The Royal College of Music and its Contexts
An Artistic and Social History
Music since 1900 Series

Located between the great Victorian museums of South Kensington and the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal College of Music, founded in 1883, has been a central influence on British musical life ever since. This wide-ranging account places the College within its musical and educational environments. It argues that the RCM's significance lies not only in its famous performers and composers, but also the generations of its more anonymous former students who have done so much to improve the musical life of the localities in which they have worked as teachers and animateurs. As a cultural history, this account also captures how significantly society's consumption of music - from new technologies to the altered perspectives of historical and world musics - has changed since the College was founded, and how very different our points of musical reference now are. This study traces the effects of such developments on the College's work.

Introduction – beginnings and contexts, the themes of a history; Part I. Building and Consolidating (1883–1914): 1. The founding directors – George Grove and Hubert Parry; 2. The students; 3. Establishing the musical and educational ethos – concerts and curriculum; 4. The buildings and finances; Coda – the First World War; Part II. Renewal and conventionality (1919–60): 5. Hugh Allen's RCM and musical life between the wars, 1919–1937; 6. The years of austerity – George Dyson and Ernest Bullock, 1938–1960; Part III. Changing Musical Cultures (1960–1984): 7. Keith Falkner and rebuilding institutional confidence, 1960–1974; 8. Crossing the RCM century – David Willcocks, 1974–84; Part IV. Into its Second Century, 1984–2018: 9. A changed state of rivalry – the RAM, the 'centre of excellence' and the Gowrie review, 1982–92; 10. The new realities of accounting and assuring – securing the RCM's public funding in the 1990s; 11. Reimagining for the future; Epilogue – a prosopography.

David C. H. Wright became Reader in the Social History of Music at the Royal College of Music, London after a professional life spent in both music college and university environments. His writings range from the culture and economics of Victorian music publishing to the Prom seasons of William Glock and Robert Ponsonby in The Proms: A New History (2007). In 2013, he published a social and cultural history of the Associated Boards of the Royal Schools of Music.