CHARLES WOOD CONFERENCE
This year marks the centenary of the death of Charles Wood (1866-1926), Precentor and Director of College Music at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and later Professor of Music at Cambridge University in succession to Stanford. He also taught at the Royal College of Music in London, where he had a formative influence on the musical development of the younger generation of English composers including Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Herbert Howells, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Michael Tippett.
Wood was himself a significant composer. He wrote extensively for the Anglican church service, including repertoire intended originally for use in the College Chapel, and also composed solo and part-songs, instrumental chamber music, cantatas and organ music, and published collections of folk songs, carols and hymns.
To mark the centenary, there will be a day conference at Gonville & Caius College on Saturday 31 October. It will begin with a keynote address by Jeremy Dibble (Emeritus Professor of Music at Durham University) whose new biography of Wood will shortly be available. This will be followed by performances of secular songs and choral pieces. After a sandwich lunch, the London Chamber Ensemble (led by Madeleine Mitchell) will perform two of Wood’s string quartets, and Dr Nicholas Thistlethwaite will give a lecture on the evolution of chapel choirs in Cambridge in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The programme will end with Choral Evensong, sung by the Gonville and Caius chapel choir, including items of Wood’s church music.
The conference will begin at 11.00 a.m. (coffee available from 10.30 a.m.) and conclude at around 4.45 p.m. The full programme and other details will be sent in advance to participants.
The conference fee of £40 includes a sandwich lunch and other refreshments. This fee will be waived for students under the age of 25 who are currently in education whether at Cambridge University or elsewhere.
Jeremy Dibble’s biography of the Charles Wood ‘The Life and Music of Charles Wood’ can be ordered in advance at a significant discount and collected at the conference. Details of how to order Professor Dibble's book will be sent in due course to those who book places for the conference.
Please notify us of any dietary/access requirements by emailing claire.wheeler@cai.cam.ac.uk (Claire Wheeler, Choir & Chapel Administrator).
