be heard to advantage in some of the unusual repertories we loved to explore. As a change from the enormous Italian field, we tried much German material, from Demantius (an exact contemporary of Monteverdi) all the way on to Haydn. The French chanson offered many delightful shorter pieces, and we sang some moving dialogues by Lassus. I wanted to try out what the Hispanic school had left us, and we loved the Gallego Portuguese pieces in the Concionero de Uppsala, as well as the older repertoire of the Concionero del Palacio. English madrigals were a must, and we issued a disc of these to go with my two Penguin books of four- and fivepart madrigals. It was a joy to perform this kind of music at festivals, and to record it. Helped by an occasional subsidy, we were able to offer complete programs of music by Gesualdo, Pomponio Nenna, Giaches de Wert, and Nicola Vicentino. It may have been only a tiny dent in the repertoire of earlier days, but it provided us with new challenges at every turn. We sometimes thought back to the time of the ladies of Ferrara, and all the masterpieces they had to learn and perform.

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I LEFT PENN STATE after a four-man commission (including Donald Grout) had pronounced the music department unsatisfactory. The president of the university read the condemnation in front of the entire music faculty, stuffed the report in a drawer, and said, in effect, "on with the show: In spite of scenic beauty, I did not relish spending the rest of my life in a place of learning without a music library (they now have one), and accordingly moved on. A vacant professorship had occurred at Columbia University, and an exchange of correspondence with Jacques Barzun led to the offer of a full professorship in 1964, which of course carried tenure. Although I was welcomed, I believe there were some who felt I had jumped the queue. My graduate teaching followed a rather experimental line, for I offered courses in medieval and renaissance liturgies, alternating with a course on Monteverdi. I found at Columbia a different situation from my semester's stay in 1956, for the courses offered seemed to be heavily teutonic. Spurred on to paint a different picture of music, I added lectures on Henry Purcell. When the course was first advertised, it became rapidly over-subscribed. We had to find a larger classroom in another building. After the last lecture, the class rose to its feet and applauded. My experiment had proved a success: English music could hold its own against the continentals. At an American Musicological Society convention in Washington, D.C., Christmastide 1964, I gave a talk on the Worcester Fragments, illustrating it by color slides of the original manuscripts and with stereo recordings of the music. New York was exciting; we lived at first in an apartment in Riverdale, then moved to Claremont Avenue, near the university. Yet my wife and I did not feel it a perfect background for the young ones, and we returned to Europe every summer, staying for the better part of four months. We met delightful friends in Paris, among them the Handman family. Dorel was a pianist who had studied with Schnabel, and his wife, Lucile, a gracious lady who cared for an extended family living in a fine old apartment in Avenue Niel. Dorel produced my first broadcast in French, and encouraged later explorations of the recorded repertoire, such as Beethoven's beguiling settings of British folk songs.

Sacred Music
ALWAYS AN ENTHUSIAST FOR CHURCH MUSIC, I had felt early on that much relating to musicoliturgical structure was eluding me. When, shortly after the end of World War II, there was an attempt made to record some early English church music, it fell to my lot to review the discs. I found the results so poor that I had to investigate further. There was a "motet" by Tallis, taken straight from the old Carnegie edition of Tudor church music. It didn't look like a motet, because there were clearly verses and a poetic structure. Later I discovered that it was really a hymn, but with verses 1, 3, and 5 omitted. Reconstructing the original form, where plainsong verses intervened, yielded a logical structure.

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Slowly I investigated the liturgy in a practical way, preparing editions for performance. I found that the chant verses provided contrast to the polyphony, and I continued my research by indexing the hymns in the Sarum Breviary. Suddenly sense came out of nonsense. The same was true when I studied responsories and other liturgical forms. The texts began to make sense, and so did the music. In an early book, Tudor Church Music, I showed how these complex structures revealed their secrets. In later editions, when dealing with processional responds in Music in Honour of St Thomas of Canterbury, I went into the remarkable structure of the prosa (an offshoot of the Sarum sequence), where paired verses turned into four, because the melody of each was sung first with text and then immediately repeated on the vowel a; this would continue all the way through the composition. In my 1965 Treasury of English Church Music, Vol 1, I gave an example of a sequence in which a pair of verses were fitted with elaborate tropes and hockets. This music will never become popular in the concert world, but such virtuoso pieces do show what was happening in the Middle Ages and how large-scale structures played their part in the development of music. I HAD PURCHASED AN APARTMENT in Engelberg, Switzerland, attracted no doubt by its monastery. I knew that Mendelssohn had stayed there in 1831 and had improvised on a difficult fugue subject set by the Father Prefect. We all grew to like Engelberg and the peacefulness of its town and the Alps. It was there that I did some of my most productive summer work. Invited to Lisbon in 1966, I conducted two Monteverdi works at the theater, II Ballo delle Ingrate and the Combattimento. In the cathedral, it was of course the. Vespers. As the latter was attended by the President and his ministers, we all had to be on our best behavior. Edgar Fleet was singing first tenor, and Leslie Fyson second; it fell to his lot to sing, from a distance, the Magnificat's echo passages. At the rehearsal, he was just about to open his mouth when he felt a hand clapped over his face. It was a military gentleman entrusted with guarding the politicians. We managed to allay his fears, and the echoes were in place during the evening performance. Engaged to conduct a disc of music by Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli for EM I, I had carefully prepared the scores, but no firm decision arrived before we left New York. In Engelberg a message arrived to say "Gabrieli sessions are on. As the scores were still in New York, I hastened to the Music Library in Zurich and obtained permission from my old friend Kurt von Fischer to photocopy their scores so I might prepare them anew. While in London, I also made some special recordings for Vanguard's The Art of Ornamentation, in which I was greatly helped by an ex-pupil, Neal Zaslaw. Other ventures included the complete La cetra by Vivaldi. In June the Ambrosians were in Vienna, recording music for an independent label, but I took advantage of their presence and recorded my "short version" of the Monteverdi Vespers for Vanguard. Leaving at once for Paris, I interviewed von Karajan for a series of films he was producing.

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Herbert von Karajan


A MUCH MISUNDERSTOOD MAN, Herbert von Karajan took his life and his duties seriously. His first major appointment was in the mid1930s at the Aachen Opera, where one of his many tasks was to teach a bass singer how to perform the role of Baron Ochs in Der Rosenkavalier; the voice was good, but the man could not read music. During the early part of World War II, Karajan was challenging Furtwngler in Berlin. Both were known for their support of Jewish orchestral musicians, but the Nazis disliked Karajan because his first wife was half-Jewish. At the height of the Berlin bombardment, he persuaded the pilot of a small plane to take him to Italy, where he learned good Italian and was helped by the British to find occasional engagements. Eventually coming to the notice of Walter Legge, he spent some time building up the Philharmonia. His first records included works by Britten and Vaughan Williams, composers to whom he hardly ever returned. But he was popular with the orchestra, at first led by concertmaster Leonard Hirsch. A local paper sent a reporter to ask, "Why do you work with a Nazi like this?" "He's no Nazi, said Hirsch, "he's a fine conductor!" Karajan admired the precision and phrasing of the orchestral woodwind quartet. "How do you maintain such perfection?" asked the maestro. One of the four principals stood up: "We sleep together. After a while Karajan was conducting all over Europe, and eventually reached the Berlin Philharmonic. These were his greatest years, for he recorded and concertized ceaselessly. He proved to be a commanding figure, and he certainly never bothered to argue a point - yet he was wonderful to work with, and gained the respect of the orchestra at all times. Later he came to New York's Met, bringing his controversial Wagner productions where the lighting rehearsals were known as darkening rehearsals. Towards the end he spent much time editing his TV productions, but he never ceased to record. The Beethoven symphonies he did four times in their entirety. Granted he was a showman, but he was a superlatively good one, and he enriched the world of music ceaselessly. NINETEEN SIXTY-SEVEN the Monteverdi quarter centenary year was the busiest I ever remember, beginning with a lecture at Vassar College. Driving there, I slightly exceeded the speed limit and was hauled off the road by an amiable cop. I apologized and said I was hurrying to Vassar to give a lecture. "OK, he said, Ill make out this ticket just as fast as I can: Lectures and concerts demanded much time to plan and prepare. In New York, my singers, their fares paid by the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, gave two concerts at Hunter College, one at Harvard, and another at Rutgers. Added to these, appearances at Union Theological Seminary and St. Paul's Chapel, both at Columbia University, resulted in a short but worthwhile tour. At the Hunter concerts, I enlisted the help of Kenneth Cooper (harpsichord) and Richard Taruskin (gamba). The Harvard and Rutgers concerts were well-reviewed, and we were warmly welcomed by Henry Kaufman at Rutgers. One of our encores was a piece by Vicentino, "O messaggi del cor to a beautiful text by Ariosto. This may have led the way to a later Vicentino disc in the Vanguard catalogue. In May, Fairfield University singled me out to receive an honourary Doctorate of Humane Letters.

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AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL the Accademia Monteverdiana gave its first Promenade Concert in the BBC series that had begun in 1895, the year of my father's birth. It was an all-Monteverdi concert, and we owed this great opportunity to the kindness and interest of Sir William Glock, Controller of Music for the BBC Third. There were sixteen of us, seated on a special platform in the center of the arena, and if the event was unusual, it can be recalled now with pleasure and gusto. Of course, as our fame and success grew with inbuilt impetus, so too did the range of followers increase, for now the magic name was Monteverdi. We recorded a television program in the grounds and palace of Eltham, interspersing musical works with suitable references to Monteverdi's life. Off to Munich by air, then a rented car to Salzburg. I had invented a new kind of musicologist: one who found the engagements, edited the music, rehearsed and performed it - and drove the car with five singers inside. I had come to the Salzburg date almost by accident. Yehudi had mentioned my name to von Karajan during a Mozart recording session. Although English, I was "from the New World" in one sense, and therefore likely to be able to interview Karajan on the subject of Dvorak's masterpiece. This interview, produced by the legendary Georges Clouzot (director of the film Diabolique), took place in a large studio outside Paris. After the filming, which was for an ongoing TV series, The Art of Conducting, which featured the German maestro and his orchestra, I handed Karajan a few of my recent recordings: "Would you like us to sing at your Festival?" He never played the records, but gave me the name of an assistant in Salzburg. We were accepted, and I submitted a program featuring madrigalian masterpieces by Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Marenzio, Striggio, and a group of Scarlatti pieces to be played by Kenneth Cooper. When the singers and I arrived in Salzburg, I had already canceled the plush hotel chosen for us by the Salzburg crowd. My preference was for a smaller, less pretentious hotel in town. Installing the singers there, I told them they could rest after their labors of the previous evening. I was mistaken. Only a few minutes later, a telephone call had us repair to the hall for microphone tests. We went unwillingly, and I at once saw that there was no harpsichord, only a spinet. I pointed out that Scarlatti sonatas could not convincingly be played on a one-manual instrument and waited until a proper harpsichord arrived. We then tried to "tune" some of the difficult Gesualdo pieces, but, each time we began, some clumsy technician would noisily shatter the atmosphere. The concert was crowded, and went well. But we were not popular with "the management, so no supper invitation was issued. We took ourselves to a restaurant and finally went to bed after an exhausting two days. AFTER THE SALZBURG CONCERT we continued with the rented car and drove to Switzerland, scene of our next concert. The Lucerne Festival, a highly prestigious international affair, was having trouble finding a suitable hall for us. The large one was too large, and our program un- suitable for churches. Dr. Walter Strebi, one of the founders of the festival, suggested a hall in St. Urban, not far from Lucerne. We concurred, and the concert was announced but immediately oversubscribed.

