by Kennedy Blair Miller Photo credits: Ben Reason I’ve always felt an affinity with Ally. We’re both from Southern USA (Ally’s from Nashville, Tennessee, just one state over from my home state of North Carolina); we both studied music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and now, we’re both graduate singers at…
Read MoreFive Period Songs – an interview with Mia Serracino-Inglott
by Jonty Watt One of the more exciting projects to come out of RAM recently was Mia Serracino-Inglott’s performance of her own composition at the Southbank Centre, titled Five Period Songs. Mia is a mezzo-soprano who regularly performs and creates new music, and who is challenging conventions of what it means to be a classical…
Read MoreInspiring composer: Grażyna Bacewicz
By Emily Trubshaw Although many YouTube comments are encouraging and supportive of Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s music, there is also a wide spread of those that criticise her ability to produce more than just a well-executed musical structure. Rather than moving her audience, Bacewicz is often perceived as being clinical and unoriginal. ‘Her generativity lacks…
Read MoreInspiring composer: Margaret Bonds
By Kennedy Blair Miller For a long time, I struggled to believe my identities as a classical musician and an activist were compatible. The history of classical music is filled with misogyny, racism, and homophobia, so I sought out an alternate history – one where musicians used their art as a vessel for progress. Margaret…
Read MoreInspiring singer: Florence Foster Jenkins
By Jonty Watt If you have ever happened upon a recording of Florence Foster Jenkins’s singing, you might think she makes a remarkably strange choice of inspirational figure. Dubbed the ‘anti-Callas’ and ‘exquisitely bad’, her recordings of difficult operatic repertoire are, indeed, legendarily woeful. Her ‘Queen of the Night’ aria has racked up nearly two…
Read MoreSue Lawley – Broadcaster
By Declan Hickey There is no greater reservoir of satisfaction than the BBC Radio 4 archive, suffering only from its incompleteness. Fortunately, the channel’s enduring contribution to mankind, Desert Island Discs, is among its better-preserved programmes. Better still, the golden age of 1988–2006 survives fully intact, no record or luxury spared. Devoted listeners will know…
Read MoreInspiring DJ: Honey Dijon
By Toby Anderson 2022 was the year I started seriously thinking about house music. At the centre of that was the fabulous, ethereal, mesmerising DJ Honey Dijon. As a black trans woman, Dijon places the queer utopianism that gave birth to house music at the centre of her craft, weaving stories of queer empowerment and…
Read MoreWho Resurrected Carmen?
By Kennedy Blair Miller Artwork by Jess Bull Anderson The doors to the Opéra-Comique theatre opened to a bustling crowd of eager Parisians on 3 March 1875. Well-dressed socialites, composers, and artists presented their tickets to the ushers with an air of superiority. They had been invited to the premiere of a new opera, Carmen,…
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Kate Soper and the Musical Chimera
live performance, two-headed monsters, and our complicated relationship with the self By Jonty Watt There is a moment in American composer Kate Soper’s philosophy-opera IPSA DIXIT (2016) when Soper, in her role as prima donna, walks over to violinist Josh Modney and begins a strange assault on his violin. Specifically, she fingers notes on the…
Read MoreRAM’s Bicentenary Playlist
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…
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