Royal Academy of Music

Famous academy alumni include Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Elton John and Annie Lennox.


The academy provides undergraduate and postgraduate training across instrumental performance, composition, jazz, musical theatre and opera, and recruits musicians from around the world, with a student community representing more than 50 nationalities. It is committed to lifelong learning, from Junior Academy, which trains musicians up to the age of 18, through Open Academy community music projects, to performances and educational events for all ages.^[6]


The academy's museum^[7] houses one of the world's most significant collections of musical instruments and artefacts, including stringed instruments by Stradivari, Guarneri, and members of the Amati family; manuscripts by Purcell, Handel and Vaughan Williams; and a collection of performing materials that belonged to leading performers. It is a constituent college of the University of London and a registered charity under English law.^[8]

Library and archives[edit]

The academy's library contains over 160,000 items, including significant collections of early printed and manuscript materials and audio facilities. The library also houses archives dedicated to Sir Arthur Sullivan and Sir Henry Wood.^[21] Among the Library's most valuable possessions are the autograph manuscripts of Purcell's The Fairy-Queen, Sullivan's The Mikado and The Martyr of Antioch,^[22] Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Serenade to Music, and the newly discovered Handel Gloria.^[23] A grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund has assisted in the purchase of the Robert Spencer Collection—a set of Early English Song and Lute music, as well as a fine collection of lutes and guitars. The academy's museum displays many of these items. The Orchestral Library has approximately 4,500 sets of orchestral parts. Other collections include the libraries of Sir Henry Wood and Otto Klemperer.^[24]


Soon after violinist Yehudi Menuhin's death, the Royal Academy of Music acquired his personal archive, which includes sheet music marked up for performance, correspondence, news articles and photographs relating to Menuhin, autograph musical manuscripts, and several portraits of Paganini.^[25]


Harriet Cohen bequeathed a large collection of paintings, some photographs and her gold bracelet to the academy, with a request that the room in which the paintings were to be housed was named the "Arnold Bax Room". Noted for her performances of Bach and modern English music, she was a friend and advocate of Arnold Bax and also premièred Vaughan Williams' Piano Concerto—a work dedicated to her—in 1933. In 1886, Franz Liszt performed at the academy to celebrate the creation of the Franz Liszt Scholarship^[26] and in 1843 Mendelssohn was made an honorary member of the academy.

Student performances and festivals[edit]

Academy students perform regularly in the academy's concert venues, and also nationally and internationally under conductors such as the late Sir Colin Davis, Yan Pascal Tortelier, Christoph von Dohnányi, the late Sir Charles Mackerras and Trevor Pinnock. In summer 2012, John Adams conducted an orchestra which combined students from the academy and New York's Juilliard School at the Proms and at New York's Lincoln Center. Conductors who have recently worked with the orchestras include Semyon Bychkov, Daniel Barenboim, Sir Simon Rattle, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Christian Thielemann.^{[27][28][29][30]} Famous people who have conducted the academy's orchestra also include Carl Maria Von Weber in 1826 and Richard Strauss in 1926.^[31]


For many years, the academy celebrated the work of a living composer with a festival in the presence of the composer. Previous composer festivals at the academy have been devoted to the work of Witold Lutosławski, Michael Tippett, Krzysztof Penderecki, Olivier Messiaen, Hans Werner Henze, Luciano Berio, Elliott Carter, Stavros Papanikolaou, as well as academy graduates, Alfred Schnittke, György Ligeti, Franco Donatoni, Galina Ustvolskaya, Arvo Pärt, György Kurtág and Mauricio Kagel.


In February–March 2006, an academy festival celebrated the violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, who first visited London 175 years earlier in 1831. The festival included a recital by academy professor Maxim Vengerov, who performed on Il Cannone Guarnerius, Paganini's favourite violin.^[32] Academy instrumentalists and musical theatre students have also performed in a series of concerts with the academy alumnus Sir Elton John.^[33]


The students and ensembles of the Royal Academy of Music perform in other venues around London including Kings Place,^[34] St Marylebone Parish Church and the South Bank Centre.