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I offered to give two performances on the day, one early and the other late, but this was thought too risky: so we settled on a converted church in St. Urban. Our admirable press officer was Robin Marchev, still a loyal friend; it was he who made the arrangements for rehearsals and travel come to life. We stayed at the Ring Hotel in Engelberg, where we rehearsed and relaxed. On a day off, we drove to Erlenbach, south of Zurich, where in two long sessions we recorded a disc for Concert Hall (still run by my old friend David Josefowitz), and it was announced as Monteverdi and His Contemporaries. Essentially the Salzburg program, it was now refined and improved. The St. Urban program, almost completely new, included a string quartet and harpsichord. During the intermission I met Pierre Tagmann, a Swiss specialist on Monteverdi. He told me that he planned to come and teach in Los Angeles. We became firm friends and met often in the ensuing years. The singers had to return to England immediately after the concert. This was a pity, since we had all been invited to a special party by a patron of the festival; although surrounded by appreciative guests, there was some disappointment about the absence of the six vocalists. Besides Marchev and Tagmann, we also had the pleasure of meeting the eminent Swiss soprano, Maria Stader. The party following our concert was in complete contrast to the business of leaving "in our stocking feet" at Salzburg. It was a final, graceful gesture on the part of the authorities. Determined to record the Monteverdi seven-part Gloria for EMI in London, I booked the choir and Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. But, on arriving from Engelberg, I found that someone had removed the contents of the BBC bag with scores and parts. They were reprinted and hand-copied at the last minute, and the recording went ahead as planned. By this time I had handed over the family house in London to my parents, then in their early seventies. They liked the house, which was empty for most of the year, and my father enjoyed the garden. But I was making a fearful mistake, for the house was on a steep hill, and my parents, without a car, had to walk up the hill with their purchases. It was sheer thoughtlessness on my part, for I could easily have bought them a house and garden in a warmer climate by the sea. I little realized then that they had but ten years to live. Their elder son, now with so much in the way of resources, thought of everyone else but his parents. He was to be punished for his negligence. BY 1968 ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE FAMILY was coming to the fore. Anthony had made ahobby of tape-recording, and now, at age 17, he took it seriously. Before long he was giving me valuable assistance at sessions, and soon became a reliable engineer. He took a keen interest in recording techniques, and since he stayed in our London house all the year he was able to develop a miniature studio and some useful equipment that he built himself. At the same time, he was given a job at Pye Studios, thanks to John Mosely, later moving to Command (another of John's enterprises), with a branch in Paris. Anthony is now (in 2001) chief engineer in one of New York City's major sound studios. His younger brother Michael followed a similar line, but eventually moved successfully to other branches of computer electronics.

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Faithful Yehudi invited us to Gstaad, where over the years we had given four concerts of vocal chamber music. Later in the year, when I had become known for my interest in medieval music, I involved the singers in the film world. Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn were starring in The Lion in Winter, a story about the early Plantagenets. The composer John Barry sought my advice about medieval music in general, and I gave him some useful melodies and texts. He wrote a gripping score, which the singers recorded under his direction. His setting of "Rex regis rectissime" as the title background was particularly arresting, with its Orff-like rhythmic thrust. In this same year I began the project of recording all the examples in the well-known textbook, Historical Anthology of Music. Eventually spreading over six Musical Heritage Society LPs, it covered a vast area of musical history. Anthony served as engineer for most of these, which were recorded in churches in and out of London. The next project was a translation of all the letters of Monteverdi. Transliterations had appeared in an edition by Malipiero, but they were highly corrupt; I made fresh transliterations from manuscript sources in Mantua and Florence and worked with facsimiles from Paris, Rome, and London, a lengthy task. The actual translation followed, and in this the libraries of Columbia University proved extremely useful, for I had to trace all Monteverdi's allusions to musicians, mentioned usually by Christian name only. My projected five-year task would turn into a fifteen-year marathon. Graduate teaching at Columbia from 1968 onward was enlivened by a meeting with Henryk Kaston, a violinist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra; he was also a skilled maker of bows and jewelry. With a friend, he had purchased a pochette (dancing master's violin) by Guarnerius, and my task was to write about it and place it in context. I greatly enjoyed this, and was handsomely rewarded by the generous Henryk. He also had the agreeable habit of offering me seats at the Opera, which I shared with family and graduate students. Henryk was one of many New Yorkers who made the days seem shorter and more delightful. I was "on a roll, producing articles, music editions, and gramophone records with extraordinary frequency. My appearances as a guest lecturer or conductor were fitted in when appropriate. Did this make me a popular faculty member? Decidedly not! My colleagues saw me disappear into the European maelstrom once a year for three or more months, yet I still continued as a "producing scholar. By 1970, I had completed six years at Columbia teaching a wide range of courses for undergraduates and graduates, as well as two graduate seminars. I made as much use as possible of my growing collection of color slides, and my recordings, which often included up-to-date material I had only just brought to light. When expedient, I involved graduate students in such ongoing projects as Music in Honour of St Thomas of Canterbury. They responded by transcribing some of the medieval pieces, which were published in London. I was coming up to my sabbatical, granted for 1970 and part of 1971. I left for London on June 30th, and Daphne went almost at once to the Canterbury Festival, where she gained one of her earliest experiences of stagecraft by working with E. Martin Browne on a new production of Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. At the same time, I was asked to open the Festival with Music in Honour of St Thomas of Canterbury. We were a dozen musicians: a consort of vocal soloists and a handful of instrumentalists, and, as we began the program with the responsory "Jacet granum" (The grain lies covered by chaff), I

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experienced a strange sensation. This music, especially transcribed for the concert, was being performed in the cathedral for the first time in seven or eight centuries. It was the same for the rest of the program. Everything was new and unfamiliar; I was opening up an unsuspected world. In this way my sabbatical began, and the family soon left for Geneva, where I had decided to spend most of my time working on the Monteverdi letters. I ENJOYED WORKING FROM THE CENTRES OF EUROPE, for I found that Geneva led easily to Italy and to France and Germany. It was also convenient for the music festivals of Lucerne and Gstaad. The Accademia appeared twice at Lucerne and several times at Yehudi's festival, where our first concert was entitled "Music & Poetry. This gave us an opportunity to explore different settings of the same Italian poem, and we also included some French, German, and English poetry set to music by Lassus, Haydn, and Purcell. My experimental vein, already clear at Columbia, constantly reappeared in the festivals at Bath, London, and Windsor. When I returned after my year's leave, I found that the character who had rented my apartment had not forwarded my mail, but had stuffed it behind books on my shelves. He claimed to be a harpsichordist, and had torn pages from my musical volumes to enlarge his repertory. The state of the house was indescribable. I found it difficult to deal with, for I had suddenly been invited to an international congress in Moscow by the Menuhins. Columbia was aflame with political disorder in 1971, with interference from part of the student body and the disagreeable faction that led them. Some of our finest faculty left, and even the provost, Dr. Jacques Barzun, was said to have handed in his resignation. In the end it was not accepted, and the university struggled on. Its reputation fell disastrously, from sixth or seventh to twenty-sixth place. My annual leave-takings from Columbia were beginning earlier and earlier. In 1973 I left for Europe in mid-May, and went at once with a team of twelve musicians to the Bordeaux Festival. As a necessary and unusual preliminary, each had to appear separately at the studio of a West End photographer who produced a dozen pictures that would appear, single file, in the Bordeaux program. On May 19th we set off from London Airport, changing planes in Paris for the Air-Inter flight to Bordeaux. Problems began in London, for Ross Pople, our cellist, was refused entrance to the British Airways plane unless he bought a seat for his instrument. He left on a later flight, sensibly accommodated by Air France. As we arrived in Bordeaux with no sign of Ross, we began our rehearsal without a cello continuo. He arrived much later, and was such a good reader that he blended into the ensemble without too much difficulty. The concert, which was the closing concert of the season, took place in the courtyard of the building famous for its magnificent white Bordeaux - Chateau dYquem. M. Chaban-Delmas, Mayor of Bordeaux, led a delegation of notables and, apart from one fluke, the concert went well. In the last item, an ode by Purcell, the final chorus lost its last few bars, because I had a memory lapse. The musicians accepted my cut-off beat, and the work ended there. Everyone applauded, and only a Purcell scholar would have noticed the difference.

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Musicians and audience then went into the chateau and enjoyed a late party hosted by the Count and Countess de Lur-Saluces, who took us into a small room, congratulated us on our performance, and presented each one of us with a precious bottle of Chateau dYquem. My son Anthony had come down from the studio where he worked in Paris, and we travelled back together on Ltendard, one of the crack trains of the day. This over, Sheila and I spent a month at the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio, on Lake Como. I worked on the Monteverdi letters, while she painted the landscape. In July came another adventure: an invitation by Roger Blanchard to his festival at Ampus in Provence. Our first concert took place in a 12th-century church in the village of Ampus, a delightful setting for our varied program of medieval and baroque music. Then, in two days, on to Le Thoronet, a 14th-century abbey with gorgeous acoustics. This time it was a concert for the public and for television, and there was much Monteverdi.

Lillian, a Private Romance


FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS I had a typical, happy life with home, children, travel. Then in 1974 things began to wear and to change. My marriage showed signs of strain. My wife and I informed our friends that it would be an amicable separation. The children were twenty-four, twenty-one, and eighteen, becoming gradually independent. I was invited to teach for a year at Santa Barbara. Sheila and I split up amicably, but I was desolate. One day, walking around an isolated pool of sea-water we called the lagoon, I found myself with one of the teaching assistants, a student of mine, Lillian Kwasny. We so enjoyed our walk and our talk that we decided to let the friendship develop naturally. She was thirty-seven, I was fifty-three. She had recently come out of hospital. It was a hysterectomy, I later learned, but I could at that time not guess the cause. She had a little terrier called Scherzo (her master's thesis was on Monteverdi's Scherzi musicali of 1607), and she had a Volkswagen she had christened Comet. We took to going on long drives, and one ended in a seaside village, Pismo, where we found a private hotel called Sea Gypsy. It was run on the same lines as my place in Engelberg: private suites belonging to a designated owner. Suddenly I felt on home ground, and we did not leave that evening. All we remembered was the gentle, distant lapping of the waves in the peace of the night. We both felt that years had fallen away; disappointments, frustrations, evils. There were to be more than we could ever guess. But that night and others like it were perfect. On the morning after, I proposed and was accepted. Not yet divorced, I was jumping the gun. We kept our trysts as secret as we could, and they laid the foundation for a nine-year association that drew us to hitherto unknown heights and depths. In anticipation of the appointment to Santa Barbara, I had bought a large house in which I placed all my books, records, and files. Lillian soon brought in hers, and we were happy in so many rooms, carrying on our work independently. Companionship without interference. I settled down to the task of writing a final version of the Monteverdi translation, while Lillian busied herself with teaching music in a nearby community college. Appointed to the university, my contract had not come through, and indeed never would.

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We were supremely happy. I did not know then that Lillian (Leocadia, in Polish) was hypoglycemic, and I had a poor understanding of the complaint. Its main result was an unpredictability of emotions and a strong reaction to overdoses of wine. I then learned of her childhood in Pennsylvania, the cruelty of her grandparents, strict Polish Catholics. I learned of her unwanted pregnancies at the hands of faithless lovers, of her mother's insistence that unwanted children be given up for adoption. This was the tender, beautiful, sensitive, intelligent creature I had come to regard as my own. Many precious friendships bridged the gap between New York and Santa Barbara. The Menuhins were constant in their interests, so too were Newton and Lucile Gregg, who had regarded me as a loyal consultant to Gregg International Press, which had an active music section. I began by suggesting reprints of the great German classic editions: Bach, Handel, Palestrina, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and to these were added facsimiles of French and Italian operas. I also suggested theoretical works like Zarlino's three volumes, and others. When the Greggs moved to California the program continued, Lillian and I visiting Newton and Lucile in the San Francisco area on several occasions. It had been a splendid relationship, like that with the Menuhins: never a cross word, never a dull moment. I could not help comparing it with the university world, so often dotted with disagreeable figures. Why was this? I believe there was an element of frustration in some university members. They were so often disappointed singers or pianists who had taken refuge within the walls of academe. I must have been particularly annoying to them, since I enjoyed both music-making and musicology. Despite some dark-clouded warnings, we were steadily involved in creative work. Every year we visited Europe to make recordings. Smaller firms like Nonesuch and Vanguard commissioned records from time to time, and in many of these Lillian took an active part. When she heard the Concert Hall record of Beethoven folksong settings, she insisted on more, with the result that we made two further records, including his settings of English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish songs. Fond of Ireland in so many ways, she specialized in its music and literature. And since my singers were of Scottish, Welsh, English, and Irish origin, we could always count on authentic accents. These daylong sessions, which utilized Anthony with his latest equipment, accounted for two of four held in Westminster School Hall. The other two sessions yielded a disc of music by Alessandro Grandi and one containing a skillful compilation of plainsongs conducted by John Blackley. In Santa Barbara everything appeared to be new and inviting. It was not so for long. Although I had been asked to stay on permanently, there was clearly a plot afoot that effectively prevented my appointment. While the university in general behaved horribly, a few friends broke through the circle of mistrust and suspicion. When my position was "mysteriously" canceled, a lawyer friend, John Ellis, drove out to the campus in 1976 and spoke with the vice-chancellor personally. It did no good then or at any later stage, so thoroughly had the plot been set. It was a hideous compound of jealousy, immorality, and political intrigue. Not content with having acted cruelly towards me, the university also created difficulties for Lillian. In time, although we were constantly in the hands of lawyers, we continued with our own work and triumphed.

