Skip to main content

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

May – July 2022

In the second of our series on the Greats of the classical musical tradition we draw attention to the resources available in the Jerwood Library for the student, performer, critic and lover (and hater) of arguably one of the greatest figures in our cultural history: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791).

Come to the Jerwood Library and listen to the various recordings and interpretations available in our CD and LP collections, and see performances of his operas on DVD. Or, from the comfort of your favourite couch at home, avail yourself of our extensive online resources.

Inform your performance with the study of critical and facsimile editions embodying the work of the finest Mozart scholars; research your academic work with books, journals and online resources.

Or just wallow in the sheer pleasure of his music in any combination of the above!

Whatever your needs the Jerwood Library and its staff are here to assist you.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s B-minor Mass

Sep – Dec 2019

For the current display in the Jerwood library’s foyer we have drawn on our extensive collection to highlight one of the greatest works of one of the greatest of the composers who form the foundations of the European musical tradition. J. S. Bach wrote his B-minor Mass in the final years of his life, leaving what many regard as a kind of testimony to his life’s work. It is a grand piece of great beauty and profound religious sentiment, displaying the scope and variety of his art; and its students will find a wealth of resources in the library including a complete facsimile edition and various collected editions; as well as recordings, books and scores.

For more information about the Bach B-minor mass exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Reserved Women!

May – July 2019

An exhibition of scores by women composers held in the Jerwood Library’s reserve collections. All the composers chosen for this exhibition were born, or were active during the nineteenth century – featuring Charlotte Anley, Clara Angela Macirone, Charlotte Sainton-Dolby and Maria Lindsay.

For more information about the Reserved Women exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Clara Schumann 1819-1896

Jan – Mar 2019

It’s 200 years since the birth of Clara Schumann, and the Jerwood library is marking the occasion with a small exhibition dedicated to her life and work displaying a range of materials available from our collection, including books, scores, and recordings. Known as Europe’s ‘Queen of the Piano’, Clara had a brilliant career for over 60 years as one of the most prominent virtuoso pianists of the nineteenth century. She also composed an accomplished series of around 50 pieces, greatly admired by her contemporaries.

For more information about the Clara Schumann exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Claude Debussy – 1862 – 1918

Sep – Dec 2018

Debussy was undoubtedly one of the most important figures in the music of the late-Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, whose influence pervades music to this day. To commemorate the centenary of his death the Jerwood Library is very proud to present a taste of what any student of the great man can find in our collection: sheet music, scores & fascimiles; CDs, DVDs & LPs; books & journal articles – not to mention the vast online resources available to Trinity Laban staff and students.

From the library of Julian Bream: an exhibition of his scores and manuscripts

Apr – Jul 2018

Currently on display in the Jerwood Library is a selection of scores from the personal library of the guitarist Julian Bream (b.1933), now held in the Jerwood library archives.

The items are drawn from the whole spectrum of his activities throughout his long career as one of the world’s greatest guitarists. Bream’s contribution to the guitar is enormous, and through a combination of his international performing career, prolific recorded output, his commissioning of new works and tireless work as an arranger, he has played a central role in the elevation of the guitar to its status today as an instrument at the heart of musical life throughout the world.

For more information about the Julian Bream exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Stephen Montague at 75

Jan – Mar 2018

Currently on display in the Jerwood Library is a selection of photographs and scores from Trinity Laban professor of composition Stephen Montague. The items on display give an insight into a long and diverse international career as a composer, conductor and pianist. Included are photos of his time spent with such leading lights of twentieth-century music as John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow and Jo Kondo, as well as an eclectic selection of scores that testify to his desire — shared with Henry Cowell — ‘to live in the whole world of music and not just one corner.’

To read an interview with Stephen Montague, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Stockhausen (1928 – 2007)

Oct – Dec 2017

The 5th December 2017 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of the German composer and musician Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Jerwood Library is very proud to present this exhibition to commemorate his music as he is generally considered one of the towering figures of 20th Century music. His work encompassed pioneering research into electronic music; aleatory and serial composition; spatialization in music, as well as grand, visionary ideas and projects such as Cosmological Composition and the creation of the huge opera cycle, Licht.

This exhibition makes use of the Jerwood Library’s collection of Stockhausen material.

Trinity Laban Faculty of Music Composers series: Darren Bloom

May – Sep 2017

The Jerwood Library is happy to feature the work of Darren Bloom, composer and teacher at Junior Trinity. In 2016 Darren won the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize and has been commissioned to write a new chamber work for the 2017 Cheltenham Festival. The exhibition features notes, sketches and (as yet) unfinished scores to illustrate the work in progress for this commission, as well as details of his recent work for the London Symphony Orchestra and other activities.

