![]() Other compositions included The Judas Tree: A Musical Drama of Judas Iscariot (1965), which was performed in the US across three nights in Holy Week 1967 at Washington National Cathedral, playing to some 3,000 people. Pop was another inspiration, as in his tribute to the Beatles in his crossover composition, Merseyside Echoes, commissioned in 1986 by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. He believed that all kinds of music can belong together. He left in 1984, becoming professor emeritus, and later transferred to London University where, between 19, he was professor of music at Goldsmiths’ College, subsequently professor emeritus, and then head of music at the Institute of United States Studies until 2004.ĭickinson’s own compositions combined different genres and soundworlds, from the experimental to ragtime. He staged conferences and concerts, drawing on his personal connections with composers such as Copland, Cage, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. With her support, Dickinson combined academic posts with a busy career as a composer and performer.Īfter lecturing at Birmingham University, he became professor of music at Keele University in 1974, introducing ragtime, jazz and pop into its degree courses, and establishing the Centre for American Music. They married in 1964 and had two sons, Jasper and Francis, eventually settling down in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. ![]() In 1962, after returning to Britain, he lectured at the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea, and met his future wife, Bridget Tomkinson, who had been a student at the nearby Royal College of Music. These are pretty shattering ideas in ways that we’re still digesting.” With Cage it’s anything that is making a noise anywhere that can be included in one’s concept of music. He saw them as “powerhouses of a new way of thinking about music”, and told Gramophone magazine in 2014: “With Ives the popular music of his time, which might have been looked down on, was part of an art culture as well. The composers he encountered there included Charles Ives, who combined popular tunes, revival hymns, barn dances and classical music, and Cage, whose 4′33″ involves a performer remaining silent onstage. “The impact of New York was extraordinary. He could have pursued a route into cathedral music, but he decided instead to go to the US.įrom 1958, he spent three formative years in New York, initially as a graduate student at the Juilliard School. After attending the Leys school in Cambridge, Peter got an organ scholarship to Queens’ College at the university. He was born in Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, the son of Frank Dickinson, the contact lens pioneer, and Muriel (nee Porter). He never forgot an apparent snobbism decades earlier towards jazz that led to BBC Radio 3 refusing to broadcast George Gershwin, whose masterpieces include Rhapsody in Blue, with its fusion of jazz and classical music. Other major works included his Blue Rose Variations for organ, which was performed at the BBC Proms by David Titterington in 2009, and his Mass of the Apocalypse, played by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the Aldeburgh festival in 2015.ĭickinson was ahead of his time. ![]() These composers in turn inspired Dickinson to write concertos for organ (1971), piano (1984) and violin (1986). The French composer Erik Satie was among his diverse passions and, as one critic observed, Dickinson helped make Satie a “cult favourite throughout Europe” from the 1960s onwards.
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