Royal College of Music

Front facade of the RCM

Royal College of Music logo

The Royal College of Music ( RCM ) is a renowned music college in Kensington , London .

History and tasks

Founded in 1882 as the successor to the National Training School for Music by the then Prince of Wales (later Edward VII ), the college opened in 1883, with George Grove as its director. One of the first singing teachers (until 1886) was the "Swedish nightingale" Jenny Lind, who is famous throughout Europe and America . In 1894 the college moved to its current address in the Albertopolis Cultural District, where it is adjacent to Imperial College, London, opposite the Royal Albert Hall . In the same year Hubert Parry took over the management and kept it until 1918.

The music college teaches all contents of western classical music, from student to doctoral degrees.

The college also has a junior department with more than 300 students between the ages of 10 and 18 who can learn all kinds of instruments, singing, composition and performance practice in ensembles and orchestras. A summer school is also held annually for 30 young musicians from the UK . There are plans to expand their scope.

Like the Royal Academy of Music , the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Royal Northern College of Music , the RCM is a member of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM), the world's leading institute for musical examinations.

Well-known students

Agnes Elisabeth Overbeck (1870-1919), pianist
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), composer
Gustav Holst (1874–1934), composer
William Hurlstone (1876-1906), composer
Thomas Dunhill (1877–1946), composer
Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977), conductor
George Butterworth (1885–1916), composer
Arthur Bliss (1891–1975), composer
Eugène Aynsley Goossens (1893–1962), conductor
Noel Gay (1898–1954), song composer
Constant Lambert (1905–1951), composer
Michael Tippett (1905–1998), composer
Marjorie Westbury (1905-1989), singer
Peter Pears (1910–1986), singer
Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), composer
Charles Groves (1915–1992), conductor
Joan Dickson (1921-1994), cellist
Neville Marriner (1924-2016), conductor
Joseph Horovitz (* 1926), composer and conductor
Gervase de Peyer (1926–2017), clarinetist and conductor
Joan Sutherland (1926-2010), singer
Colin Davis (1927-2013), conductor
William Waterhouse (1931–2007), bassoonist and musicologist
Julian Bream (1933-2020), guitarist and lutenist
Alan Ridout (1934-1996), composer
Colin Mawby (1936–2019), organist and composer
James Galway (born 1939), flautist
John Williams (born 1941), guitarist
Thomas Allen (born 1944), singer
Andrew Davis (* 1944), conductor
John Lill (born 1944), pianist
Michael Nyman (* 1944), composer
David Helfgott (* 1947), pianist
David M. Patrick (* 1947), organist
Andrew Lloyd Webber (* 1948), composer
Malcolm Archer (* 1952), organist, choir director and composer
James Horner (1953-2015), composer
Alexander Baillie (* 1956), cellist
Paul Schwartz (* 1956), music producer, composer, conductor and pianist
Surendran Reddy (1962–2010), composer and pianist
Claude Chalhoub (* 1974), cellist and composer
Mica Penniman (aka Mika) (* 1983), singer and songwriter
Olga Jegunova (* 1984), pianist
Lauren Francis , soprano

Instrument museum

The college's musical instrument museum has a collection of 800 exhibits, mainly from Western cultures, but also some from Africa and Asia. The museum is housed in a purpose-built building from 1970. The collection includes more than a dozen Stradivarius violins. It is open to the public.

Other collections

The loan and reference stocks include several hundred thousand individual items. including numerous manuscripts, including by composers such as Mozart or Haydn , and also numerous letters, including a larger Beethoven collection. There are also tens of thousands of musical first editions. The modern prints can be borrowed if they are not required by the college. There are also thousands of recordings and an extensive library with several hundred music magazines.

The Portraits and Performance History department has a collection of 340 original portraits and 10,000 prints and photographs; a collection of 600,000 concert programs from 1720 to the present; and extensive specimens from the fields of opera, instruments, title page and concert hall design.