For more information about the Darren Bloom exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

The First Great Virtuoso of the Viola – An exhibition on Lionel Tertis

January – March 2017

Currently on display in the Jerwood Library are items from a large collection of material relating to the celebrated viola player Lionel Tertis (1876-1975), collected by his biographer, John White (1938-2013), and now held in the Jerwood library archives.

Lionel Tertis was a renowned viola virtuoso who worked tirelessly towards raising the status of the viola to a solo and recital instrument on a par with the violin and cello. To this end he inspired and performed many new works for the instrument, was a prolific arranger of old works and even produced his own design for the Tertis-Model viola, in pursuit of a stronger, more sonorous tone. The library’s collection comprises Tertis’ manuscript arrangements and annotated copies of music he owned, along with photographs, correspondence, concert programmes and other memorabilia. It was the life’s work of the much-respected violist John White whose definitive biography of Tertis was published in 2006: Lionel Tertis: The First Great Virtuoso of the Viola.

For more information about the Lionel Tertis exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Experimental music from 1950s New York

September – December 2016

Photograph of John Cage at a drinks reception at the Cage/Cunningham Residency at the Laban Centre, Laurie Grove, London, July 1980

Photo by Peter Sayers (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Currently on display is a selection of scores from the library’s collection by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff and Earle Brown, all of whom in 1950s New York were experimenting with a new degree of indeterminacy in their pieces and an interest in treating sounds as objects rather than vehicles for expression. These composers also had many friends among the painters working in New York at the time – people such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman and Franz Kline – and it seems no coincidence that the design and visual impact of their scores were also of great importance to them.

For more information about the Experimental music from 1950s New York exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Trinity Laban Faculty of Music Composers series: Luke Styles

18 April – 31 August 2016

Jerwood Library is very pleased to present an exhibition highlighting the work of Trinity Laban Junior Dept. composition teacher and composer Luke Styles, focusing on two of his acclaimed works: his opera of Macbeth and Handspun for aerialist and cello.

For more information about the Luke Styles exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Without any apologies for their sex:
A celebration of women at Trinity Laban’s Faculty of Music

15 January – 24 March 2016

The published history of Trinity Laban’s Faculty of Music (formerly Trinity College of Music) is dominated by the faces of men. But take a closer look at the archives, and a different picture emerges. As students, teachers and examiners, women contributed in innovative and pioneering ways to the success of the conservatoire. This exhibition recovers their voices from the obscurity of the historical record. It is the story of how women made Trinity Laban the institution it is today.

For more information about the Without any apologies for their sex exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Facsimile Scores in the Jerwood Library

10 September – 11 December 2015

The two display cases just inside the library entrance show examples of two kinds of handwritten music facsimiles available in the Jerwood library.

One cabinet displays a selection of beautiful and distinctive handwritten scores from twentieth-century composers. The chosen manuscripts display a range of particularly striking and individual approaches to the calligraphy of more-or-less conventionally notated music.

The other cabinet highlights a few items from the library’s reference facsimile collection; a wonderful source of insight into the writing styles and working methods of many of the old masters.

For more information about the Facsimile Scores exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Music in Wartime

8 May – 2 July 2015

To commemorate the 70th anniversary of VE Day (8 May 1945), the library has launched a new exhibition: Music in Wartime. With material related to both the First and Second World Wars, the exhibition highlights resources unique to Trinity Laban – extracts from Trinity College of Music’s board minutes of the time (held in the Trinity College of Music Archive), and items from the Charles Kennedy Scott Archive – as well as providing a broader picture of wartime life through passages from The Musical Times and books from the library’s loanable collection.

Music in Wartime will be on display from 8 May to 2 July and can be found in the Jerwood Library of the Performing Arts at the music faculty of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (directions here). If you are coming from outside the institution, please sign in at the main reception desk and a member of library staff will come to meet you.

