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Richard Marlow Memorial Service Address 23 Nov 13

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Richard Marlow Memorial Service Address 23 Nov 13 Memorial service for Richard Marlow Saturday 23 November 2013, 2.30pm Trinity College Chapel It is a great privilege and, at the same time, rather daunting to give this address. After all, Richard Marlow was more than twice my age and held the post of Director of Music at Trinity for somewhat longer than I have been alive. My own time as a music student and organ scholar here, in the final years of the last century, coincided with the beginning of Richard’s fourth decade as a Fellow. By then, many achievements and a vast discography lay behind him, yet his commitment to the highest standards of performance and teaching were undimmed, and remained so until the very end of his life. Born on the outskirts of London just one month before the outbreak of the Second World War, his father an electricity- board worker and his mother a stalwart of the Mothers’ Union, Richard was educated at the local primary school and failed the 11+ exam, an achievement of which he remained strangely proud. Following five years at Archbishop Temple’s Secondary Modern School near Lambeth Palace, he went on to the sixth form at St Olave’s School, which then lay not far from Tower Bridge. Richard’s first exposure to church music came at St Paul’s Nork where the Organist was the Vicar’s teenage son, Christopher Dearnley, later Organist of Salisbury and St Paul’s cathedrals. He encouraged Richard to audition for a choristership at Southwark Cathedral, where Sidney Campbell first introduced him to the organ. It was as a Southwark boy that he joined the choristers of Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s and the Chapel Royal in 1953 for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The experience was clearly an overwhelming one. In a recent interview for BBC radio, Richard described his inability to sing the opening of Parry’s I was glad, so overcome was he by the emotion of the occasion. It was also around this time that he made his first visit to Trinity, to have tea with Hubert Middleton, then Organist of the College and the uncle of his boyhood friend, David Gedge, later Organist of Brecon Cathedral. At the age of 14, he became Organist of St Anselm’s Church, Kennington, and in 1958, went up to Selwyn College Cambridge as Organ Scholar, just escaping obligatory National Service. It is said that Richard turned down the organ scholarship at Christ Church Oxford, preferring instead a college in which he would have the opportunity to direct the choir himself. The Reverend A.C. Blyth, Vice-Master at Selywn, had set down that the Choir’s principal responsibility was to lead the congregational singing and not to get ideas above its station, and Sir David Harrison, a choir member in the 1950s and later Master of Selwyn described the group as more a collection of male broken voices than tenors and basses. This was not the most edifying of ensembles with which to work, yet Richard’s time as Organ Scholar coincided with the arrival of the first Choral Exhibitioner, and standards soon rose. As a Research Fellow, Richard was supervised by Thurston Dart who was, for twenty years, on the Editorial Committee of Musica Brittanica. Dart set a number of his students and colleagues to work on volumes for this collection, and Richard was tasked with editing the keyboard works of the seventeenth- century English virginalist, Giles Farnaby and his son, Richard. Thurston Dart was undoubtedly one of the greatest influences in Richard’s life, instilling in him not only the detail, discipline and integrity that came to characterise his own work but also, and perhaps, more significantly, the skill to apply scholarship in performance, translating dry academia into ringing gold. Of course it was at this time that Richard encountered an even greater influence in his life. First glimpsed across King’s College Chapel at Evensong, Annette cast a spell on Richard, and he was delighted when he found himself one day alongside her at a drinks party. Seizing the opportunity to dazzle with his wit, on filling Annette’s glass he misquoted Psalm 84 with a winning smile – ‘I had rather be a wine-pourer in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of ungodliness’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this rather unique chat-up line was met with complete bewilderment by the future Mrs Marlow. Nevertheless, the two were duly married in September 1964. A short period at Southampton University followed, during which time Richard was also the Organist of St Mary’s Church in the city. The distinguished musicologist, Professor Peter Evans, then Head of the Music Department, recalls Richard’s unique combination of scholarly integrity and practical ability. After just three years, Richard and Annette