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I extended my interest in music and liturgy, and made a collection of books on the Sarum rite: facsimiles such as the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society editions of the Gradual and Antiphonary, text editions of the Sarum Breviary and the Missal. They proved invaluable on many occasions. Eventually many went to the library of my friends John Blackley and Barbara Lachman, at the time co-directors of La Casa del Libro in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Liturgical interests continued with an edition of Monteverdi's Christmas Vespers. Working on the letters, I had noticed that there were many references to Vespers for Christmas, yet no settings could be found among his published music. Acting on a suggestion found in one of Monsignor Biella's articles, I decided to look into the later published collections: the Selva morale e spirituale and the book of posthumous psalms. From these I compiled a Vespers-set which the Accademia Monteverdiana first performed in St. John's, Smith Square, London. Later we took the new edition to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, a vast cathedral in Washington, D. C. There I had the satisfaction of conducting the Vespers in a liturgical setting, for a church dignitary officiated. On a completely different wavelength, we also experimented with The Beggars Opera. This had been "arranged" in countless ways, but we wanted to make a scholarly yet practical edition, and transposed the ill-fitting songs into related keys. For the recording, we made use of a splendid room in a house still owned by a dear old friend, Lady Susi Jeans, widow of a former Astronomer Royal. The finished result appeared on three labels, one German and two American. Once again Lillian was an active session-supervisor, and ended by writing some of the notes as well. The marriage lasted for nine years and brought forth a range of productions, including books, articles, and records. We were very happy in this association, which owed its success to the fact that we worked at leisure, never forcing the pace, and always leaving ample time for reflection. It was a time in my life when

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I finally learned how to relax, yet was continually spurred on by kind and enthusiastic help. Santa Barbara formed a perfect background to all this, and for that alone I must always be grateful to it. In her last years, my mother came to stay with Lillian and me. Although frail when she arrived, she was nursed by Lillian and taken on many a tour around the county's beauty spots. It was a wonderful finale. Lillian played the piano well enough to become a music therapist, brightening the lives of old people at establishments in and around Santa Barbara, and while she was away I worked on various projects, mostly writing and record-making. The records were done in London, where we spent part of each summer. In our large house on Las Tunas Road, we both had our "space, a music room for each, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, and a large and lovely garden. Like my father, Lillian loved living things and rejoiced at their growing. We cultivated many kinds of trees and flowers. Thus isolated, we nevertheless had friends with whom we exchanged visits, including Ruth Michaelis and the Geiringers just nearby. To our joy, people would travel thousands of miles to keep in touch. The children, whom Lillian liked, paid occasional visits. In our social life, Lillian would plan "islands" on the calendar. If she found two or three days with no engagements, she would pencil 'round the dates and proclaim an island. Then we would take a drive to anywhere, and enjoy nature, the sea, the mountains, and good fresh air. The local concert scene we would take in eagerly, with visiting orchestras and soloists. One day, Yehudi gave a concert with his chamber orchestra; we always kept in touch with him and Diana, both by then dear friends. Yehudi asked us to help with his Music of Man video project, and we leapt into the fray. The scripts, which Yehudi would have to read in English and French, were compiled by a commercial writer, and Lillian and I were engaged to correct them. Some sentences were almost unbelievable: after writing his third symphony, Beethoven sat down and wrote his fourth. Strangely, our rewrites never showed up in Yehudi's mail. At one meeting in a Los Angeles hotel, Diana came forward and placed a slender arm on my shoulder. "Now then, prof, what's happening about these scripts?" They had of course been consigned to the rubbish bin. As soon as the Menuhins grasped the situation, they called a summit meeting in Portland, Oregon, where Yehudi was due to play a series of Elgar performances. In due course, an envelope arrived at Las Tunas containing first-class tickets for us both, and we spent an enjoyable but hardworking four days, sharing the same hotel and meeting at meals twice a day. In revising the impossible scripts, I suggested the use of lines drawn beside the portions of text that Yehudi approved of and in this way the project went forward, eventually resulting in an acceptable publication. In this and similar ways we overcame most difficulties. Lillian had been a traveller since her youth, visiting many exotic and unfamiliar parts of the world. With my encouragement, she ventured on. We made records in London with my favorite musicians, and Lillian became an expert session supervisor, producing Monteverdi's Christmas Vespers, The Beggars Opera, and English Christmas Music. We traveled together all over Switzerland, a country she adored. In America, there were journeys to the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, San Francisco, Seattle, and Victoria, Canada, with an enjoyable summer at Ann Arbor, thanks to an old friend, Gwynn McPeek. Many were the trips to New York City, where she had relatives. But in the midst of travel, always work. We must have produced more than a dozen records in those nine years.

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One summer, Yehudi invited us to Gstaad, scene of his annual festival. But disaster overtook us. A friend had wined and dined us too well, and, when we returned to our hotel, Lillian had an attack of hypoglycemia. It was the night before our departure from London to Gstaad: fatefully, my last concert there. I left for Switzerland, she flew back to Santa Barbara. When eventually I returned to California, I discovered that she had moved her furniture out to set up house on the other side of town. But after a few days she telephoned, saying "Come for tea and a swim. That was how it was: one could never be sure. Hypoglycemia sometimes has the effect of eradicating part of the memory, so that, when the subject returns to normal, all remembrance of a deed or mishap has vanished. I finished my edition of the Monteverdi letters, and she, rising at six in the morning, compiled a masterly index. The storms passed, work went on, but ultimately there came a serious breakdown. I had done my best, and so had she. I heard years later that she had suffered a crippling accident. I never saw her again and believe her to be deceased - but I shall never forget her. Requiescat in pace. IN JANUARY OF 1977, my father had died, and in November of that year (after the happy visit to Santa Barbara) my mother followed him. Both were aged 81, nine times nine, figures that rang in my head and heart. I did not know what I was doing, although the Monteverdi project was completed and published. Despite remaining in touch with the children, I was not a happy man.

Yehudi Menuhin
AFTER PROLONGED COOPERATION in many musical areas, Yehudi and I faced a new challenge: that of political intrigue. In 1974 I had been invited to teach at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Let it be clear that I never applied for any of the American teaching posts I held. I would not dream of depriving an American scholar of his or her rightful position. The university had just lost a senior scholar, and the need was to replace him quickly. At first I refused, but pressure was increased to the point where I could no longer resist. A definite salary offer was made, and I accepted, making my way to Santa Barbara in the summer of 1974. When I arrived, the salary was not what had been promised and agreed upon, but I decided to stay since it was a year's appointment only. By next term, the university offered me a permanent post, fully pensioned, to replace the one I was leaving at Columbia.

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I was advised to buy a house for my extensive library and prepare for teaching in 1975. But they offered no allowance for the moving of my books and personal effects. That was not the way Columbia had behaved in 1962. Not wishing to appear difficult, I said nothing. I gathered references, as requested, and sent in my materials. A lapse of several weeks followed, and on the day escrow closed on my house, it became known that the post had been canceled. No amount of public or private enquiry revealed the reasons. I felt that I was being tricked, and I was. I told Yehudi of this development, and he wrote an immediate letter that I delivered to the Vice-Chancellor. No apology or explanation was offered, but I later discovered that a University of California professor had left his position at Oxford in suspicious circumstances. This was Joseph Kerman, who returned to his post at Berkeley, which he ought to have resigned on being appointed to Oxford. Clearly he had decided that, if Oxford had let him go, he would take revenge on the next Englishman who ventured into the University of California. People who know this history of events are horrified that such a betrayal could take place within the realms of academe. Yehudi stressed the injustice of the case (at the end of which there was a farcical lawsuit resulting in no proper compensation for myself). Here is his letter... I have known Denis Stevens for some twenty years, and have always had cause to admire his scholarship and his passion for music. There are not many musicologists who are as dedicated to hearing the works they understand, to coaching a performance as Denis Stevens has done over these last de- cades with his own Accademia Monteverdiana and other ensembles, in many of which I have played myself. I was therefore delighted to learn of his appointment to the University of California at Santa Barbara, California being my own home and Santa Barbara a favourite spot, not only culturally important, but musically well on its way to becoming a mecca for teachers and students alike. The appointment commenced on 1st July 1974, and it was enthusiastically supported by the unanimous recommendation of the senior faculty of the university's music department at Santa Barbara. Further support came from allover the world, not least from Yale, Harvard, and Columbia. Following a year's Visiting Professorship at Santa Barbara, Columbia University generously agreed to release Professor Stevens from his position as Professor of Music there as of 30th June 1975, so that he might accept Santa Barbara's offer of a permanent post from 1st July 1975. However, an abrupt volte-face occurred when Denis Stevens received a letter from Professor Wendell Nelson, Chairman of the Department of Music at Santa Barbara, dated 1st August 1975, which informed him that "the Music Department has withdrawn its recommendation for your proposed appointment. Professor Stevens made every effort to discover the reason for this surprising action, but was unable to uncover any evidence which one way or another had diverted the Music Department's attention from their responsibilities to the consideration of unfounded, or at least unknown, rumours.

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It is my conviction that in a democratic country no man may stand accused of a crime of which he is not informed. It is quite understandable that in every profession there are people who would spread evil of their own manufacture, and equally it is certain that they wish neither their motives nor their identities to be exposed. In the circumstances, therefore, there are only three possible modes of response to the justified legal redress now being sought by Denis Stevens: 1. He is reappointed to his post; or 2. He is financially compensated for the earnings he would have accrued in this post for at least the next ten years; or 3. He takes the case to court and is shown under due process of law the incriminating evidence. There can be no doubt of the following: 1. That this case and the present situation cannot possibly harm Denis Stevens-his reputation is too well established, too assured, he is too loved and respected by his colleagues and wide audiences all over the world to worry about that. 2. That he, together with his students and colleagues, will have been put to much inconvenience, expense, disappointment and frustration, all of which demand retribution. 3. That his friends, together with him, will pursue the case to its ultimate conclusion. Yehudi Menuhin, Hon. Doctor, U. of California at Santa Cruz. LILLIAN'S AND MY FRIEND ENID FRAME-THOMSON, half sister of Sir Arthur Bliss, gave me lunch one day and said, The University has treated you in a horrible way. I would like to help you, if I may. She then offered an enormous sum of money. I thanked her and said I would telephone in two or three days. But it was her husband, Tom, who telephoned first: Enid died yesterday. Devastated, but on her account, not on my own, I resolved to cherish my friendships with the dead. But I decided to leave Santa Barbara. Having invested funds in what turned out to be a dishonest firm professing to take care of elderly people trying to live off their capital - caught, in fact, among three such firms - after a short time I was all but ruined. We resolved to sell the house, and I began to make enquiries about a move back to England. Lillian had announced her plan to look after her stepfather, who was not in the best of health.

Leopold Stokowski
I HEARD Stokowski conduct Stravinsky's LHistoire du Soldat when he was about 87 years old. He wore no glasses, sported no hearing aid, and conducted from a miniature score. The locale was a recording studio in midtown Manhattan, and the pickup groups obviously had been carefully chosen. He was quiet, authoritative, and supremely capable. In the intermission he talked about the problems of teenagers: he had two at the time. Still a great maestro, he had enjoyed a remarkable career, which since has been welldocumented in Oliver Daniel's book.

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He was born in what is now Marylebone High Street, London W1, and as a boy sang in Marylebone Parish Church Choir. He attended the Royal College of Music, and heard the first season of Henry Wood's Proms in 1895. New York, Munich, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia came later. He was never short of ideas, and as an orchestral trainer he was second to none. The influence of Artur Nikisch and the German school of conducting came early to the fore, and he was soon to adopt such special phrases as Bogenfrei (free bowing) and Notenfrei (don't look at the notes). His name had been Stokowski for at least three generations, and he never changed it. The "Stokes" legend should be associated with his younger brother, who did change "Stokowski" to "Stokes" while running a limousine company. His rise from church organist to the lights of Hollywood ranks as one of the most remarkable stories in music. The number of his premiere performances is spine-chilling, and the particular chapter on the Schoenberg Violin Concerto (in which he fought the trustees and finally won the performance with Louis Krasner) is almost unbelievable in its sheer persistence. In early music he was also an innovator, giving U. S. premieres of Monteverdi's Orfeo and Vespers. We shall never see his like again.

John Mosely
JOHN MOSELY, who died at the age of 62 on October 7, 1995, in an aircraft accident in the United States, was a pioneer of stereophonic sound. In New York one day in 1957, I met the enterprising record producer Beverly Merrill, to whom I mentioned my Tomkins book and announced my ambition to record some of this music, especially the stereo pieces. She lost no time in recommending the English sound engineer John de Sola Mosely. Back in London, while correcting proofs of my book Thomas Tomkins, a letter arrived from Beverly with a contract to make two discs for her firm, Experiences Anonymes. I sought out John Mosely, at that time an engineer in his late twenties. He agreed to record the music, using (as I well remember) equipment partially borrowed from other companies, and we recorded two discs, one of sacred and one of secular music, with the Ambrosian Consort and the In Nomine Players. I had no idea of the theory or practice of stereo, but was amazed at what I heard on playback. One was really hearing "solid" sound, heightened by definite leanings to left and right. John had achieved a splendid stereo balance within the spacious acoustic of St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield. We edited the masters, mono and stereo separately, throughout the night. He left for New York next morning with the tapes in his attach case. Despite the patronizing attitudes of older recording industry colleagues, John knew that he had in his hand-luggage something fabulous and far-reaching. He also knew that the music could not then be issued on disc, since no agreement had yet been reached on methods of cutting. Undeterred, he arranged for his product to be published as stereo tapes. He travelled widely, extending his expertise in recording and classical music to business administration and international finance. Producing impressive records of Boult, Barbirolli, and Scherchen, he also dealt almost simultaneously with Louis Armstrong, Charles Aznavour, and later Elton John.

