Arthur Hutchings
  Professor of Music - Durham & Exeter Universities - an appreciation of his life and work

 

The 1947 appointment to the Durham Music Chair to succeed Sir Edward Bairstow was at least unconventional if not, in the eyes of some of the university community, downright inappropriate. Hutchings had held no previous university lectureship nor was he known as a performer. The Warden of the Durham Colleges in the University Sir James Duff made an astute choice, for his man had a solid background of erudite and perceptive critical writing, a wide knowledge of music and much else besides, had no narrow agendas, but above all was charismatic and a first rate communicator. He was down to earth and approachable. As a young musician growing up in London during 1920/1930s he had had close contacts with many of the brilliant up and coming composers and commentators. These contacts meant he would be well regarded nationally and of course his years of grammar school teaching promised a ready understanding of young people. Inaugurating a new residential full time music degree course allowed him scope for moulding the way forward. The external degrees continued to be offered until 1980 by which time the residential music BA was the standard.

 

  From 1947 until approximately 1960 the music office, shared by the professor and his secretary, was a small room above a solicitor’s office in the North Bailey where all were welcome although he didn't suffer fools gladly. In private letters to those he knew well, his comments on individuals, attitudes and institutions he disfavoured were unbridled. By contrast his frequent generosity could be unexpected and thoughtful. The present writer in his first term was asked  “You’re keen on Debussy and the French people - have you read Martin Cooper’s excellent book on French music? No? Well go to the bookshop, get them to order it and put it on my account”.

 

  There was, and it continues in use, the principal lecturing and performance space (Room 6) of ample proportions in the Old Divinity School opposite the north door of the cathedral. Two elderly Bechstein grands, a Shudi two manual harpsichord with "Venetian blind" swell mechanism, a record player and blackboard constituted the props. For many of the early years Arthur Hutchings’s colleagues were Alan Dickinson (Bach, Berlioz, 19th-early 20th century), Alec Harman (Renaissance, Polyphonic period, early Baroque) and the brilliant young Peter Evans (Mahler onwards). Evans would soon be appointed to the Chair of Music in Southampton University. Each new undergraduate intake was generally restricted to a dozen or perhaps fourteen. Selection procedures sometimes took somewhat unexpected forms: for instance, composer Anthony Payne remembered writing to Hutchings about the possibility of enrolling although he’d really hoped to read classics at Oxbridge. They met on Palace Green between Cathedral and Castle; Payne was randomly quizzed  – recognise this or that theme, read a few bars from a Bach recitative etc. The professor then said he had go home merely adding “Oh and..we’ll take you next year - goodbye".  Michael Wilson recounts how he went up to Durham to take preliminary tests and was told to start the course in October. When he duly arrived Hutchings said “Who are you? I never said you could come”. After this unpromising début, all was well.

 

  In his lectures Hutchings taught harmony styles, contrapuntal and fugal styles, orchestration, music history usually selected from Baroque, Classical, 19th century periods according to syllabus requirements. It is this range of practical applications that constitute some of the chapters in his book ‘The Invention & Composition of Music’ [1958]  For him, the whole purpose of music was communication and feeling; in the book he writes "Assuredly the parody of classics is no main road to urgent modern expression, but it can help such expression to bear the impress of an orderly and critical mind, and it can prevent some types of mind from remaining inarticulate", and "imitative composition is justified if...it secures an experience not fully comparable with original expression but approaching it".

​

  To quote from the address given by Professor Peter Evans at the 1990 Durham memorial concert for his former teacher  "Arthur’s assumption was that students chose to read music, not for some tricks of the trade that would place them on their first professional rung, but because their love of the masterpieces of Western music was as profound and all-embracing as his own. We can borrow his own words, on one of Delius’s teachers “He knows his classics, but also knows that responsive humanity, not a congress of teachers, made them classics; he sees them as supreme records of expression, their technical processes being fascinating means to greater ends”.