returned to Cambridge and Richard succeeded Raymond Leppard both in the Music Faculty and at Trinity. Nicholas King, Organ Scholar at the time, describes Richard’s arrival: The Choir of King’s College was in residence in Trinity Chapel whilst their chapel was being cleaned, and a record number of freshers had arrived in the Trinity Choir. The Prince of Wales was in residence, Rab Butler was the Master and Harry Williams was in his final year as Dean of Chapel before going on to Mirfield. The organ was a monolithic Harrison filling the width of the gallery, and the choir of tenors and basses performed a repertoire of established four-part works arranged, with varying degrees of success, for lower voices. On Richard’s first Sunday, two tenors overslept and failed to appear for the morning service, something which was to become a recurring theme over the next thirty-eight years… Things soon changed, and works by contemporary composers were introduced alongside 16th-century motets sung from C- clefs. In a far-sighted but controversial move, the old organ was replaced in 1975 by a neo-classical instrument by the Swiss firm Metzler, constructed within the restored main case of 1708. The new organ incorporated pipework from the earlier Father Smith instrument and remains one of the finest instruments of its type in the UK, unsurpassed for the clarity and colour it lends to Baroque music. In 1976, Richard performed the complete organ works of J.S. Bach in a popular series of lunchtime recitals. The Cambridge University Chamber Choir was resurrected and soon became a major force in music-making both in Cambridge and on the wider musical scene, performing works previously untackled by student ensembles. The tradition of Singing on the River was revived, and performances of the B minor Mass and passion settings by Schütz and Bach became regular fixtures, with the group being joined by world-renowned soloists such as Peter Pears and John Shirley-Quirk in performances in Cambridge, Ely, and, at the invitation of Benjamin Britten, in Snape. The Chamber Choir toured widely and one member particularly recalls a visit to Rome during which the Choir was ushered into a book-lined corridor to change before singing the afternoon mass in St Peter’s Basilica. With the Choir in various states of undress, a door at the end of the corridor opened to reveal a Christening party, including several robed Vatican clergy, who processed through the corridor much to the bemusement and embarrassment of the singers. Characteristically, Richard bowed solemnly as the clergy passed by, despite not wearing any trousers! It was in the early 1980s that Rab Butler took Richard aside one day and gently suggested that women might be admitted to the Choir, or else the two of them could find themselves imprisoned for sex discrimination. From that casual conversation came one of the jewels in the crown of this great college. The first mixed choir began singing services in 1982 and rapidly established an international reputation. Richard himself described the first intake of women choral scholars as outstanding, and he drilled them with his characteristic combination of discipline and sensitivity. Attention to detail was always at the top of the list and Catherine King, one of that pioneering cohort, recalls the first BBC broadcast in January 1983 at which even the spoken Confession and Lord’s Prayer were marked up with breaths and Marlovians. The RKM code was soon established – the Marlovian was the comma with a slur above it, which indicated neither a breath nor a break, but merely a relaxation within the phrase, an elegant musical moment that defies definition; legato was indicated by the stroking of the leg and when his high standards weren’t met, Richard would simply walk out of the rehearsal. Little changed in the next twenty-four years. Since its foundation, Trinity had maintained a choir of boys and men which, at the turn of the 20th century under Charles Villiers Stanford and later Alan Gray, was considered the finest in Cambridge. The Choir School closed and eventually the boys were disbanded but, within months of the foundation of the mixed choir, Trinity had once again become a centre for musical excellence, the choir attracting critical acclaim for its purity of intonation, ensemble and elegant musicianship. It is perhaps difficult for many of us to imagine a time in which sacred music was considered the exclusive preserve of choirs of men and boys, yet the advent of mixed choirs in Cambridge challenged that orthodoxy and a recent survey in Gramophone magazine of the greatest choirs across the globe placed Trinity, under Richard’s distinguished successor Stephen Layton, as the fifth best choir in the world. In a college founded for the advancement of ‘education, religion, learning and research’ Richard contributed equally to all aspects of those noble aims.
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