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His energy was phenomenal, but he never neglected family and friends, and enjoyed life to the full. In England, he was in charge of recording and technical development for Pye Records and, in the United States, for Night Technologies. In Japan, he modified Sansui's four-channel system into the five channels used in the 1974 film Tommy. When he moved to Hollywood, his 16-Db improvement to 70mm recorded sound won him an Oscar in 1985. On achieving his goals and his laurels, John characteristically moved on to other projects.

Edgar Fleet
BLESS the Third Programme! Filling the urgent need for performers of medieval music in 1948, Edgar Fleet and a select group of singers leapt into the void. They had thought to call themselves the Gregorian Singers, but settled on the Ambrosian Singers, with its suggested taste of divine nectar. A new movement was on its way; growing quickly to a vast pool of singers, the Ambrosians, organized by John McCarthy, began to resemble another musical catchment area, the Vienna Philharmonic, in that it provided all kinds of work, ancient and modern, light and serious, for up-and-coming professionals. In 1959 the Ambrosians, already large, grew to support The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Beecham's performance of the Berlioz Requiem. I even found myself dragged into the performance as an auxiliary baritone, standing next to my old friend John (Jack) Frost. Fleet grasped the essential fact that singers in earlier times had had to cultivate two different types of voice: a powerful one for use in church, and a quieter, more flexible sound for vocal chamber music where light ornamentation was the order of the day. From the liturgy he knew so well, he could project backwards in time with an infallible sense of style. Faced with a 13th-century motet or a Mass cycle in a fourteenth-century rotulus (parchment roll) from the Public Record Office, he unflinchingly sight-read the hard copy, effortlessly convincing the musical world of its authenticity. Taking part in the 1959 world premiere of The Worcester Fragments in Worcester Cathedral, he drew from the plain chant an ineffably beautiful Gaude trope, just as in the same acoustic he subsequently launched the brilliant hockets of an Epiphany sequence. One of the first to establish Monteverdi's Combattimento as a virtuoso vehicle for solo tenor, Fleet sang the composer's original ornamentation for the first time in living memory. He took part in several Proms, filling the Royal Albert Hall as effortlessly as he would sing a lute-song in the studio. He had learned the Catholic repertory while a choirboy at Brompton Oratory, in London, adding Italian and German to his linguistic accomplishments on entering the Royal Academy of Music. A foundermember of the Ambrosians in 1948 and of the Accademia Monteverdiana in 1966, he explored all the known areas of music, besides introducing the modernistic harmonies of Gesualdo's mature madrigals and the later style of Pomponio Nenna and Sigismondo d'India.

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Gastronomically as well as musically, he was often drawn to the Abbey of Le Thoronet in Provence, or to the charms of Bellagio, Lugano, or Schloss Elmau. He helped to put Vicentino, Giaches de Wert, & Cipriano de Rore firmly on the map of pre-classical vocal music, often performing a freshly prepared edition for whatever scholar had transcribed it. In 1957 he took part in the first stereo recording in London of English church music (Tomkins); he also sang in the first English recording to use a Dolby noise-reduction unit (August 1966) in The Art of Ornamentation and Embellishment, which I edited. A reliable and inspiring chorus master, as his years with the English National Opera proved, he combined good discipline with authority and knew how to bring out the best in his men and women. His transatlantic and local "fixing" was little short of a miracle, for he could assemble at short notice a magnificent team of singers and players for film recordings, Promenade concerts, and foreign festivals. In matters of performance and ornamentation, I largely left him to his own excellent devices, so that the textbook flourishes of Conforto, Bovicelli, and Bassano disappeared behind a cascade of notes of which Fleet alone knew the secret. Fleet was a well-built, cheerful man whose abundant sense of humor never left him. His expertise in the plainsong he loved and cultivated from boyhood onwards gave him something unique and special that was acknowledged by all who worked with him. His personal qualities were marked by kindness, loyalty, and consideration for others, his musical ones by a rock-steady reliability no matter what the circumstances. Edgar Fleet was born on June 13th, 1931, and died in London on April 10, 1999.

John Frost
JOHN FROST, a Suffolk man, was drawn to music at an early age and entered King's College, Cambridge, as a choral scholar. His interest in composition led him to the Royal College, where he studied with Herbert Howells. Subsequently a lay clerk at St. Paul's, he was early drafted into the comparatively new world of professional choral singers and ranked as one of the original Ambrosians. The vast amount of chorus and solo work then available made him a "natural" for the many consort and choral groups then flourishing. Composition was temporarily set aside, but Jack did useful work as an arranger and was also a helpful rehearsal pianist. He was a meticulously conscientious team-member, and I well recall admiring a small note- book in which he had written the music and text of some Spanish villancicos we were learning. He turned my AA typescripts into a miniature work of art, from which he fluently sang the verses at concerts or recording sessions. His puns and jokes have gone down in history, notably his rejoinder to the topless morning dress. The singers were doing a Festival Hall performance of Purcell's The Fairy Queen, and everybody had to wear tails. "What we really need, exclaimed Jack, "is a dressless evening bottom.

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A famous musical trick was to play tunes, accurate in rhythm, intonation, and ornaments, by forming an artificial diaphragm with his two hands. It could provide a sonorous bass to his two-part rendition of a hymn tune, or a neat exposition of the main theme of Bach's Concerto for Two Violins. A topping musician, it was at Albert Hall in 1960 that Jack sang as a stentorian bass-baritone. I know this, because the call for extra voices had been so insistent that even I joined in, and relished adding to the strains of the Berlioz "Tuba mirum" by standing in Jack's shadow. He was a wonderful traveling companion, and often came with other members of the Accademia Monteverdiana to Edinburgh, Bath, Gstaad, Salzburg, Lucerne, and America. Adding to a natural gift for friendship, he showed a real concern for his fellow artists and remained a perennially loyal friend long after the printing profession had claimed him. Although he loved his bottle of wine, he never indulged too freely in the Purcellian habit of "Jack thourt a toper, because he was there primarily for music, and it is as a musician that we shall remember him with affection and gratitude. John Frost was born May 22, 1924, and died April 10, 1999. ON NOVEMBER 8, 1984, I was summoned to Buckingham Palace to receive the CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) from the Queen. This award was in recognition of my services to music and musical scholarship. The years from 1987 onwards were full of travel, which I often felt were without a true purpose. I kept in touch with friends and family, Anthony, Daphne, and Michael, wherever they were living. My 70th birthday party, held in Santa Barbara, was an occasion to rejoice with friends and family, also an opportunity to look back. I felt that, despite all the ills that had occurred, I ought to begin serious work again. One day a call came from Italy, and I was invited to produce an edition of the last work Monteverdi published in his lifetime - the Selva morale e spirituale. I knew it would be a colossal undertaking, but I assented at once. Preparatory work was begun, but the business of transcription and realization had to wait until 1993, when I put down roots at Morden College. In that year I left New York and Santa Barbara for good, and travelled to Blackheath for my interview. I was accepted at once, sponsored by Richard Bush, John Mosely, and Dr. Will Reed, an old friend who was already a member of the College. I moved into Morden College on October 18, 1993, and felt immediately at home. Sir John Morden intended the word college to carry its medieval connotation, as a group of people with similar aims. Visitors sometimes assume that some teaching program exists, but apart from occasional classes in French conversation or music appreciation there is little of teaching or formal learning. The men and women have made their contribution to life, and are in retirement. There is an excellent library, and a chaplain who has charge of the religious life of the community. Outings in the College bus take members to the theatre, museums, exhibitions. I soon began to love the life, as it was sensibly ordered and left the individual free to do whatever he or she wished.

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Michael and Daphne visited me in those early days, and they saw at once that I was well-accommodated and led an almost ideal existence. The necessities of life were provided, and I was aware of the importance of the College chapel, which formed a natural part of Sir John Morden's plan. Although my concert life had virtually ceased, I was to give several concerts in the chapel, seeking the assistance of some of my singers and former pupils and friends. One of these, Sir Nicholas Jackson, Bt., had studied with me at the Royal Academy of Music in 1960. He has played organ and harpsichord for us and is now a good friend of the College. I tackled the Selva morale, rising at seven every day to continue the transcribing. Completion and proof-reading took six years, but at last the music and the introduction were finished. The two volumes weigh 8.2 kilograms. Simultaneously I prepared a revised edition of the Monteverdi letters for Oxford University Press, and a revision of the 1610 Vespers. When not working, I took occasional vacations, often in Switzerland, where I still had several trusty friends. Since I had been seriously harmed by financial mischief in California, I telephoned contacts in France, Germany, Italy, and America, saying that I was able to undertake occasional assignments. I wrote many program notes for the concerts at St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York City, where Dr. Gerre Hancock was in charge of the music. In 1995 John Mosely informed me that he was about to record Handel's Messiah in Salt Lake City with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He wanted to revive the fine old edition by Ebenezer Prout. I agreed to help, and prepared a score that kept in most of the Proutisms, cleansing it only of doublings of solo voices by woodwind. I volunteered musical afternoons at the College every month or so, illustrating my talks with cassettes. An annual St. Cecilia concert gave me an opportunity to arrange a concert in chapel. In these I was helped by some of my singers and former pupils and friends. My daughter Daphne, who had introduced me to Morden in the first place, moved from Greenwich and took a flat in Blackheath, which allowed easy access to London. Only a few yards from the College, she soon took part in some of our activities. It was a boon to have her nearby, and we were often able to visit London together, or plan an occasional visit abroad. Her husband, Edgardo, would also visit us from time to time, although work and family duties took him to New York and Florence. Keeping in touch with old friends, I found that John Blackley, whom I had last seen in Baltimore, had moved with Barbara Lachman to a simple but spacious house in Lexington, Virginia. Our friendship took on a new lease in life, and resulted in vigorous, scholarly collaboration. He and Barbara edited my Monteverdi in Venice, published by Associated University Presses in 2001. John accepted copies of all my master tapes, and has listed them on the Internet. Barbaras recent book on Catherine Blake has made a favorable impression already. We hope to produce more as time goes on. Business took me as far as Rome, and Daphne's work in films saw her in St. Petersburg and parts of America. In Santa Barbara a scientist friend, Richard Barker, had settled in Hastings, my mother's birthplace, and I often visit him there. In Surrey, I discovered second cousin Roy Fredericks and his wife Delia, who share my interest in music. New friends include Alex and Donna Townsend and their violinist son Leslie, who takes part in our concerts and enlivens the scene with his charm and resource. A student of Emanuel Hurwitz, he is rapidly making his way in the musical world.

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The Garrick Club continues to be a haven and refuge. It has changed for the better, and is expertly run by a splendid team. Has my life at Morden been an opening? Perhaps so, for I am happier than I have been for a long time, and was recently reconciled with my former wife, Sheila, who now lives at Corfe Castle in Dorset. I still work a little every day, and keep in touch with friends all over the world. Like many other residents of the College, I can say that I have done my part as well as possible. There have been mistakes, to be sure, but (as with Musica Britannica) things came right in the end. MY SOUL THIRSTS AFTER THE LIVING GOD: WHEN SHALL I COME AND APPEAR BEFORE THE FACE OF THE LORD? On April the first, 2004, his question was answered. _________________________________________

A Tribute to Professor Denis Stevens (2 March 1922-1 April 2004)


by Anthony Pryor delivered at Morden College, Blackheath, on Thursday 15th April 2004. It is an honour for me to speak here today at this service for Denis. My own role in his life was akin to a tiny piece of mosaic, fitted very late into the picture, as, in his closing days, he forged a link with Goldsmiths College two or three miles away. Many others in this gathering will have longer, richer memories of him perhaps too full, too complex, for public sharing or utterance and so I shall attempt to find some words to mark this occasion on their behalf, as well as my own. In the public world special occasions will not be needed to remember Denis, since his achievements made him a man that our culture and particularly our musical culture will find it very difficult to forget. He was most famous for his scholarly work on Monteverdi and for the concerts and recordings of his works which he conducted with the Accademia Monteverdiana, of which he was the founder. But over the years, and with the help of many friends including Yehudi Menuhin, the individual members of the Ambrosian singers, the organist Sir Nicholas Jackson, and the critic and scholar Jeremy Noble, he produced a whole series of remarkable events and publications that gradually drew early music into the realm of public consciousness.