For more information about the Music in Wartime exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

An Exhibition to Mark Fifty Years Since the Death of Charles Kennedy Scott (1876-1965)

23 January – 26 March 2015

This exhibition celebrates the life and musical career of Charles Kennedy Scott (1876-1965), a former member of staff at Trinity College of Music (now Trinity Laban), who died 50 years ago. Described by Sir Thomas Beecham as ‘the greatest choir-trainer in the world,’ Scott was a hugely influential musician, music director, writer and educator. Over a long career he made important contributions to the revival of early music, and to the promotion of contemporary choral composition. This exhibition showcases material from our Charles Kennedy Scott archive including some of Scott’s personal papers and unpublished music manuscripts, along with material relating to his choirs and to his involvement with Trinity. For more information about the Charles Kennedy Scott exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Trinity Laban Faculty of Music Composers series: Sam Hayden

November – December 2014

To coincide with the premiere of Hayden’s string quartet Transience, the Jerwood Library is pleased to present a display featuring Hayden’s score for Transience and screenshots of the OpenMusic patches used in the composition, provided by the composer. Also on display are the score of Surface/Tension by Sam Hayden as well as the scores for the Bartók and Harvey string quartets, all from the Jerwood Library’s collection. For more information about the premiere and the display, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

From Notes to Performance

September – November 2014

This exhibition looks at some of the questions which arise when selecting materials for performance. Using a piano sonata by Mozart and an aria by Handel as examples, a range of library and archive material is displayed. This compares editions (facsimile and modern printed scores) and editorial practice, offers insightful written accounts by performers, critics and the composers themselves, all supporting the journey ‘from notes to performance’. For more information about the From Notes to Performance exhibition, visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Conducting the Croydon Phil the Trinity Way: Alan Kirby, Myers Foggin and James Gaddarn

8 May – 19 June 2014

For the past year the much-respected Croydon Philharmonic Choir has been celebrating their 100th season. Whilst the choir has no connection with Trinity Laban today, its history is nevertheless closely related since their first three musical directors were all involved in some way with the then Trinity College of Music. The association began in 1914 when Alan Kirby, who became an honorary fellow of TCM and whose collection of conducting scores were eventually bequeathed to the college library, founded the choir. Forty-odd years later, the baton passed to Myers Foggin, a former principal of Trinity. Finally, James Gaddarn, who taught at the college for thirty-five years, conducted the choir between 1973 and 1999. This exhibition tells the story of these conductors through material housed here in our special collections. Exhibits include Alan Kirby’s score of the Apostles (inscribed by Elgar when he guest-conducted the choir in 1933), Myers Foggin’s personal scrapbook, and the programme for Adrian Boult’s 80th birthday concert in 1969 at which the choir performed under James Gaddarn.

PDF version of the exhibition guide is available.

Roger Scruton Exhibition

March 2014

The Jerwood Library presented an exhibition on the occasion of a visit by Roger Scruton to Trinity Laban on 20 March 2014, highlighting the relevant materials from the library’s collection, alongside scores and materials relating to his two operas lent by him for the display. For more information about Professor Scruton’s visit and the display visit the Jerwood Library blog.

Trinity Laban Faculty of Music Composers series: Gwyn Pritchard and the Second London Ear Festival

February/March 2014

The Jerwood Library has mounted a display to highlight the work of Trinity Laban professor of composition Gwyn Pritchard and the second London Ear Festival taking place from 27th to 30th March 2014 at the Warehouse and Cello Factory, both in Waterloo.

The Jerwood Library’s collection of Gwyn Pritchard’s scores and recordings can be searched via Jerwood Library Search.

Stanley Black Centenary Exhibition

November 2013 – January 2014

This exhibition celebrates the life and work of Stanley Black OBE (1913-2002), one of Britain’s best-loved musicians, in this his centenary year. During the course of a long and indefatigable career Stanley Black turned his talents to piano playing, composing, arranging and conducting in a wide variety of genres. He was known to audiences across the globe for his jazz arrangements, his film music, for light music broadcasts on the BBC and as a conductor of pops-style orchestral concerts. The Jerwood Library is fortunate to be the repository of the Stanley Black archive, an extensive collection of manuscript music scores and archival material relating to Stanley Black. Items on display include photographs, film music contracts, concert programmes, autograph scores and manuscript notes. The majority of the collection is catalogued on Jerwood Library Search and is available to researchers by appointment.

The Westbrook Trio: Celebrating 30 Years

October 2013

WestbrookTrio
Illustration by Miklos Buttkai. Reproduced with permission.

For over thirty years now the Westbrook Trio have been delighting audiences across the globe with their innovative mix of jazz and music theatre. Comprising the jazz composer and pianist Mike Westbrook, singer and lyricist Kate Westbrook, and saxophonist Chris Biscoe, together they have created a vast body of original material uniting text, music and improvisation. This exhibition highlights some of the Trio’s work with a range of concert posters and programmes, recordings and original manuscripts from the Jerwood Library’s Westbrook Archive.

We have written a blog post about the Westbrooks’ visit to the exhibition on 3 Oct 2013.

Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997)

August – September 2013

Nancarrow tempo scheme, reproduced by kind permission of the Nancarrow Estate
Tempo scheme by Nancarrow, reproduced by kind permission of the Nancarrow Estate.

