PETER DICKINSON AND AMERICAN MUSIC
Peter Dickinson, the British composer,
writer, pianist and Emeritus Professor of the Universities of Keele and London
was seventy-five on 15 November 2009. There have been a number of tributes in
London including a work in the BBC Promenade Concerts but perhaps little general
awareness in the US of his long history of dedication to American music. His
family enjoyed connections with the US and his father, the internationally known
contact lens specialist Frank Dickinson, received awards and honorary degrees
there. In 1958-59 Peter Dickinson was awarded a Rotary Foundation Fellowship
which enabled him to become a graduate student in composition at the Juilliard
School of Music, where he studied with Bernard Wagenaar.
The following year he worked as a pianist (with a spell on
the staff of the New York City Ballet playing for Balanchine to choreograph),
church organist, and critic (Musical Courier, the Musical Times).
In 1960-61 he was a lecturer at Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey, and
Organist of Hillside Presbyterian Church, Orange.
During that three-year period Dickinson wrote his first
article about American Music – ‘Education at the Juilliard School of Music’, for
the Musical Times (May, 1960) with a report the following month on ‘The
Avant-garde in New York’ His violin and piano recital with Dinos Constantinides
(then a violinist) at Carnegie Recital Hall (23 March 1961) included Copland’s
Sonata and his own Sonata and Dickinson was featured in the Composers Forum
Concerts. The series of recitals he put on at the Rutherford campus of Fairleigh
Dickinson included many works by American composers.
On returning to England in 1961, where he was teaching in
London, Dickinson kept in touch with American composers he had met in New York.
In 1965 he wrote the earliest full-length study of John Cage for any British
periodical (Music & Musicians, February 1965); in 1966 he put on the
first all-Feldman concert in England; and he started a long series of
illustrated BBC broadcast talks and reviews, many on American composers he had
met such as Cowell, Cage, Carter and Thomson. In the later 1960s Dickinson began
a long partnership with his sister, mezzo-soprano Meriel Dickinson, and they
regularly gave recitals based on American composers.
In 1974 Dickinson was appointed to the first Chair of Music
at Keele University in Staffordshire. Since this was a new department he had the
opportunity to shape its course in a unique way. As a result of his experiences
in New York he set up a Center for American Music program which he ran for ten
years. (The New Grove Dictionary of American Music contains an entry on
it.) This was a pioneering venture at a time when American music was far from
established as a university discipline in the US. Keele ran an MA in American
Music and there were three international conferences on aspects of American
Music. The last of these was in 1983 in conjunction with the Society for
American Music (then called the Sonneck Society), supported by the US Embassy
and the BBC, which attracted 100 visitors from the US. Arising from this
conference Dickinson co-edited a special issue of American Music (Vol.
IV, No 1, Spring 1986).
Many American composers and performers visited
Keele during Dickinson’s regime including Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, George
Crumb, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Ben Johnston and Elliott Schwartz. The faculty
included Stephen Banfield and, as Visiting Fulbright-Hays Professors in
succession, William Brooks, Cecil Lytle, Dwight Peltzer and Karl Kroeger.
The new Music Department opened in 1974, the centenary year
of Charles Ives. Dickinson was invited to the Charles Ives Festival Centennial
Conference in New York and New Haven (his contributions are in An Ives
Celebration, edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis, University of
Illinois Press, 1977). At the same period Dickinson had a leading role in the
BBC2 TV documentary for the Ives centenary – he started the Charles Ives Choir
at Keele, which he directed, especially to perform some of the larger Ives
songs. They appeared in the TV program and so did Meriel Dickinson.
Throughout this period the Dickinsons were active in recitals
and broadcasts throughout the UK but also in Holland, Denmark, Germany, Austria
and Italy. Their programs of American music focused on the bicentennial year of
1976 but from before then until the early 1990s they gave hundreds of recitals
and broadcasts featuring their American repertoire. Their recording American
Anthology was released on LP two years later. This included first recordings
of songs by Carter, Thomson and Cage and of Copland’s Night Thoughts for
piano. The release was exceptionally well received by the composers and the
press, including the New York Times (Allen Hughes, ‘Anglicized American
Song’, 22 June 1979). On receiving the LP Carter wrote on 22 December 1978:
‘Thankyou very much for the lovely record that you both made.
I have enjoyed it very much – what beautiful singing and playing – I used it for
a birthday program over the air and they were very impressed.’
William Schuman wrote on 15 October 1981:
‘Thank you so much for sending me your excellent recording. I
have listened to the performances with the greatest pleasure. Your playing is
absolutely top-flight, and your sister’s command of the Gershwin style, let
alone all the others, is superb.’
After Dickinson left Keele in 1984 the Department was taken
over by David Nicholls, the leading British American music specialist of the
next generation, who was able to build on earlier foundations.
Returning to London, Dickinson continued recitals and
broadcasts with his sister and made regular visits to the US. Some of his
lectures and lecture-recitals there were on British music, including his own,
but more frequently American music. Institutions he was invited to visit have
included – City University of New York; NYU; Vassar; University of Kansas;
Louisiana State, Baton Rouge; Northeastern; Harvard; Juilliard; Bowdoin; New
Jersey; Maine College of Art; Michigan State; Phillips Collection, Washington;
Berkeley; Wesleyan; Dartmouth; and Washington University, St Louis (the
prestigious T. S. Eliot Lecture 25 October 2001: ‘From St Louis to Europe: the
International Influence of Scott Joplin’s Ragtime Rhythms’).