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A landmark in this endeavour was his spectacular performance of Monteverdis Vespers in Westminster Abbey in 1962 before an audience of 2000 people, but he also conducted the first-ever Promenade Concert devoted to Monteverdi in 1967, and he published a marvellous translation of Monteverdis letters in 1980 - perhaps his most enduring scholarly achievement.

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Rehearsing Gabrieli for the proms at the Royal Albert Hall, August 13, 1968 But Denis was not just a performer and editor, he was also a famous academic, with a series of professorships in America which culminated in his holding a full Professorship in Musicology at Columbia University in New York for twelve years. Also, for a while, he was editor of the prestigious Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. It is not possible today to list all of his many intellectual and musical achievements, or to survey his work as a radio producer on the BBC Third programme where he arranged some of the earliest broadcasts, not only of Monteverdi, but also of the then scarcely-known Vivaldi. He was the recipient of awards and degrees from many quarters, and in 1984 he was honoured with a CBE for services to music and musical scholarship. He finally returned to London in the 1990s to settle here at Morden College which he found to be supportive, accepting, understanding and collegiate in the best sense of the word - and at a very deep level he greatly valued the care and companionship offered by you all. It is not possible to sum up Denis in a few trite words - after all, he would be the first to point out that they were trite - but, to me it seemed that whatever he did, he always did it with the energy and enthusiasm of an impresario.

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Publicly, this impresario talent displayed itself in his uncanny ability to draw into his musical activities an astonishingly wide range of unlikely participants and well-wishers, including such luminaries as Igor Stravinsky, Sir Adrian Boult, and Nadia Boulanger. It also led him to organize and offer advice to scholars, institutions and performers, whenever the opportunity arose. Many in this gathering will have benefited from his material or intellectual donations, which always came with a characteristic urgent enthusiasm. We at Goldsmiths College are particularly grateful and proud to be the custodians of his unique Monteverdi library, and many others in this room will have reason to remember his generosity. Privately, too, his impresario inclinations were every bit as much in evidence. In his later days it was amusing and lovely to see the determined way in which he carefully orchestrated and scheduled our visits to his room - taking great pains to maintain continuity, to avoid awkward clashes or too much repetition, and seeking always to construct for himself a nicely varied bedside programme, as it were. I once teased him about this: Ah, he replied, old radio producers never die, they simply change their programming responsibilities. I hope the celestial branch of the Musicians Union is ready for him. Of course, most of us here do not need to be reminded that Denis had a strong and complex personality. It was sometimes difficult for him to see beyond the vividness of his own ideas to their effect on others, but everything he did was done with passion and with the intent to bring into focus something that was muddled or obscure. This was difficult to take in some circumstances, but it was also the engine that drove the best aspects of his scholarship and his musical imagination. In the still moments at the end of a life it is sometimes tempting to seek simple truths about people. But it is not their simplicities, it is their complexities that help to weave them into the fabric of our memories, and enable them to live on as a continuing and indelible part of our experience. And so it will be with Denis. He could be dark and light, generous and singular, serious and funny. We shall miss him, and at this moment our hearts go out to his surviving family, for we share their complex sense of loss and mourn his passing. Anthony Pryer Morden College, Blackheath, Thursday 15th April 2004.

Following picture: DWS in Venice conducting the American Youth Chorus at St. Marks Basilica, 1972.

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A Marriage of Music and Art


by Sheila Stevens The links between myself and Denis were forged by music. The Holloways were a London family with both my mother and elder brother, another Denis, being serious musicians. When in 1940 a time bomb fell on our garden in South London we went (the four of us) to an uncle of my fathers in Penn, Buckinghamshire not five miles away from Deniss home at High Wycombe The two musicians who shared a name met at the South Bucks School of Music and played sonatas by Brahms, Elgar and Csar Franck. Excused from turning over the music I could sit in a corner and draw them whilst enjoying it, and the music still runs through my head to day. We had two pianos at home and fellow students came from the Royal College of Music to play with brother Denis so I was always hearing and seeing musical subjects. In 1942 I went to the Chepping Wycombe School of Art and Denis went off to India and I must have made an impression as there were later enquiries about your young sister, does she still draw everything? although we did not meet again until my 21st birthday in 1946 - back in our London home. The war was over and everyone, including me was duly de-mobbed. Romances of wartime were either short-lived or they developed fast. Denis returned to Oxford and I went to the major art school of the day, Camberwell College. I met Denis again and I remember going to an Oxford party and being very impressed. A trip to Covent Garden to hear Strausss Der Rosenkavalier followed and soon after we became engaged and I was given a marquisite ring. I started working at Illiffes Publishing Company and later the BBC Monitoring Centre at Caversham and in 1949 Denis joined the BBC staff as producer for the Third Programme and we were married. We lived in a small house of my fathers at Thornton Heath, with Denis going to the BBC in Portland Place daily. In 1950 our son Anthony was born, and daughter Daphne in 1953. But 1955 was a turning point with the offer of a Visiting Professorship at Cornell University in New York State. That was the first of our American trips but the first time was just a one-term affair and Anthony was left behind with family at school. Once it was established that Denis would be invited to Columbia University in New York City, Anthony came over and that is how we became a peripatetic family. Mickey was born in 1956 we got home just in time so all three children were born in London where we had a house. The years in America must have benefited the family enormously. From their earliest days the three children were surrounded by music - concerts and recordings - and a social life geared to entertaining the famous such as Yehudi Menuhin and Pierre Boulez for lunch at home. Denis was a genial host and ready to mix the drinks and make desserts whilst I cooked. John Barbirolli and Evelyn Rothwell although childless themselves, mingled well and when the children appeared there was a warmth and interest leading to Daphne playing a clavichord made by Tom Goff of Pont Street. I also remember at Cornell and Penn State the visits of English professors in the music and other departments in particular the singer Keith Falkner and his family who were great walkers and taught students to play the game of cricket, and Anthony Blunt the art historian and Poussin expert invited the family back to his home and cooked, afterwards teaching our youngest to swim in Black Moshannon Lake. No one less like a spy and defector could be imagined. At evening parties in London we met musicians like Claudio Arrau, always on the

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move, performing around the world - he kept his next concert date written on his shirt cuff! Denis was always interested in art particularly as it related to iconography and portraits of musicians and was a fine photographer of manuscripts all carefully documented but he also used his skills to make family photos and immaculate albums of our travels and even home movies.

Denis and Sheila, Anthony, Daphne and Michael at the Morteratsch Glacier, 20 May, 1961 The pole shows the regression of the glacier, which moves back a metre or so every year.

During this time the DWS musical outpourings and manifestations took all possible directions, with books, recordings, articles, lectures, conferences and other administration to say nothing of dinner parties and social gatherings. The music festivals of Edinburgh, Bath, Gstaad, Lucerne, and others threw open their doors to our singers and a stay at the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellaggio allowed us to recharge our batteries. I was able to paint while Denis worked. I was always chief proofreader and glad to take part in projects involving music and art such as the translation of Music and Art in Society published by Pennsylvania State University Press in 1962. From this year everything grew to vast proportions and so began the American Dream - music on such a scale that no single person has ever achieved before or since. You will have read it all in this book, and perhaps wondered how it was done, all being of such high quality, of originality and with dedication. It is meteoric, and one can only be filled with amazement at such achievements. After 25 years of treading the path I took a sabbatical or early retirement - back to the visual world, with the children on their way to their goals. Perhaps the 25 years were exhausting but they were also enjoyable. I have opted to finish my days in England and have found Dorset a veritable haven since 1988, although I was very happy once again to meet up with Denis at Morden College, and make peace with him there in his last days.

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Denis in Santa Barbara,1974-84


by Lillian Kwasny-Stevens (Sasha Moore) Even after all these years, a certain kind of day or certain music, unexpectedly heard, locks me in my tracks and, helpless, I am transported twenty or thirty years to a day or time or place in my life with Denis. Sometimes the memories are good, sometimes sad and sometimes tragic. Like silent but friendly wraiths from the past, they enter unbidden, without a May I please and I am surprised by their immediacy and my vulnerability to their power. He came to the beautiful city by the ocean to teach graduate students in the Music Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Fall of 1974 at the request of Peter Racine Fricker, the late Professor of Composition and longtime friend of his: how he left, years later, I cannot say for I was no longer at his side. At the time though, I was a graduate student in Musicology in the Masters program and a Teaching Assistant. I shared an office with his TA and we came to be on friendly terms, the three of us often having lunch together. The students loved him and, in time, Denis was offered a position as tenured Professor of Music . The departments goal was to build the graduate program in musicology. Our inclination towards the other was so natural that by the end of term in June, he'd come to Hemet, a small town fifty miles west of Palm Springs, to meet and formally ask my parents for my hand in marriage and by the summer of 1975, he took me to England as his intended. I met his family while beginning work with him and the Accademia Monteverdiana on recordings, concerts and radio for what would be nearly ten years. We were already settled into our beautiful home on Las Tunas Road in Santa Barbara, perched on a 'saddle' in what is called the Riviera of the town. Our views stretched over the city to the ocean and horizon on one side and the lofty Santa Ynez mountain range, reaching 5,000 ft, on the other. By the summer, however, UCSB had withdrawn its offer of a tenured position to Denis who had already resigned his position as Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York City. I am probably one of a handful, perhaps the only one, who knows what really happened with Denis's appointment that summer. The events preceding the lawsuit remain with me: they will not be published here or anywhere. The failure of his appointment to the Music Faculty at UCSB was aided by jealousy and bungling on the part of the University and abetted, on Denis's side, by fear and pride.

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Working out the balance in the Lassus Seven-part Magnificat Westminster Cathedral Promenade Concert, 22 August, 1974

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With a November wedding planned in Palm Springs, the future was uncertain but I looked forward to a life with Denis and believed that love would surely, if not overcome all, at least see us through difficulties as united hearts. And so the summer of 1975 predicted our future: the UCSB lawsuit would become an ugly and dissonant ide fixe contrasting with our lives of productive work, projects, travel, family and friends in the US, England and Europe. My husband's energy and brilliance for performance, recording, teaching and writing continued unabated. At the 1975 sessions in London, I met the singers - the core and heart of Deniss Accademia. They were always my singers to him and a talented group they were: Patricia Clark, Ursula Connors, Shirley Minty, Nigel Rogers, John Noble, and the unforgettable Edgar Fleet who became a close friend to me and whose death a few years ago was untimely. Four records were produced for Nonesuch and Vanguard labels: two of the Beethoven Folk Song Settings, a Dictionary of Gregorian Chant directed by the brilliant John Blackley and the music of Alessandro Grandi, Music for San Marco, Venezia: who can forget Edgars luscious solo of Grandi's motet, O quam tu pulchra es ? We recorded in Dean's Yard, Westminster Abbey. On Day One of the session, the IRA telephoned to announce a bomb threat at the Abbey. What to do! Anthony and Michael, Denis's sons, had already set up the equipment and recording spots; we expected the musicians at any moment. The singers and pianist would be OK: they carried their music. But what of the cellist and violinist (all three instrumentalists were from the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music) who carried their music and instruments in.... cases! What might the Bobbies suspect? Denis said, Why don't you go out and, with your American accent, explain to the Bobbies that musicians are arriving and two will be carrying cases?. The Bobbies seemed amused when I said, Oh, it's not like Chicago and Al Capone; these cases have something better in them than guns... they're carrying musical instruments!. I knew what the musicians looked like and, peering into oncoming cars, signaled the Bobbies A-OK. When the musicians with cases arrived, the Bobbies, in the spirit of the moment, conducted them in with elegant gesture, turning and moving in courtly measure. London's finest and I hugged at the end of it all. Ah, God bless them, every one! How often do strangers bring trust as well as humor to moments of crisis and danger? Anthony was the recording engineer and I kept book for all four sessions and, later, co-wrote program notes for the Beethoven folk song settings albums. Back home in Santa Barbara, after Denis finished editing the heavy reels of music and had sent them off to Nonesuch and Vanguard, the reality of our situation was clear. There was no university job, no seminars to prepare, no students rapping impatiently at the door to see him.