In April 2012 Trinity’s Head of Composition Dominic Murcott was the Artistic Director for Impossible Brilliance, a festival of the music of Conlon Nancarrow at the South Bank Centre in London. Murcott has for some years been researching Nancarrow and had gained access to his Mexico City studio. Our current display contains artefacts from that studio as well as materials from Murcott’s private collection and that of the Jerwood Library.

Nancarrow’s output was almost entirely composed for player pianos (also known as pianolas). These were automated acoustic pianos, fitted with a mechanism that reads musical information in the form of a paper roll punched with holes. These were the precursors to the modern sequencing of electronic instruments, but were not particularly esoteric in their time; they were commonplace in domestic homes where they were a form of music reproduction. Piano rolls of all kinds of music were commercially available.

You can read more about the exhibition and Nancarrow from the curator of the exhibition, Walter Cardew, on the Jerwood Library blog.

A Peep at Trinity’s Jazz Collection: Alan Mills and Dan Pawson

April – July 2013

Alan Mills and Dan Pawson were two major contributors to the library’s jazz holdings. Between them they donated thousands of LPs, CDs, books, journals and ephemera resulting in a remarkably rich treasure trove of jazz materials. This exhibition showcases just a fraction of these items. Highlights from the Alan Mills collection include material by Mike Westbrook, Paul Rutherford and the female jazz musicians Billie Holiday, Lizzie Miles and Emma Barrett, alias ‘Sweet Emma’. Dan Pawson’s collection of memorabilia from the New Orleans jazz scene is represented by numerous George Lewis recordings, rare magazines such as Eureka, the bi-monthly magazine of the New Orleans Jazz Society, and Dan’s personal scrap books.

Catches and Glees in the Jerwood Library

24 January-14 March 2013

Catches and glees were distinctly English forms of part song typically sung by male voices. The catch was primarily known for its humour, often of a rather crude variety, and was popular from the late sixteenth century whilst the glee with its more refined subject matter was encouraged from the mid-eighteenth century. Glees were through-composed part songs but catches were sung as rounds, with the parts often arranged so as to give the words added meaning when combined. The Jerwood Library holds a significant number of catch and glee collections, mainly dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This exhibition highlights some of these collections and explores the social context of part singing at that time.

PDF version of the exhibition guide is available (1.1 MB).

John Cage (1912-1992)
Exhibition to commemorate Out of the Cage!

October – December 2012

Out of the Cage! is a centennial celebration of John Cage & Friends featuring a multitude of musicians, dancers, and other performers simultaneously animating a labyrinth of rooms and spaces in the Old Royal Naval College on 26 October 2012.

The exhibition displayed materials from the Jerwood Library collection and the private collection of Trinity professor and artistic director of Out of the Cage! Stephen Montague as well as photos from the Merce Cunningham/John Cage residency at the Laban Centre in 1980, provided by the Laban Archive.

Trinity Laban Faculty of Music Composers series: Errollyn Wallen MBE

June – October 2012

Errollyn Wallen was born in Belize and moved to England when she was two years old. She read Music at Goldsmiths, King’s College, London and King’s College, Cambridge.

Recent commissions and performances include, amongst others, Diamond Greenwich performed for the Queen at the re-opening of The Cutty Sark in Greenwich, All the People of the World for the Hallé Orchestra, Triptych for organist Thomas Trotter, a tour of Carbon 12: A Choral Symphony for Welsh National Opera, and the film Falling for Channel 4 and ABC Television.

Current commissions include two works featuring the London Symphony Orchestra for the opening ceremony of the 2012 Paralympics.

Errollyn Wallen was awarded an MBE in the 2007 Queen’s Honours List for services to music.

The exhibition displayed a range of items relating to Errollyn and her work, including scores, CDs, photographs and other ephemera. A feature was one of Errollyn’s own CDs, which has been to outer space on the NASA STS-115 mission.

Wild Ambitions: Louis Jullien and his Musical Circulating Library

20 April – 7 June 2012

April 2012 marks the bicentenary of the birth of Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860), a French-born conductor and composer who revolutionized concert going in mid-nineteenth century Britain. In the Jerwood Library we hold around 250 bound volumes once belonging to a music circulating library which Jullien operated from his ‘Royal Conservatory of Music’ on Regent Street. This collection represents one of very few such libraries to have survived from this period and is interesting for its reflection on the musical culture of the time. The exhibition highlights items from the library and explores the life and work of Louis Jullien.

PDF version of the exhibition guide is available (1.3 MB).