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Royal Academy of Music
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The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britian's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French eccentric harpist and composer Nicolas Bochsa and in 1830 was granted a Royal Charter by King George IV. It is one of five conservatoires in the UK to be granted the Royal prefix. The current president of the Academy is Professor Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, appointed in July 2008.
Academy is situated on Marylebone Road in central London adjacent to Regent's Park.
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The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britian's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French eccentric harpist and composer Nicolas Bochsa and in 1830 was granted a Royal Charter by King George IV. It is one of five conservatoires in the UK to be granted the Royal prefix. The current president of the Academy is Professor Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, appointed in July 2008.
The Academy
The Academy is situated on Marylebone Road in central London adjacent to Regent's Park. Academy facilities, which include the 450-seat Duke's Hall, the Sir Jack Lyons Theatre donated by philanthropist Sir Jack Lyons and two smaller concert spaces, were expanded in 2001 with the opening of the new 150-seat David Josefowitz recital hall and a public museum of musical instruments and artifacts from the Academy's collections. The Junior Academy, for pupils under the age of 18, takes place every Saturday.
The Academy's library contains over 160,000 items, including significant collections of early printed and manuscript materials and audio facilities. The library also houses archives dedicated to Sir Arthur Sullivan and Sir Henry Wood. Among the Library's most valuable possessions are the manuscripts of Purcell's The Fairy Queen, Sullivan's The Mikado, Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and Serenade to Music, and the newly-discovered Handel Gloria. A grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund has assisted in the purchase of the Robert Spencer Collection — a set of Early English Song and Lute music, as well as a fine collection of lutes and guitars. The York Gate Collections now display many of these items. The Orchestral Library has approximately 4,500 sets of orchestral parts. Other collections include the libraries of Sir Henry Wood and Otto Klemperer.
Harriet Cohen bequeathed a large collection of paintings, some photographs and her gold bracelet to the Academy, with a request that the room in which the paintings were to be housed was named the 'Arnold Bax Room'. Noted for her performances of Bach and modern English music, she was a friend and advocate of Arnold Bax and also premièred Vaughan Williams' Piano Concerto - a work dedicated to her - in 1933.
The Academy has students from over 50 countries, following diverse programmes including instrumental performance, conducting, composition, jazz, musical theatre and opera. The Academy enjoys an established relationship with King's College London, particularly the Department of Music, whose students receive instrumental tuition at the Academy. In return, many students at the Academy take advantage of the range of Humanities choices at King's, and its extended academic musicological curriculum.
The Academy hosts the Asian Music Circuit's annual "Asian Music Summer School" in July each year. In this forum, the public are taught Indian, Chinese and Japanese music from musicians or singers from India, China, Japan and the UK. Related concerts and seminars are held in the Academy to support the summer school's programme.
Student performances and festivals
Academy students perform regularly in the Academy's concert venues, and also nationally and internationally under respected conductors like Sir Colin Davis, Yan Pascal Tortelier, Christoph von Dohnányi, Sir Charles Mackerras, James MacMillan and Trevor Pinnock. In September 2005, Sir Colin Davis conducted an orchestra which combined students from the Academy and New York's Juilliard School at the BBC Proms.
The Academy collaborates with other conservatoires world-wide, including participating in the SOCRATES student and staff exchange program. In 1991, the Academy introduced a fully accredited degree in Performance Studies, and in September 1999, it became a full constituent college of the University of London, in both cases becoming the first UK conservatoire to do so.
The Academy regularly celebrates the work of a living composer with a festival in the presence of the composer. Previous composer festivals at the Academy have been devoted to the work of Witold Lutoslawski, Michael Tippett, Krzysztof Penderecki, Olivier Messiaen, Hans Werner Henze, Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, as well as Academy graduates, Alfred Schnittke, György Ligeti, British and American film composers, Franco Donatoni, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Pärt, György Kurtág and Mauricio Kagel.
In February-March 2006, an Academy festival celebrated the violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, who first visited London 175 years earlier in 1831. The festival included a recital by Academy professor Maxim Vengerov, who performed on Il Cannone Guarnerius, Paganini's favorite violin.
Courses
The Royal Academy of Music offers training from infant level (Junior Academy) to Ph.D.
People
Some distinguished alumni
Some distinguished past and present teachers
Museum
The Academy's free public museum, is situated in the York Gate building, which is connected to the Academy's building via a basement link. The museum is open 11:30am-5:30pm Monday to Friday and 12:00-4.00pm on Saturdays and Sundays.
The building was designed in 1822 as part of the main entrance to Regent’s Park, and was an important feature in John Nash’s architectural designs for Regency London. The interior of York Gate was largely destroyed by bomb damage in the 1940s, but the Nash exterior has Grade 1 listed building status. The Royal Academy of Music moved to Marylebone Road in 1911, and held a lease on part of York Gate during the 1920s and 1930s. A grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund enabled the Academy to acquire and refurbish the building to house studios and practice rooms and a museum.
The Academy holds a collection of more than 200 stringed instruments from the violin family. These have been acquired for the benefit of students and recent leavers and they are maintained by the Academy's resident luthier. Several of these instruments are of Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri. The galleries display materials from the Academy’s collections of instruments, archives, manuscripts and images. The galleries are also considered a 'living museum', acting as a showcase for the work of performers, composers, instrument makers and scholars from a wide range of musical and other relevant disciplines. In 2005 the Academy acquired the famous "Viotti ex-Bruce" violin, made by Stradivarius in 1709, on behalf of the nation.
Items from the working collections of famous musicians associated with the Academy include batons, a stopwatch and scores owned by Sir Henry Wood, percussion instruments selected and played by James Blades and the restored Alexander horn which was played by Dennis Brain, damaged in the crash which killed him, and subsequently restored by Paxman of London.
Other Collections: Foyle Menuhin archive (letters, music, photographs, artworks and more collected by Yehudi Menuhin over his lifetime), Jenny Lind (1820-1887) Collection, David Munrow (1942-1976) Collection, the Priaulx Rainier (1903-1986) Collection and The McCann Collection.
In August 2006, a music shop was opened, selling sheet music and various music accessories, available to the students and visitors and open in working hours from Monday to Saturday.
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