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DWS, Lillian, Jill Gomez and Parick Carnegy, London 1981 There was, however, the Monteverdi Letters. He had the gift of time to complete, uninterrupted, the magnum opus that had consumed him for decades. With his magnificent library and resources in place, he set to work. Soon enough, I compiled the index and, in time, we proofread by reading aloud to each other - twice - exchanging parts after the first proof was completed. It was published, to critical acclaim, by Faber & Faber in 1980. They gave Denis a lovely party in London. Happily, Patrick Carnegy, of Faber, was in attendance and was utterly charming. Later, we met his talented wife, the singer Jill Gomez. Denis completed a second book - Musicology: A Practical Guide published 1980 in London and by Schirmer the following year in the US. Other projects loomed as well: there were two visiting professorships, scores of radio programs, two more recordings (Id have sworn we did eight but can only recall six. How do people write memoirs replete with verbatim conversations occurring fifty years earlier, I wonder), two professional conducting occasions and a television series. One summer when Denis was in England, the telephone rang at Las Tunas road. A beautifully modulated voice with mid-Atlantic accent said: Ah, is that you, Lillian? This is Yehudi. Is Denis there?. (It turned out that both men were in London.) Id met Yehudi and Diana Menuhin when they invited us to lunch at their beautiful chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland but I still felt a frisson of excitement because Yehudi was, to my way of thinking, one of those gifted beings completely in touch with the universe.

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It seemed a television series, The Music of Man, was in the works and Yehudi wanted a musically knowledgeable writer whom he trusted to parse the script and write the sections having to do with classical music. Over the next year, we met Yehudiana twice to discuss changes and new material. Once, in Portland, Oregon where he beautifully played Sir Edward Elgars Concerto for violin and orchestra in B minor - especially thrilling to hear Yehudi with this work because, as a very young man, he performed it with Sir Elgar himself at the podium. We later met in Los Angeles where Yehudi gave a wonderful reading of Concerto for violin and orchestra in D minor by Jean Sibelius. Denis was responsible for the section on Medieval and Renaissance music. He took care to choose the most beautiful and representative examples of illuminations and music from his own collection. How refreshing! A series on music that doesn't begin with the Baroque. He and the Accademia participated on camera for the Early Music segments: Gabrielis In Ecclesiis at Canterbury Cathedral (standing in for San Marco in Venice)was filmed late one night; the next day the singers filmed English madrigals. One of the film directors (a group of them had earlier visited us at Las Tunas Road) grabbed me, uttered a stage direction and placed me in front of the camera yelling Action!. The scene in a pub where a lady with long brown hair, wearing a red blouse is seen talking, is the one in question and I am noticed only if you do not blink or sneeze. Thus, my career in television. Oh well: ma fin est mon commencement et mon commencement ma fin, as Machaut used to say.

Filming Gabriellis In Ecclusiis for the CBC in Canterbury Cathedral, 31 May 1978. Right: Trinity Boys Choir, Edgar Fleet, Paul Esswood, Stephen Roberts

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Two visiting professorships came Deniss way. Alec Harmon invited Denis to occupy the Brechamin Chair of Musicology at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. We drove there in five days from Santa Barbara enjoying the beauty of northern California, Oregon and Washington. Denis was popular with the students in seminar and the early music performing group. During a break in the semester, we crossed to Canada and enjoyed an unforgettable High Tea at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. The second position, in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, was also great fun. Denis taught several classes and conducted the Early Music group in preparation for their summer Renaissance Faire. He looked resplendent in his costume - the modern-day loafers adding a distinctive touch - and a good time was had by all. Once again, he was popular with the students and the faculty there were delightful. Two public performances also occupied him. One was at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. where he conducted a previously unknown Vespers by Claudio Monteverdi; the other was the Menuhin Festival in Gstaad where selected Scherzi Musicali (my Masters thesis ultimately published by Novello & Co) were premiered. Other free-lance projects were ongoing in Santa Barbara. We wrote scripts based on Deniss vast library of Accademia recordings and concerts which were sold to the BBC and its equivalents in South Africa, Canada and Australia. The narration and editing was done in the foyer of our home where Denis and Anthony, years earlier, had set up what he called his ideal editing studio.

DS at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC conducting Monteverdis Christmas Vespers in a liturgical performance, 1979

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DWS rehearsing at the Gstaad Festival, 1981. Our great friend, the bon vivant and raconteur par excellence, Pierre Tagmann translated many of those scripts into German. These were sold to radio stations in Germany and Switzerland. At the time, Pierre was Professor of Music at the University of Southern California (USC) and many weekends he drove to our home: we worked hard, ate and drank well, talked and laughed deeply. His beautiful wife, the late Barbara Tagmann, was a psychiatrist and though her practice was in Germany, she visited Pierre as often as possible. They were wonderful friends to us and the path between their home in Rancho Palos Verdes and ours was well used. At least two more albums came into being: The Beggars Opera with orchestrations 'in the style' by Denis we had driven to the Huntington Library in Los Angeles for research and study of the Beggars Opera (Gay/Rich) manuscripts. It was recorded at the beautiful country estate of the late Lady Susi Jeans. Once again, the singers did wonderful work and Nigel Rogers was a perfect MacHeath. The other album was A Christmas Anthology for Midland Bank International who wanted to give their special customers a unique holiday gift and Denis was commissioned to direct the musical project. I'd long dreamed of a Lessons and Carols with famous actors as the readers: Denis suggested it and Midland secured the services of five actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company including Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Emrys James, Michael Pennington, Norman Rodway and David Suchet.

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The music ranged from anonymous works of the Middle Ages to music by William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, Samuel Wesley, Richard Pygott, Henry Purcell and Alun Hoddinott; the singers included Julie Kennard, Martin Warr, Shirley Minty, Paul Esswood, Ashley Stafford, Ian Partridge, Peter Hall, Edgar Fleet, Michael George, and Roderick Earle. The consummate musician, Leslie Pearson, played solo organ and also with the Ensemble of Early Instruments. Choral director and teacher, David Squibb brought the Trinity Boys Choir from Croydon to add the wonderful timbre that only the voices of young male singers can produce. It is a truly magnificent realization of words and music, in my opinion, and is best described in Denis's words as A sequence of Bible readings and music from the British Isles. I think it is one of the finest works of his career. In this day of CDs and DVDs, I wonder how many patrons of Midland Bank still have this wonderful Anthology on LP. Not bombs this time, but water, made the Anthology, already an unforgettable series of sessions, even more unforgettable. For one session, a fierce rainstorm sent sheets of rainwater rushing down a wall, with terrific speed and volume, in the room where the recording equipment was set up. The engineer and I were stunned but soldiered on. The noise was deafening though we managed to hear the music in a vague sort of way through earphones. Fortunately, it was the last set of the day. Denis said it was shocking, having come in 'high and dry' as it were, from the sanctuary, to see us. The engineer and I were huddled, like two forlorn ducks, in rain gear, over the paperwork and equipment, loyally doing our tasks whilst freezing cold rainwater cascaded down the wall onto the floor - fortunately pooling yards away from where we and the electrical equipment were. We packed up and repaired to a beautiful, warm, cozy pub for sustenance and comfort.

Denis and Lillian at the Garrick Club. Photo by Eric Fenby, 1981

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As dear to Denis's heart as London was, so was his club, The Garrick, in Covent Garden. Named after the actor David Garrick when it was established in 1831, its membership comes from, by and large, the creative and performing arts community. No wonder he loved it! From a simple exterior entry, one ascends the stairs to a world of beauty, theatrical art, rarified conversation and excellent cuisine. We had many wonderful culinary and social experiences there dining with Yehudiana, Robert and Ingrid Layton (treasures of my heart), Llewellyn Jones as well as an unforgettable luncheon one day with Eric Fenby which had an unexpected and lasting impression. Eric was a delight: he was a soft-spoken, understated and quiet man (a surprise, at first) but what else could he have been to survive as emanuensis to Frederick Delius? Among other subjects, he kindly gave me instructions on how to brew a good pot of tea for my English husband (with a wink and a nod), and we listened to his views on English music. The lasting impression was when I took a photo of Denis and Eric outside of the Garrick: How about the two of you?, he asked. The photo of us - Denis wearing his pink and green striped Garrick tie - was a candid photo by Eric Fenby and one of the nicest ever taken of us. It was our personal favorite and is printed with this article. One last project deserving of mention was our involvement with the establishment of a classical-music FM station south of Santa Barbara in Thousand Oaks. It began life as KCPB. Funding was so scarce at first that we lent them LPs from our own collections and wrote our own scripts. Denis narrated many of them. We built programs, wrote and timed scripts and boxed our records for pick-up. We programmed music one week at a time at first. Later, when funds were available, we ordered LPs for the Music Library and I began cataloging the material. Everything came to Las Tunas Road and everything went out of Las Tunas Road. Later, KCPB was purchased by KUSC, another classical-music FM station broadcasting under the aegis of USC in Los Angeles. What a good time that was for us - though we often felt like parent birds feeding their voracious chicks with that weekly deadline . With no bosses, deans or others of that ilk looking over our shoulders, we created programs of our own choosing, enjoying the rarity of complete creative freedom. One of our dearest friends in Santa Barbara was Enid Frame-Thomson, half-sister to Sir Arthur Bliss who, as a young man, apparently frolicked in the same Santa Barbara surf and knew the beauty of the land just as Denis came to know it years later. Enid had a great heart and sense of humor and knew everyone in the British Colony of Los Angeles and southern California. The parties at her avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA were unforgettable. She also maintained an apartment in Mayfair. One summer in London, she and I went to see Agathie Christies Mousetrap. Over lunch at the Ivy, I mentioned that Denis surely deserved recognition from Queen Elizabeth II in honour of his services to music and scholarship. She agreed. I collected the documentation, with Deniss knowledge, and gave it to Enid and the request went from Los Angeles to London. About a year later, Denis was awarded the Commander of the British Empire (CBE). We were no longer together so I was not at Buckingham Palace when he received the honour, but was truly happy to have played a part in it.

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However fulfilling and adventuresome our projects and creative musical life together - filled with wonderful friends, family, travel in the US, Europe and Great Britain - certain stresses made living together more and more difficult. Our divorce was final December 1984; we last saw one another in 1989. Through the friendship of John Blackley, we reconnected in 2002 and Denis invited me to visit him at the beautiful Morden College, near Greenwich, England. He lived in an apartment on the quad designed by Sir Christopher Wren and would be taken care of for all of his days. What a stunning place Morden College is and the kindness of the staff is unsurpassed. I think it must be paradise to live there. Though saddened at his physical frailty, it was good to see him again. Neither of us could quite believe I was there and the years, thirteen since we'd last met, fell away as they do when old and true friends meet. We slipped into our old habits of talking about and listening to music together just as we had in Santa Barbara and, oh, so many other places in the world. I never enjoyed listening to music with someone so much as with Denis.
The Quad, Morden College in winter.

At the beautiful Memorial Service at St. Paul's Church in Covent Garden on July 1, 2004, I recall weeping through most of it because every piece of music so beautifully realized that day, Denis and I had sung or listened to in our years together. Again, the gentle and uninvited wraiths. There was a man who understood that particular loneliness. In Canto V of L'Inferno, Dante gives Francesca da Rimini these words: Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria (There is no greater sorrow than to remember, in our grief, times of happiness). Attending the service and being in London again (a city I've loved since my first visit in 1963) was both a closure and an opening; was finality and liberty. I could not help but think that our love story - sneered at by some, cheered by others, resented by a few - describes that sometimes love is not enough. But if there is a heaven, dear Denis, we will meet again in a place where hearts are healed and one lives with love and happiness forever.

