John Stainer: A Life in Music

Professor Jeremy Dibble (Durham University), authority on British music from the 19th century, reflects on the life of Sir John Stainer and his most famous work, The Crucifixion.  An illustrated talk with accompaniment by the Cathedral Choir, who have recently recorded the work for Delphian Records.

Tickets: £15/£10, from EdFringe.

The Choir of St Mary’s was founded in 1879 to provide choral music for the daily services at Edinburgh’s new St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, with its own choir school.  This tradition, of singing regular weekday and Sunday services in the Cathedral, continues to this day, the only place in Scotland to do so.

Jeremy Dibble studied music at Trinity College, Cambridge (with Philip Radcliffe, Richard Marlow, Peter le Huray and Robin Holloway) and at Southampton University (with Peter Evans). Before he was appointed as a lecturer at Durham in 1993, he was a lecturer in music at University College, Cork. He teaches courses in harmony and counterpoint, musicianship, nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, and includes special topics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English song, Brahms, Britten's Chamber Operas and (at MA level) English church music. In 2010 the Royal School of Church Music awarded him a Fellowship (FRSCM) for services to church music and, in 2013, he was awarded a Fellowship (FGCM) by the Guild of Church Musicians.  Dibble’s research specialisms lie in British and Irish music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an area which includes not only composer studies, but also musical criticism and aesthetics, church music, hymnology, song, light music, opera and instrumental music.