Important book chapters from this decade include: ‘The
American Concerto’ in A Companion to the Concerto, ed. Robert Layton
(Helms, 1988, 305-25; OUP, 1996); ‘Charles Ives and Aaron Copland’ in The
Heritage of Music (OUP, 1989, 235-45); many entries on American composers in
The Viking Opera Guide, ed. Amanda Holden (Penguin Books, 1993). From
1989 to the present day Dickinson has been a critic on the Gramophone
where he has been influential in covering hundreds of American music releases.
He has also written regularly about American music for the Musical Times,
Music and Letters, and in many reviews, occasional articles and
dictionary entries. He has written major obituaries for the London daily
newspaper the Independent, including Copland, Bernstein, Thomson, Cage
and many lesser-known figures.
In the 1990s Dickinson held the Chair of Music at Goldsmiths,
University of London, where he was responsible for a large department but when
he left in 1997 he became Head of Music at the Institute of United States
Studies, where he set up the MA course component in American Music and presented
a series of lectures and recitals including major jazz events until 2004.
In the last decade Dickinson has drawn on his extensive
archives and contact with composers to produce books on American subjects:
Copland Connotations: Studies and Interviews,
edited by Dickinson (Boydell & Brewer/University of Rochester Press, 2002)
including his own chapter ‘Copland’s Earlier British Connections’; an Open Forum
at the Copland Centenary Conference Dickinson put on in 2000; and interviews
with Copland himself. The book has a foreword by the distinguished American
music historian H. Wiley Hitchcock who said:
Neil Lerner in Music and Letters (May 2004, 332-5):
Copland Connotations was
launched in 2002 at the Institute of United States Studies, University of
London, and at Steinway Hall, New York, as part of the Copland House program.
Dickinson’s next monograph was:
CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage
(University of Rochester Press/Boydell & Brewer, 2006).
With a long introduction by Dickinson, this book is based
mainly on a series of interviews he conducted for a BBC Radio 3 documentary
interviewing Cage, friends and colleagues in 1987. Cited as ForeWord Magazine
Book of the Year: Bronze Award 2006 Music.
Kenneth Silverman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning study
of Cotton Mather and now engaged on a major biography of Cage, emailed on 5
September 2006:
‘Laura Kuhn (Director of the John Cage Trust) gave me a copy
of CageTalk. I can’t think of anyone else who has done anything about
Cage that is more scrupulous and informative. The book is of course of great
help to me. That aside, I send you many
mighty congratulations on your superlative work, and hopes
for its deserved great success.’
Email from H. Wiley Hitchcock, 12 December 2006:
‘It is by all means the very best book of its kind I've ever
looked through... So often, these anthologies are just thrown together and
published with hardly any annotations or linkage between the separate
components, and no sense of the compiler's serious intentions, if any. Not you,
and not this book! I hope you get the kind of thoughtful plaudits by reviewers
that your book not only invites but demands…’
Stephen Brown in The Times Literary Supplement, 8
December 2006, p28
'Dickinson's book is the ideal introduction to Cage. Floating
along the top of each page are reminiscences, backstage gossip and the
entertaining but revealing anecdotes of bright and charming people. Underneath
runs a dense undercurrent of footnotes, which label, categorize and pin down
every fact, publication and event.'
On 29 March 2008 Dickinson gave the Eccles Center keynote
lecture, ‘John Cage was all the Rage’, at the annual conference of the British
Association for American Studies in Edinburgh and repeated it at the British
Library in London on 30 March 2009. The lecture was published by the British
Library. Most recently Dickinson was invited to participate in the Ives Vocal
Marathon at Wesleyan University in February 2009.
His Samuel Barber Remembered: a Centenary Tribute
includes a series historic interviews conducted for a BBC Radio 3 documentary
made in 1981. This was published by Rochester University Press in March 2010.
Barbara Heyman: ‘As a biographer I find Peter Dickinson’s beautifully annotated
book an indispensable resource.’ Vivian Perlis: ‘Peter Dickinson applies his
considerable talents to create a scholarly and absorbing portrait of Barber, as
he has done previously with Copland and Cage.’
Dickinson’s British honors have included an
Honorary Doctorate from the University of Keele and an Honorary Fellowship of
Trinity College of Music, both in 1999. There are four CDs of his music on the
American record label Albany and two more came out on Naxos in 2009. Further
information is available on his website:
www.foxborough.co.uk
Bridget Dickinson 4 May 2009
’Professor Dickinson has been an indefatigable author of publications on
American composers and their works and an enthusiastic inciter of younger
scholars and performers. In fact, he must be regarded as a crucial figure in the
rise of American music, over the past quarter-century, to musicological status
as an appropriate field for scholarly attention on its own account – not just as
a country cousin of European music.’
’Peter Dickinson’s collection is an important contribution not just to Copland
studies, in which it will immediately become a central source, but to the study
and understanding of twentieth-century US music and its reception’.