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DWS, with Edgardo and Daphne Stevens-Pascucci in Morden College Gardens, 2003

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Denis William Stevens (1922-2004) Bibliography


I: Writings: Books, Journals, Conference papers, etc: Franz Liszt (1811-1883), Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), The Concerto, ed. A. Robertson (Harmondsworth, 1952/R), 179-86, 282-8 The Keyboard Music of Thomas Tallis, MT, xciii (1952), 303-7 The Mulliner Book: a Commentary (London, 1952) Purcells Art of Fantasia, ML, xxxiii (1952), 341-5 A Unique Tudor Organ Mass, MD, vi (1952), 167-75 La chanson anglaise avant lcole madrigaliste, Musique et posie au XVIe sicle: Paris 1953, 121-7 La musique dorgue en Angleterre, RdM, xxxii (1953), 141-9 The Background of the In nominee, MMR, lxxxiv (1954), 199-205 Seventeenth-Century Italian Instrumental Music in the Bodleian Library, AcM, xxvi (1954), 67-74 Pices de thtre et pageants Tudor, Les ftes de la Renaissance [I]: Royaumont 1955, 259-78 Processional Psalms in Faburden, MD, ix (1955), 105-10 A Recently Discovered English Source of the Fourteenth Century, MQ, xli (1955), 26-40 Tudor Church Music (New York, 1955/R, 3/1966) A Musical Admonition for Tudor Schoolboys, ML, xxxviii (1957), 49-52 Thomas Tomkins 1572-1656 (London, 1957, 2/1967) Ornamentation in Monteverdis Shorter Dramatic Works, IMSCR VII; Cologne, 1958, 284-6 The Second Fountains Fragment - a Postscript, ML, xxxix (1958), 148-53 Thomas Prestons Organ Mass, ML, xxxx (1958), 29-34 The Manuscript Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Adv.Lib. 5.1.15, MD, xiii (1959), 155-67 ed., A History of Song (London, 1960/R, 2/1970) [including The Renaissance, 67-116] ed., with A. Robertson: The Pelican History of Music (Harmondsworth, 1960-68) [incl. Ars antiqua, i (1960), 211-58; Baroque Instrumental Music, ii (1963), 297-319] German Lute-Songs of the Early Sixteenth Century, Festschrift Heinrich Besseler, ed. E. Klemm (Leipzig, 1961), 253-7

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Problems of Editing and Publishing Old Music, IMSCR VIII: New York 1961, 150-60 Where are the Vespers of Yesteryear?, MQ, xlvii (1961), 315-30 Plainsong Hymns and Sequences (London, c 1965) Polyphonic Tropers in 14th Century England, Aspects of Medieval and Renaissance Music: a Birthday Offering to Gustave Reese, ed. J. LaRue and others (New York, 1966/R) Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi: a Re-Appraisal for the Quarter centenary, MQ, liii (1967), 161-87; repr. in The Monteverdi Companion, ed. D. Arnold and N. Fortune (London, 1968), 227-54 Claudio Monteverdi: Selva morale e spirituale, Claudio Monteverdi e il suo tempo: Venice, Mantua and Cremona 1968, 423-34 with S. Stevens: Music and Art in Society (University Park, PA, 1968) [trans. Of F. Lesure: Musica e societ, Milan, 1966] John Taverner, Essays in Musicology in Honor of Dragan Plamenac, ed. G. Reese and R. J. Snow (Pittsburgh, 1969/R), 331-9 Music in Honor of St Thomas of Canterbury, MQ, lvi (1970), 311-48; repr. in Scritti in onore di Luigi Ronga (Milan and Naples, 1973), 613-49 Monteverdis Necklace, Quadrivium, xii/2 (1971), 33-47; repr. in MQ, lix (1973). 370-81 ber das Vibrato: sthetische, stilistische, geschichtliche Betrachtungen, Musica, xxv (1971), 462-4 Lower Music and Higher Education in the 1970s, College Music Symposium, xii (1972), 41-6 Some observations on Performance Practice, CMc, no. 14 (1972), 159-63 Petrarchs Greeting to Italy, MT, cxv (1974), 834-6 The Violin: a Short History, Bachs Sonatas and Partitas, in Y. Menuhin and W. Primrose: Violin and Viola (London, 1976/R), 193-220, 221-9 Ceremonial Music in Medieval Venice, MT, cxix (1978), 321-7 Monteverdi, Petratti and the Duke of Bracciano, MQ, lxiv (1978), 275-94 Monteverdi: Sacred, Secular and Occasional Music (Rutherford, NJ, 1978) ed. And trans.: The Letters of Claudio Monteverdi (London, 1980, 2/1995) Musicology (London, 1980, rev. 2/1997 as Early Music) Musicology in Practice: Collected Essays by Denis Stevens ed. By T. Lewis [Volume I: 1948 - 1970, Volume II: 1971-1988] (White Plains, 1987) The Joy of Ornamentation by Giovanni Luca Conforto (White Plains, 1989) Monteverdi e la prassi esecutiva, NRMI, xxix (1995), 595-605

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Monteverdi: Songs and Madrigals (Ebrington, Gloucestershire 1999) Fragmenta Autobiographica (Lexington, VA, 2001) Fragmenta Altera (Lexington, VA, 2002) The Music of Thomas Tomkins in Thomas Tomkins: The Last Elizabethan ed. by A. Boden with B. Rose, P. James and D. R. A. Evans: (Aldershot, 2005)

II: Musical Editions


The Mulliner Book, MB, i (1951, 2/1954/R) Thomas Tallis: Complete Keyboard Works (London,, 1953) In Nomine: altenglische Kammermusick, HM, cxxxiv (1955) Robert Carver: The Two Extant Motets: O bone Jesus; Gaude flore virginali, Collected works, i, CMM, xvi/1 (1959) Claudio Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610 (London, 1962); LOrfeo: favola in musica (London, 1967); Magnificat (London, 1969) [with J. Steele] Penn State Music Series, i-ii, v, xxvii (University Park, PA 1963-71) Robert Fayrfax: Missa Tecum principium, Cw, xcvii (1965) The Treasury of English Church Music, i: 1100-1545 (London, 1965) Early Tudor Organ Music, ii: Music for the Mass, EECM, x (1969) Music in Honor of St Thomas of Canterbury, 1118-1170 (London, 1970) Venetian Ceremonial Motets (London, 1978) Claudio Monteverdi: Opera omnia, xv: Selva morale e spirituale, IMa, 1st ser., v (1998)

DISCOGRAPHY
Musicke hath a certain divine influence into the soules of men, whereby our cogitations and thoughts are brought into a celestial acknowledging of our natures John Case, 1586 A.1 Accademia Monteverdiana: A Twentieth Anniversary Tribute. Works by Anon., Beethoven, Dunstable, Fanner, A. Gabrieli, G. Gabrieli, Lassus, Monteverdi, Morley, Queldryk, Wilbye, selected from CSD 3504, HQS 1080, HQS 1093, STL 150, PES 5283. UK: HMV (HQS 1434), 1981.

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A.2 ALBICASTRO & BOYCE: Concertos. Accademia Monteverdiana Orchestra. US: Penn State Music Series (PSMS 103-S); US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 1036), 1966. A.3 Amorous Dialogues of the Renaissance. 10 dialogues by Morley, Lasso, Hassler, Demantius, Willaert, Andrea Gabrieli, Giovanni Gabrieli, Wert. US: Nonesuch (H-71272), 1973. A.4 Anthology of English Madrigals: "Sing We at Pleasure". Complements The Penguin Book of English Madrigals with works by Bateson, Bennett, Byrd, Fanner, Farnaby, Gibbons, Morley, Mundy, Pilkington, Tomkins, Vautor, Weelkes, Wilbye. Ambrosian Consort. UK: EMI (HQS l080IHQM 1080), 1967. A.5 The Art of Ornamentation. Keyed to standard scores, demonstrating plain & ornamented versions of music by composers from 15th-18th centuries. Ambrosian Consort, other ensembles & soloists; cond. DS & others. US: Vanguard Bach Guild (BGS 70697-08NSL 11044-45. 2 LPs), 1968. B.1 BEETHOVEN: Englische, Schottische und Irische Volkslieder. Patricia Clark, Ursula Connors, s; Shirley Minty, c; Edgar Fleet, Nigel Rogers, t; John Noble, bar; Elisabeth Perry, vln; Felix Schmidt, vc; Peter Pettinger, pno. Germeany: Schwann (VMS 2059), 1978. B.2 BEETHOVEN: Folksong Settings. Patricia Clark, Ursula Connors, s; Shirley Minty, c; Edgar Fleet, Nigel Rogers, t; John Noble, bar; Elisabeth Perry, vln; Felix Schmidt, vc; Peter Pettinger, pno. US: Nonesuch (H-71340),1977. B.3 BEETHOVEN: Madrigals and Canons. Patricia Clark, s; Jean Allister, c; Edgar Fleet, John McCarthy, Robert Tear, t; John Frost, b. UK: EMI (PES 5283, 7" EP 7130), 1963. B.4 BEETHOVEN: Scottish and Irish Songs. Patricia Clark, s; Edgar Fleet, t; John Noble, bar, Levon Chilingirian, vln; Suki Towb, vc; Harold Lester, pno. Switzerland: Concert Hall/Gravure Universelle (SMS 2725), 1971. B.5 BEETHOVEN: Settings of Irish, Welsh and Scottish Folksongs. Patricia Clark, Ursula Connors, s; Shirley Minty, c; Edgar Fleet, Nigel Rogers, t; John Noble, bar; Elisabeth Perry, vln; Felix Schmidt, vc; Peter Pettinger, pno. US: Vanguard (SRV-356 SD), 1977. B.6 BYRD: Music for Voice and Viols. Russell Oberlin, ct; In Nomine Players. US: Experiences Anonymes (EA-37); US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 689) 1962. C.1 Choral Music of the Renaissance. Church music by Byrd, Morales, Victoria; madrigals by Giovanni Gabrieli. Ambrosian Singers & Consort. US: Dover (HCR 7271.HCR 5271), 1967. C.2 A Christmas Anthology. Sequence of Bible readings & music from the British Isles. Members of the Royal Shakespeare Company (Barbara Leigh-Hunt; Emrys James, Michael Pennngton, Nonnan Rodway,

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David Suchet); Accademia Monteverdiana (Julie Kennard, s; Martin Warr, treble; Shirley Minty, c; Paul Esswood, Ashley Stafford, ct; Ian Partridge, Peter Hall, Edgar Fleet, t; Michael George, bar; Roderick Earle, b; Leslie Pearson, organ); Ensemble of Early Instruments (Roy Goodman, vln; Jane Ryan, viola da gamba; Trevor Jones, Alison Crum, Mark Caudle, Nicola Cleminson, viols; Philip Thorby, Margaret Westlake, vielles & shawms; Colin Sheen, Christopher Mowatt, sackbuts); Trinity Boys Choir; Chorus of the Accademia Monteverdiana; English Chamber Orchestra. Midland Bank International (MBI 2003-04, 2 LPs, private edition), 1980. C.3 The Cries of London: Music in Honor of Queen Elizabeth 1. Ambrosian Consort and Players. US: Penn State Music Series (PSMS l00-S); US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 884). Also as Die Marktschreier von London: Musik zu Ehren von Knigin Elizabeth I. Germany: Schwann (VMS 2038), 1978. D.l Dance Music of the Renaissance and Baroque. Works by Ammerbach, Arbeau, Aston, Attaignant, Bassano, Blow, Brade, Byrd, Couperin, Dalza, Ferrabosco II, Frescobaldi, Gervaise, Gesualdo, Haussmann, Holborne, Locke, Nau, Peerson, Pesenti, Phalese, Purcell, Scheidt, Susato, Tomkins and de la Torre. Jaye Consort of Viols; Philip Jones Brass Ensemble; Canzona Ensemble; Accademia Monteverdiana; Baroque Trio; Harold Lester, harpsichord. US: Musical Heritage Society (OR 352-54, 3 LPs), 1970. D.2 DUFAY: Missa Caput. La Maitrise St. Antoine; J. Whelan, tbn. UK: Oiseau-Lyre (LD-79, 10" LP); France: Oiseau-Lyre (OL 50069,12" LP), 1954. D.3 DUFAY: Secular and Sacred Music. Ambrosian Singers, Consort & Players. US: Dover (HCR 5261), 1965. D.4 DUNST ABLE: Sacred and Secular Music. Eileen Poulter, s; Russell Oberlin, ct; Ambrosian Singers; Michael Brimer, org. US: Experiences Anonymes (EA 36); US: Musical Heritage Soc. (MHS 686), 1961. F.l FAYRFAX: Missa, Tecum principium; Motet, Aeterne laudis lilium. Ambrosian Singers & Consort. Germany: Schwann (AMS-38), 1963. F.2 From the Renaissance. Incl. works by Byrd, Gabrieli (A.), Gabrieli (G.), Lasso, Monteverdi, Palestrina, Tallis, Weelkes, Wilbye. Ambrosian Singers & Consort; Accademia Monteverdiana; other soloists & ensembles; cond by DS & others. US: Time-Life Records (The Story of Great Music STL 150ffL 150,4 LPs), 1967. F.3 See preceding item; issued with additional materials as Concerts of the Renaissance with guide for the listener. US: Time-Life Records (STL 160ffL 160, 5 LPs), 1969. G.l GABRIELI (Andrea and Giovanni): The Glory of Venice. Ursula Connors, s; Christopher Keyte, bar; Ambrosian Singers; Philip Jones Brass Ensemble. UK: EMI (HQS-1093, LP; EMX 2145, CD); US: Angel (A36443, LP), 1967.

