This blog post is part a series, in which John answers the questions he is most frequently asked.
How did you come to be Director of Music at Clare College?
The year was 1975 and I was hanging around Cambridge composing and doing some undergraduate teaching when I was invited to a private meeting with Lord Ashby, Master of Clare. His academic field was education but he was a keen amateur musician and wanted to foster music within the college. Clare had experienced an uplift in its musical fortunes and profile when, in 1972, it became one of the first three men’s colleges to admit women. Overnight, the chapel choir was transformed from a male-voice group of, let’s say, variable attainment, into a focused and ambitious mixed choir under the leadership of Peter Dennison, Clare’s music Fellow. The tradition had been that the college organ scholar conducted the choir, but Peter saw the advantages of senior leadership and took over the conducting, leaving the organ scholar free to concentrate on playing the organ. Clare Choir then being the only Cambridge chapel choir offering choral awards to women, there was a surge of female applicants and the standard soon soared. In 1975 Peter Dennison accepted a professorship in his native Australia, leaving a vacancy which I was invited to fill. Lord Ashby was a persuasive man, and I left our meeting having agreed to be the college director of music for an annual stipend of £350 (it later rose to £500). His argument, reasonable enough though not entirely true, was that I already had an income as a composer and didn’t need the money. And I was young and inexperienced – though eager to rise to the challenge of building on the foundations Peter Dennison had laid.

Directing the chapel choir was the largest single part of my job, though my teaching continued and I had some responsibility for the admission of music students and organ and choral scholars. I loved directing the choir, and like to think that it continued on an upward trajectory, certainly in terms of its public profile: two BBC Christmas television programmes (which boosted applications for Clare generally), several radio broadcasts, and a fondly-remembered choir visit to Venice. Some of those who sang under my direction perhaps mainly remember my shortcomings, others made more allowance for my inexperience, and understood that I was aiming for an ideal of perfection I didn’t always know how best to help them reach. I was blessed with two outstanding organ scholars: John Kitchen, later to be on the teaching staff of Edinburgh University and a noted recitalist, followed by Ivor Bolton who was destined for a life as an international conductor at the Bayerische Staatsoper and later the Salzburg Mozarteum. He is currently music director of the Teatro Real, Madrid.
I enjoyed the routine of my college life: weekday Evensongs where I could programme my favourite Byrd motets and other fairly intimate church music with not much of a congregation to disturb us, Sunday services with a broader reach, recitals and broadcasts with the choir, some teaching, and a general sense of belonging to a stimulating transgenerational community of students and scholars. I might have stayed much longer, but conflicts of scheduling arose as invitations to guest-conduct, mainly from abroad, had to be turned down if they fell in term-time – and then there was the composing, which got increasingly squeezed into the cracks of what had become close to a full-time commitment to my college work. I decided I had to resign.

My kindly Dean, Dr Arthur Peacocke (eminent academic theologian and recipient of the Templeton Prize) told me ‘we suspected there might be a terminus ad quem’, a nicely academic way of saying ‘we always knew you’d quit’. Nobody at Clare seemed heartbroken at my decision – I had been in the post for only four years – but they did ask me about how to continue building up the choir and music generally in the college, and they took my advice which was to create a realistically-paid post of Director of Music who could focus on Clare music but not be a teaching member of the university music faculty nor have an overriding commitment to some other musical activity. They advertised, many able applicants came forward, and on October 1st 1979 my successor Tim Brown took office to open a new and illustrious chapter in the history of Clare music. I walked away from the only job security I had ever known, retaining only a part-time faculty post at the Open University which continued to simmer in the background of my life for some years – I did my best with it but somehow it never burned itself into my soul though it took up quite a bit of my time.
Coming up next in the series: how did the Cambridge Singers come along?
Fascinating and lovely!
Wish I could have been there!
There has been a reply to this email (but maybe not visible here) to the effect that John was a fine teacher. I concur wholeheartedly. I was at Clare 1970-74, and John taught me in my first and third years. He was rigorous, thorough and kind. He encouraged me not to call him Mr. Rutter because it made him feel like a bank manager. I owe him a lot. I was a choral exhibitioner, so sang in the last two years of the old regime (ATB choir conducted by the organ scholar) and the first of the new, with women choral scholars under Peter Dennison. There was nothing not to like about the sea change in 1972, but in defence of my friend Stephen Banfield (organ scholar 1969-72, later Professor of Music and Birmingham and Bristol universities) I want to put John’s verdict of ‘variable standards’ into context. Of course they were variable – your average organ scholar was 18/19 (and offer only an organist!!) when he came up, and with the exception of Kings and Johns the standards of all college chapel choirs were pretty hit and miss. I don’t remember seeing John in chapel much all that time (that’s fine John) but actually we did have women – for Sunday evensongs, recruited by Stephen from the precious few sopranos then available in Cambridge, a gender imbalance that undergraduates of my generation remember with no great fondness! There was another thing. In September 1971, Stephen’s junior organ-scholar-to-be and two tenor choral exhibitioners were refused admission for poor A level results. OK, but there were consequences. For me this meant singing tenor, something that ruined my voice for several years. For Stephen, more seriously, it meant accompanying his own rehearsals, charging up and down the stairs in the organ gallery several times per service, and generally being run ragged. It’s hard to imagine such a state of affairs being allowed to develop with a senior member in charge of the choir, and having (surely) a decisive say on admissions. My greatest affection for John, but this is a little lament for W. Denis Browne in B flat and the crazy, happy days before it all became very serious.