Cambridge has always had music.
The first Bachelor of Music degree awarded
in 1464, marks the start of a rich tradition.
It has evolved with figures from John Dowland and Orlando Gibbons to Vaughan
Williams and Charles Stanford, right up to the innumerable talents of the present.
Under King Charles, the second,
the first professor of music was appointed in 1684,
but it was only in 1947, in the wake of the Second World War,
that a faculty of music was established along with its own tripos.
To celebrate this first 75 years,
we look back on its traditions and on its characters.
The reason why I think so many composers
have come to Cambridge and been a success
is that the choral tradition
gave Cambridge a big reputation
already before the music faculty was founded.
What underlay
my teaching was trying to teach them to be themselves, discover
who they were by means of their music.
So this chord doesn't seem right.
Are you sure about that note?
That move there, the form, that bit, that paragraph that's a bit redundant,
have that bit is undernourished, perhaps expand it do more
and this
sort of that certainly won't work the flute balance with the trombone
there will be terrible good but what a good idea.
Why not take that further?
And that was when that fell on
fertile ground.
It's a composer already a George Benjamin, Atol Maddows as a Judith
were already finding their own voices, even as they were students.
Here, this sort of message has flourished, encouraging and trying to get
to the essence of whatever it was that
I thought they would try to reach
and essentially
you to concentrate it to get it more characterized.
Until eventually it was the character.
[Music]
Well,
Cambridge has always been a bit of a byword for a place
that spews out brilliant performers and composers
and indeed scholars.
If you think of tried to think about what it is in the water
at Cambridge, that that makes this happen, it's perhaps a rather obvious answer,
but I would be inclined to put it down very much to the collegiate system.
Every music student and of course we should remember that
not all of these brilliant performers have been music students,
but every student comes into this relatively small college community
which has its own traditions, its own music society.
There are established ways of doing things,
and you become part of a small but importantly,
critical mass of people whose job it is to make things happen.
I think all faculties will evolve.
If they don't, they will. They will die.
Actually, I'm the 1684 professor of music here in Cambridge.
I'm a cultural historian.
I specialize in France.
If I look across the faculty, I do see 14 rugged individualists,
but we do also form clusters and families.
Obviously, we have the Center for Music,
Music and Science and we have the Center for Music Performance Studies.
I think we have probably
the largest family of medievalist in the UK and we're pretty good though.
I cite myself in the 19th century everything from analysis to global opera
and to scientific history of science approaches.
So those are, I think, are some of the strengths.
And then we have a really strong interdisciplinary
bent, I think.
So if I think about the way that composition has been moving.
A recent piece by Richard Causton involved a collaboration
with engineering and of course, music and science itself.
We have long standing collaborations with education and with computer science.
So having started out with the with the islands of activity,
I think more and more in 2021, it is these connections
that are that are becoming so, so important.
And I think those are becoming more important with our with our new hires.
I think about Peter Murray and work in the musicology of Islam,
but also popular music studies and jazz.
We're recording actually the day after I've done
a couple of days of examining for part two recitals
and at least one of those recitals was absolute stupendous.
I don't think you could hear better on this on the stage of the Wigmore Hall
or the Festival Hall or anything like that.
That is constantly amazing.
But there are also intellectual aspects to the students.
I mean, that side of students tends to develop late, but of course it's
also the season when one has been marking lots of essays, scripts,
and I can remember over the years coming across scripts
where I've been genuinely moved by what the students have written.
Oh, this was the most wonderful thing about this place is just the quality
of talent, the quality of students, and they always surprise me.
And every single day.
On the one hand, we have to open their minds
and on the other hand, we have to equip them for life.
To be a musician is a vocation. And
I never overestimated what we were doing.
Well, I think music has got to be thought of primarily as a humanity.
For me, the
most treasured of
the most valuable, the most
sublime achievement
of the human race.
Can't say more than that.
[Music]