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G.2 GASIOLDI & RORE: Secular Vocal Music. Patricia Clark, Ursula Connors, s; Shirley Minty, Jean Temperley, c; Nigel Rogers, Edgar Fleet, Leslie Fyson, t; John Frost, John Noble, b; Jaye Consort of Viols. US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 1930), 1974. G.3 GAY & PEPUSCH: The Beggar's Opera. Nigel Rogers (Macheath), Angela Jenkins (Polly), Shirley Minty, Edgar Fleet, Margaret Cable, John Noble, Peter Hall, Vernon Midgley, Elizabeth Lane, Patricia Clark; Accademia Monteverdiana Chorus & Orchestra. US: ABC (AX-64046/2, 2 LPs), 1979; US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 4011-12, 2 LPs), 1979. Also as Des Bettlers Oper. Germany: Schwann (VMS 4520, 3 LPs),1979. G.4 German Music of the Renaissance. Mass by Isaac; secular vocal & instrumental works by Greiter, Isaac, Lemlin, Othmayr, Senft, Stoltzer, Walther. Ambrosian Singers, Consort & Players. US: Dover (HCR 7270/HCR 5270), 1967. G.5 GESUALDO: Madrigals from Book V, Motets and Responsories. Accademia Monteverdiana Soloists & Chorus. UK: Pye (TPLS 13012), 1968. G.6 GESUALDO: Madrigals (1611). Accademia Monteverdiana soloists. US: Dover (HCR7287/HCR 5287), 1967. G.7 GRANDI: Music for San Marco, Venezia; San Giorgio, Ferrara, and Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo. Ursula Connors, s; Mark Deller, Paul Esswood, ct; Edgar Fleet, Nigel Rogers, t; John Noble, Stephen Roberts, bar; Will Mason, b; Trinity Boys Choir; Elisabeth Perry, Krysia Osostowicz, vlns; Felix Schmidt, vc; Leslie Pearson, organ. US: Nonesuch (H-71329), 1976. H.1 History of Western Music. VoL 1: To c.1300. Corresponds to Historical Anthology of Music Nos. 1-41. Schola Cantorum Londoniensis, various soloists & ensembles. US: Musical Heritage Society (OR 349-51, 3 LPs), 1969. H.2 History of Western Music. VoL 2: 13th-15th Century. Corresponds to Historical Anthology of Music Nos. 42-75. Schola Cantorum Londoniensis, various soloists & ensembles. US: Musical Heritage Society (OR 437-39,3 LPs), 1971. J.1. JELIC & LUKACIC: Baroque Motets from Croatia: Ivan Lukacic and Vinco Jelic. Patricia Clark, Ursula Connors, s; Paul Esswood, ct; Nigel Rogers, Edgar Fleet, t; Roger Stalman, b; Trinity Boys Choir soloists; Jonathan Sparey, Carolyn Sparey, vln; Ross Pople, vc; Harold Lester, organ. US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS-3497, LP/MHC 5497, cassette), 1977. L1 LASSO & SCHTZ: Secular Vocal Music. Patricia Clark, Ursula Connors, s; Shirley Minty, c; Nigel Rogers, Edgar Fleet, t; John Noble, bar; John Frost, b; Jonathan Sparey, Carolyn Sparey, vln; Ross Pople, vc; Harold Lester, kbd. US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS-1917), 1974.

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M.1 MONTEVERDI: Il Ballo delle Ingrate. Dora Gatta, s; Elena Zilo, c; Sergio Pezzetti, b; Maria Vittoria Romano, s; Angelicum Chamber Orchestra & Chorus; Achille Berruti, hpsd. Italy: Angelicum (STA 9001); US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 977),1977. M.2 MONTEVERDI: Christmas Vespers. With 3 motets. Julie Kennard, Elisabeth Harrison, s; Shirley Minty, c; Peter Hall, Edgar Fleet, t; David Wilson-Johnson, bar; Roderick Earle, b; Accademia Monteverdiana Chorus & Orchestra; Peter Beavan, vc; Leslie Pearson, organ. UK: Midland Bank Internatl (MBI 2001-02,2 LPs, private edition), 1979; UK: WEA (K-68030, 2 LPs); US: Nonesuch (HB 73032, 2 LPs), 1980. Also as Festliche Vesper in San Marco. Germany: Schwann (AMS 4521, 2 LPs), 1982. M.3 MONTEVERDI: Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda; Il Ballo dell'Ingrate. Patricia Clark, Mary Thomas, Ann Dowdall, s; Edgar Fleet, t; John Frost, b; Accademia Monteverdiana. US: Experiences Anonymes (EA 72),1962. M.4 MONTEVERDI: Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda; Il Lamento d'Arianna; Se i languidi miei sguardi.. Dora Gatta, V. Mariconda, s; John Serge, t; P. Dery, bar; Orchestra dell' Angelicum; Achille Berruti, hpsd. Italy: Angelicum (STA 9002); US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 1724), 1966, M.5 MONTEVERDI: Madrigali Guerrieri; Il Lamento d'Arianna. Heather Harper, s; Edgar Fleet, t; John Carol-Case, bar; Accademia Monteverdiana Vocal & Instrumental Soloists. US: Dover (HCR 7286/HCR 5286), 1967. M.6 MONTEVERDI: Madrigals from Book 9. Accademia Monteverdiana. US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS-3104); Switzerland: Concert Hall (SMS 2868), 1974. M.7 MONTEVERDI: Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Ursula Connors, Shirley Sams, s; Shirley Minty, ctr; Nigel Rogers, Leslie Fyson, t; John Noble, Christopher Keyte, b; Ambrosian Singers; Orchestra of the Accademia Monteverdiana; Franz Falter, organ. US: Vanguard (VCS 1000112; VSL 11000/1). 1974. M.8 Monteverdi and His Contemporaries. Works by Gastoldi, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Striggio, Wert. Accademia Monteverdiana. Switzerland: Concert Hall (SMS 2580), 1969. M.9 MORLEY: Canzonets, Madrigals, Balletts, Keyboard Music. Ambrosian Consort; Valda Aveling, hpsd. Germany: Deutsche Grammophon (SAPM 19B309/APM 14309), 1965. M.10 MORLEY [and others]: 9 Canzonets/Music from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Incl. works by BuIl, Byrd, Famaby, Morley, Peerson, Philips. Ambrosian Consort; Valda Aveling, hpsd. US: Penn State Music Series (PSMS 1O1-S); US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 948),1966. M.11 Music in Honor of St. Thomas of Canterbury. Four centuries of music honoring the life & martyrdom of Thomas Becket. Accademia Monteverdiana. US: Nonesuch (H-71292), 1974. N.l NENNA: Madrigals and Motets. Incl. instrumental pieces by Nenna and Gesualdo. Patricia Clark,

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Mary Thomas, Hazel Holt, s; Shirley Minty, c; Edgar Fleet, Leslie Fyson, t; John Frost, b; Trinity Boys Choir; Accademia Chorus; Jaye Consort of Viols (Francis Baines, Elizabeth Baines, Peter Vel, Jane Ryan). US: Nonesuch (H-71277), 1973. P.l PURCELL: Anthems and Music for Strings. Paul Esswood, ct; Nigel Rogers, Edgar Fleet, t; John Noble, bar; Roger Stalman, b; Trinity Boys Choir; Accademia Monteverdiana Chorus & Orchestra; Harry Lester, organ. US: Musical Heritage Society (LP MHS 3978/Cassette MHC 5978),1979. P.2 PURCELL: Celestial Music. Two odes: "Celestial Music" - Ode for Mr. Louis MaidweIl's School-I689; "Now does the glorious day appear" - Ode for Queen Mary's Birthday -1689. Patricia Clark, s; Tom Sutcliffe, ct; Edgar Fleet, t; Roger Stalman, John Frost, b; Accademia Monteverdiana Chorus & Orchestra. UK: Pye Records (TPLS 13011), 1968; US: Vanguard (VCS 10053); US: Everest (3470),1981. Also Germany: Schwann (VMS 3531), 1981. P.3 PURCELL: Music for the London Theatre. Incidental music for Ampitrion, Abdelazer, Distressed Innocence and The Fairy Queen. Orchestra of the Accademia Monteverdiana. US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS946),1970. Q.l Quatre siecles de chants d'amour [Four centuries of love songs]. Works by Beethoven, Bishop, Brahms, Haydn, Lassus, Lawes, Luzzaschi, Monteverdi, Mozart, Phillips, Schumann and Vicentino. Accademia Monteverdiana; Lory WaIlfisch, hpsd. Switzerland: Concert HaIl (SMS 2659), 1971. S.1 SCARLATTI: Vespers of St. Cecilia. Patricia Clark, Ursula Connors, s; Shirley Minty, c; Ian Partridge; John Noble, bar, Accademia Monteverdiana Chorus & Orchestra. US: Nonesuch (H-71398), 1981. Also as Caecilienvesper. Germany: Schwann (AMS 3543-F), 1982. S.2 Secular Spanish Music of the 16th Century. Keyboard works by Cabezon and songs from the Cancionero of Uppsala. Ambrosian Consort; Roy Jesson, harpsichord. US: Penn State Music Series (PSMS 1O2-S); US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 1095); UK: Oryx (ORYX 717), 1966. S.3 Secular Vocal Music of the Renaissance. Works by Aldomar, Alonso, Badajos, Encina, Vilches, Luzzaschi, Rore, Striggio, Wert. Ambrosian Consort and Players. US: Dover (HCR 5262), 1966. T.l TELEMANN: Instrumental works. Louis Kaufman, vln; Sam Zilverberg, ob; Fred Hausdoerfer, tpt; Concert Hall Chamber Orchestra. Switzerland: Concert Hall (G-l7), 1953. T.2 Two Thirteenth-Century Masses. From the Las Huelgas Manuscript at Burgos and from the Worcester Fragments. Ambrosian Singers & Consort. US: Dover (HCR 5263), 1965. T.3. TOMKINS: Musico Deo Sacra. O. Forbes, S. Forbes, J. Clarke, trebles; Andrew Pearmain, John Whitworth, ct; Gerald English, t; John Frost, b; Ambrosian Singers; In Nomine Players; Martindale Sidwell, organ. US: Experiences Anonymes (EA-27); US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 687); UK: Oryx (ORYX 719), 1957.

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T.4. TOMKINS: Songs and Consort Music. Ambrosian Consort; In Nomine Players. US: Experiences Anonymes (EA-28); US: Musical Heritage Society (MHS 688); UK: Oryx (ORYX 720), 1957. T.5 Treasury of English Church Music. Vol. 1: To c.1500. Complements Blandford Press publication of same name, with works by Comyshe, Damett, Dunstable, Excetre, Queldryk, Frye, anonymous. Ambrosian Singers, Consort and Players. UK: EMI (CSD 3504/CLP 3504), 1966. T.6 Tudor Church Music. Issued to accompany Faber publication by this name; works by Blitheman, Byrd, Fayrfax, Stone. Ambrosian Singers. UK: Faber (EP), 1961. V.1 VICENTINO: The Music of Nicola Vicentino (1511-1576). Secular & sacred works. Patricia Clark, Ursula Connors, s; Shirley Minty, c; Mark Deller, ct; Nigel Rogers, Edgar Fleet, Leslie Fyson, t; John Frost, Rogert Stalman, b; Jaye Consort of Viols. US: Vanguard (HM 34 SD), 1974. V.2 VIVALDI: 12 Concerti (La Cetra), Op. 9. Carl Pini, vln; Orchestra of the Accademia Monteverdiana. US: Musical Heritage Society (OR 334-36), 1967. W.1 WERT: Music at the Court of Mantua. Masters of the Renaissance (series). Ambrosian Singers; Jaye Consort of Viols; Accademia Monteverdiana Consort. US: Vanguard (VCS 10083), 1971. W.2 WILLAERT: Vocal & instrumental pieces. Masters of the Renaissance (series). Jean Allister, c; Ambrosian Singers; Jaye Consort of Viols; Ambrosian Consort; Harold Lester, hpsd. US: Columbia Records (Odyssey 32 160202). [Programme notes by Gustave Reese,] 1968. W.3 The Worcester Fragments. English liturgical music, 13th-14th centuries. Accademia Monteverdiana soloists and chorus. US: Nonesuch (H-71308), 1975.

RE-ISSUES on Compact Disc by the Baroque Music Club


www.Baroque-Music-Club.com BMC 9 Henry PURCELL Nine Trio Sonatas, 1697. Carl Pini & John Tunnell, violins, Harold Lester, Gough harpsichord. BMC 10 Henry PURCELL Chamber & Incidental Theatre Music Music for Amphitryon, Distressed Innocence, Fairy Queen, Abdelazer. Also: Trio Sonata, Harpsichord Suite, Violin Sonata, Fantasia on a Ground, and Overture in g. The Accademia Monteverdiana, Denis Stevens. BMC 1617 VIVALDI: "La Cetra" The Accademia Monteverdiana, conductor Denis Stevens. BMC 26 TICKLE MY TOE Renaissance & Early Baroque Dances The Jaye Consort of Viols Philip Jones Brass Ensemble Desmond Dupr, lute Harold Lester, harpsichord The Accademia Monteverdiana Orchestra, Musical Director Denis Stevens.

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DS photographed by Hermann Leeb of Zrich Radio, in Great Titchfield Street near the BBC. About 1952, the time of his first recording (Telemann).

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