Peter Evans (musicologist)

Peter Angus Evans (born West Hartlepool, 7 November 1929) is an English musicologist, most noteworthy for his book The Music of Benjamin Britten.

Evans studied with Arthur Hutchings and A.E.F. Dickinson at Durham University from 1947 to 1951 (BA 1950)^[1] He taught music at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury (1951-52) before gaining his Fellowship Diploma from the Royal College of Organists in 1952.^[2] He was then appointed a lecturer at Durham University in 1953. He graduated with a BMus from Durham in that year and took the MA with a dissertation on 17th-century chamber music manuscripts in Durham Cathedral Library. He was awarded the DMus by the university in 1958. From 1961 to 1990 he was professor of music at the University of Southampton.^[1]

After his early studies of viol music, in particular that of John Jenkins, Evans has worked mainly on the 20th century, writing articles on Jonathan Harvey, Alan Rawsthorne (for the 1980 edition of The New Grove) and especially on the music of Benjamin Britten.^[2] According to Grove, he has brought to that subject "an acute analytical mind coupled with an approach in which musical values are firmly assigned first place".^[1] He is now Emeritus Professor of Music at Southampton University.^[3]

Books

• "The Vocal Works", Michael Tippett: a Symposium, ed. I. Kemp (London, 1965), 135–61
• The Music of Benjamin Britten (London, 1979, 3/1996)
• "Synopsis: the Story, the Music not Excluded", Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, ed. Donald Mitchell (Cambridge, 1987), 76–85
• "The Number Principle and Dramatic Momentum in Gloriana", Britten's Gloriana: Essays and Sources, ed. P. Banks (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1993), 77–93
• "Instrumental Music, I", Music in Britain: the Twentieth Century, ed. S. Banfield (Oxford, 1995), 179–277

Articles

• "Seventeenth-Century Chamber Music Manuscripts at Durham", Music & Letters, xxxvi (1955), 205–23
• "Martinů the Symphonist", Tempo, nos.55–6 (1960), 19–33
• "Compromises with Serialism", Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, lxxxviii (1961–2), 1–15
• "Britten's 'War Requiem'", Tempo, nos.61–2 (1962), 20–39
• "Britten's Cello Symphony", Tempo, nos.66–7 (1963), 2–15
• "Musica Theoretica and Musica Practica: a Persistent Dichotomy" (Southampton, 1963) [inaugural lecture]; also pubd in Studies in Music [Australia], iii (1969), 1–16
• "Music of the European Mainstream, 1940–1960", The New Oxford History of Music, x (1974), 387–502

References