Katy Hamilton

Before March is entirely overtaken by talks, concerts, and various other exciting things (some of which you’ll find listed over here on the Events page), I’ve been enjoying a quiet weekend at home – the last in while – of trying to get ahead with prep and having a bit of time to myself. And on Friday evening, I decided to have a look at something I’d finally managed to get to my flat over Christmas: my concert programme collection.

I’m not entirely sure why and when I started collecting the programmes and tickets of the things I attended. Somewhere in a desk drawer at my parents’ house, there are school concert sheets, summer school performance schedules, programmes from shows we went to when I was very little, like that time we saw Cats and I was too scared to go and ask Old Deuteronomy for his autograph at the interval because he was so big and, well… a cat. But certainly since I started university, I began to hang on to these things consistently, and stuck them in box files. Over the years, I’ve gathered enough of these box files to build a small wall, and it would be fair to say that the consistency of the filing has varied from the positively archival (appropriately enough, since I spent several years at the Royal College of Music actually working in a concert programme archive) to the rather random. There was, needless to say, never enough room for this slightly eccentric collection in London; but now I am in Suffolk, with cupboard space to spare, I’ve managed to get them all to the same place I am, and have begun to sort them out.

There were three motivations for doing this. The first was to please my inner Sorter Of Things, who enjoys putting such documents in a readily accessible order (see above about my happy years working in an archive). The second was one of pure nostalgia: the chance to revisit old concerts and experiences past, and here in particular I was knocked off my feet by one concert above all, of which more in a moment. The third was to do with a half-formed notion I’d developed many years ago, and am now finally in a position to put into practice. But let’s deal with nostalgia first.

(No, don’t worry, that’s a stock photo. It’s just much prettier than a collection of Ryman’s box folders… my programme collection is not THAT old.) For five happy years, I studied at the University of Nottingham: a BA in Music, followed by a part-time MA in Musicology, supplemented by piano lessons out of town, running music ensembles, conducting a chamber choir, teaching, working in a primary school, and assorted other things. For almost all of these five years, I was also the repetiteur for the University Choir, a relatively sizeable outfit which teamed up from time to time with one of the orchestras to put on the likes of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms; Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast (there are a lot of notes in that vocal score); masses by Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven; and Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle. In the terms free from such large-scale projects, the choir was put through its paces in a variety of other repertoire, which often reflected the interests of the various lecturers and external conductors who came in to lead rehearsals. There, nestling among those early boxes of papers, I found the programme of a concert featuring a line-up of music that was to lead, eventually, to my PhD: chorales and preludes by Bach, Isaac and Brahms; Stravinsky sacred settings and piano duets; and a wonderful collection of Brahms partsongs, almost all of which were originally written for vocal quartet and piano. That was in 2002. And exactly ten years later, I had a doctorate on the very subject of Brahms vocal quartets with piano, with which I had first become acquainted thanks to those choir rehearsals, and the rather ham-fisted translations I was asked to make of some of the poetry, and which the conductor very patiently corrected.

There are figures in all our lives who inspire us, whether it be in major pursuits such as PhDs (that conductor, also one of my lecturers, is one of several amazing humans who helped me on the way to conceiving and completing mine), or less grand but quietly lovely things such as the third reason for my wanting to sort my programme collection. Which was this.

Also at Nottingham whilst I was studying there was a lecturer I hardly ever saw in action, because he was very ill. His name was Anthony Pople, and if I had not believed the reputation he had as a scholar of early twentieth century music, and particularly as an analyst, it was proven in the single and astonishing lecture of his that I attended on Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. He spent two hours analysing the first twenty-four bars. It was completely and utterly riveting. I never knew Anthony well, and very sadly he died whilst I was studying for my MA. But I did once see inside his large, well-ordered office. And on a bookshelf near the door I beheld something I had never seen before: a beautifully arranged line of Royal Opera House programmes, in alphabetical sequence by composer. He looked a bit embarrassed when he saw my staring at it, and pointed out that such things contained all sorts of rich and well-researched information about operas which he was pleased to have to hand, rather than banishing them to a programme archive. He had a point.

So on Friday night, I made the first step towards implementing such a system myself. I sorted my way through about three-quarters of the Hamilton programme archive, and yanked out all the opera programmes, from performances across the UK and elsewhere. I’ll be clearing a shelf for them this evening. And then I’ll have my very own little operatic resource, gleaned from those excellent notes. I will think of Anthony every time I look at them. And it just goes to show, doesn’t it? What kind of a ‘shelf-life’ programme notes, a strand of activity that wasn’t even a part of my life when I saw his office, really can have.