Peter Dickinson 
Peter Dickinson: Words and Music 

Peter Dickinson has made an enduring contribution to British musical life, and his music has been regularly performed and recorded by leading musicians. His writings, brought together here for the first time, are equally noteworthy. Covering well over half a century, the subjects are fascinatingly varied. Apart from musical interests ranging from Charles Ives to John Cage, they touch on literature; and Dickinson’s meetings with W.H. Auden and Philip Larkinare an intriguing insight that led to his Auden songs and the chamber work
Larkin’s Jazz. American themes are prominent in this collection. There are unique reviews of concert life in New York from 1959 to 1961; an accountof the teaching programme at the Juilliard School of Music at that time; three studies of Ives; and features containing original material on Copland, Thomson and Cage, all of whom Dickinson knew. Features on Erik Satie include the imaginary discussion marking his centenary in 1966. Dickinson also writes about his own music, providing an insight into what it was like being a British composer in the later twentieth century.

Peter Dickinson was born in Lancashire in 1934 and now lives in Suffolk. His 80th birthday was marked by a whole variety of tributes, including concerts, articles, broadcasts and various interviews – some included in this book.


PETER DICKINSON is a British composer and pianist as well as author and editor of Boydell/URP books on Berkeley, Copland, Cage, Barber and Berners. As a pianist, Dickinson had a twenty-five-year, international partnership with his sister, the mezzo Meriel Dickinson, for whom he wrote song cycles to poems of E. E. Cummings, Gregory Corso and Stevie Smith. He was a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 and is widely read as a critic on the Gramophone. He is an Emeritus Professor ofthe Universities of Keele and London and is chair of the Bernarr Rainbow Trust, for which he has edited several books on music education.

Table of Content

Introduction

I: Peter Dickinson at Eighty, by Stephen Banfield

II: Some Autobiography

Three Musical Careers

III: An American Apprenticeship

New York 1958-61

IV: Writings about Music

Satie – Stein – Cummings – Thomson – Berners – Cage

Charles Ives and Aaron Copland

Lord Berners: A British Avant-gardist

African American Influences on British Composers

The American Concerto

Style Modulation as a Compositional Technique

Bernarr Rainbow: Music Education’s Pioneer Historian

Wilfrid Mellers at Ninety

Two Ives Reviews

Remembering David Munrow

Two Satie Reviews

Putting on John Cage’s
Musicircus

Lennox Berkeley: A Golden Decade

V: Literary Connections

Emily Dickinson and Composers

T. S. Eliot, Stravinsky, Britten and Rawsthorne

Ruth Pitter: A Centenary Tribute

Meeting W. H. Auden

Meeting Philip Larkin

VI: Peter Dickinson on his own Music

Directions of a Decade

Nationalism is Not Enough

From Organ Loft to Rags and Blues

VII: Interviews and a Memoir

Conversations with Erik Satie

Meriel and Peter Dickinson with Richard Baker

Peter Dickinson with James Jolly

Meriel Dickinson: A Memoir

VIII: Travels

On the Trail of Samuel Barber in 1981

Appendix II: Peter and Meriel Dickinson: Discography

Travels in America and Mexico 1986

Appendix I: Peter Dickinson: Chronological List of Works

Appendix II: Peter and Meriel Dickinson: Discography