By Ruby Howells
As we surely are all aware, 2022 has seen the Academy celebrating its bicentenary. Over the course of 200 years, the Academy has helped music grow and develop, itself producing some of the most significant figures in the creative arts. To celebrate this, I want to create a ‘bicentennial playlist’ which spans RAM’s existence. Initially I thought it would be fantastic to choose a piece of music from each year, right from 1822 to 2022; I quickly put that idea to rest, however, after realising that would take me more hours than watching the entirety of the Ring cycle. So, instead, I picked music from each decade. Rather than assuming the pressure of curating this playlist myself, I enlisted the democracy of RAMpage’s Instagram stories. To truly represent RAM, I wanted to include not just classical music, but also jazz, musical theatre and a sprinkling of popular music. It was incredibly hard to narrow down the options for each poll to just two, and I unfortunately had to miss out some real gems that are always fan favourites (i.e. pretty much everything between 1880 and 1930, please forgive me La Mer). However, after a series of what were, I hope, rather entertaining decisions on Instagram, the results are in!
So, to conclude, definitely have a listen to all of the works in this list, whether they won the vote or not – you may find a new favourite! One thing these results do show is that we still need more concerts programming the fantastic works of composers who have historically been marginalised; I have a feeling that some of these results may be slightly different if some of these works were better-known! I’m sure that in a hundred years, for RAM’s tricentenary, this list will be full of composers that we haven’t even heard of yet. In the meantime, I’m going to revel in the joy of knowing that RAM in 2022 is a bunch of Swifties.
This post is an excerpt from our most recent edition. Read the whole thing here!
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