The influencer
As one of the greatest musical educators once sang, let’s start at the very beginning. Dartington is the great-grandparent of music summer schools, and has clearly influenced all the other subsequent enterprises. It was founded at Bryanston School in 1948 in a blaze of post-war egalitarian optimism by William Glock, a pianist and music critic who later went on to become BBC Controller of Music. It was set up to offer professionals and skilled amateurs a chance to gather and work in convivial surroundings, and unlike many other post-war social experiments (fancy some nice concrete brutalism and high-rise social housing, anyone?) it has stood the test of time. This is all the more surprising considering Glock’s reputation for blacklisting contemporary composers who dared to write in a tonal and melodic idiom. What might have become a dry and arid niche school has flowered into a welcoming space for all musicians – conductors, composers and administrators, as well as performers on all instruments.
The school moved to Dartington Hall in 1953, and has remained there ever since. This beautiful medieval estate in Devon was purchased by a couple of wealthy philanthropists in 1925 to be a centre of artistic, agricultural, spiritual and social research, and the polymath ethos continues to this day, aided by the presence of the summer school.
It runs for four weeks (22 July-19 August), and is currently curated by the Radio 3 presenter and author Sara Mohr-Pietsch. Her aim has been to expand the opportunities for collaborative music making. Each week has a different flavour (from Medieval music, via Baroque, to Classical and Contemporary, roughly in chronological order) so the main piano offerings this year are in weeks three and four. They include tuition classes with Florian Mitrea (pictured, top) and Ivana Gavrić, and a course on accompanying singers with pianist Anna Tilbrook and tenor James Gilchrist. Keyboardists wishing to explore the world of the harpsichord could check out the classes with Jane Chapman in week one as well. And as Mohr-Pietsch explained to me when I spoke to her, her aim in the festival is to boost collaborative music making, so that all participants are encouraged to try something new as well: joining a folk choir, for example, or composing a film score. If that floats your boat, then Dartington is the place for you.