Royal College snubs the King by erasing his favourite composer
NewsThe Royal College of Music, whose president is King Charles, has taken down the name of his most-loved composer, Hubert Parry, after complaints by students that Parry held racist views.
Three Parry Rooms are being renamed after current donors.
Parry, a prolific composer, was director of the College from 1895 to 1916.
His anthem ‘Jerusalem’ is the only work of a British composer to be belted out at sports grounds.
The RCM has confirmed the renaming of three Parry rooms but told the Mail on Sunday that Parry’s name will be retained above a suite.
Parry once described ex-RCM student Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as being ‘like his half-brothers of primitive race.’ He held opinions that were conventional in his time.
The King has made a TV programme about his music and the Church of England cherishes his liturgies. The RCM’s latest woke act can only be regarded as self-weakening.
Pictured: Prince Charles confers RCM honour on Jonas Kaufmann
And so it goes on.
And the thing is, it will never end, because apologies don’t appease the offended. Japan apologizes again and again and again to Korea and China, to no avail: the only recourse is to apologize again. When it is a matter of culture as well as history, as with Parry, the only outcome is damage. We start to lose sight of someone great, and in this case hear his music less, because of words he may or may not have uttered in a different era. Nobody is helped. Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, Forgive our Foolish Ways!
Separately, Parry didn’t write “liturgies.” He wrote music for the Liturgy.
Japan can never apologize enough to Korea. Bad comparison.
Illustration, not comparison.
Because this is almost never about genuine feelings of offence; the outrage is completely confected. These dimwits simply delight in the power which they have suddenly been granted. By whom and why?
Japan apologizes again and again . . .?? Where did you hear that rubbish? Japan has never apologised to any of the East Asian countries it colonized and brutalized prior to and during World War 2. It has talked of “deep regret”, “heartfelt sorrow”, being “painfully aware”, “deep remorse” and other similar phrases. Individual government ministers and former ministers have made grudging apologies to very small groups of comfort women and far smaller numbers of former POWs. The country has never apologized for its dreadful treatment of entire countries for there remains in the Japan a large group of ultra right wing nationalists who will never accept anything wrong was done. It is noticeable too that when these expressions of remorse are made, groups of government ministers then go and visit the notorious Yasukuni Shrine where war criminals are buried.
I agree we all have to move on. What was acceptable decades and centuries ago is often unacceptable now. Times change. We have to
accept that. After all the many disgraceful results of British colonialism, the artifacts stolen and nations exploited, it is time we acknowledged and made much greater attempts to apologise meaningfully and make reparations. As to the issue at the heart of this thread, as we saw just last month, racism remains deeply rooted at the highest levels of our ‘society’. It should be rooted out in every possible way. The Germans and other nations can do as they wish. The British have a duty to their history to right wrongs that we know now we’re wrong. We must move on.
China should apologize to Chinese for unleashing Mao Tse-tung upon its people, Russia should apologize to Russians for unleashing Joseph Stalin upon its people, Cuba should apologize to Cubans for unleashing Fidel Castro upon its people, etc. Actually, since quite a lot of vestiges of those hard-left figureheads remain, the apologies are way too little, way too late and a case of outright falling on deaf ears.
As for Germany apologizing to Germans for unleashing Adolf Hitler upon its people? The remnants of that person, a political mad man into “selective compassion,” still lingers in more ways than one:
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/22/archives/selective-compassion.html
Today’s support of, say, anti-climate change is yesterday’s support of animal rights.
Japan never apologized to Korea. Absolutely never.
The question is, why is every administrator kow-towing (a racist term, no doubt) to these protests?
Beyond silly. Nothing is too petty for the wokerati.
All it would take is someone with backbone to say no to these silly tiktok progressives and their lack of historical perspective.
Instead administrations everywhere are rife with cowards who will sign anything and dismantle objective standards if it makes for a quieter life.
I think history will judge these people as the worst and most pathetic offenders in all this. At least the progressives believed in what they were trying to do.
Indeed, the administrations are caving in to the student tantrums and the administrations are forced into virtue signalling woke credentials.
Self-weakening but perpetually enabled by the oikophobic, virtue-signalling establishment. To hell with them all.
This is a movement of its time, to be accepted for now in the knowledge that our own lives, attitudes and beliefs will come under scrutiny by those who come after us and whose distant perspective will put our shortcomings into relief. We know we could have been a better example to them, but as exemplars, they’ll find things in us to emulate and things to reject. Here’s wishing them wisdom, magnanimity and the charity to imagine that we weren’t the barbarians they’ll think we were.
Here we go again. What woke idiots.
Presumably no Wagner played or studied at today’s RCM?
Parry should have known better. I mean really, why didn’t he forsee that a century later the attitudes he and many others espoused would change?
He deserves all he gets.
It’s high time these so-called composers who didn’t use polyphony and artists who couldn’t paint in perspective were dumped too.
Parry’s ‘racist’ views should be taken within the context of the times in which he lived – this is not to excuse them but simply to acknowledge that such views were not considered offensive at that time. I could quote what Elgar said about Coleridge Taylor (and this was a supportive statement) but it would be considered tasteless and offensive by today’s woke community. The RCM should be proud of one of their great Directors, a man who stood up for women’s rights and was liberal in his views.
I strongly disagree when you say these views were ‘not considered offensive’.
I’m pretty sure it WAS offensive to those subjected to these views, whose voices have been largely obliterated from our history books. They were unfortunately commonly held and not considered offensive by those who held the views – there’s quite a difference.
This article is just pandering to the anti-woke agenda. RCM’s decisions have got nothing to do with Charles. I’d also say it sounds like Parry was somewhat over-represented in room names and it might be nice to redress this!
It says much about the current caliber of student the RCM attracts, that they expend such disproportionate energy on events they cannot alter or retract in any way. Music colleges are for the making of musicians, NOT politicians, and it would appear in this that the RCM is losing sight of that fact. If this is what one of the supposedly most prestigious music colleges in the country has come down to, I can only declare how thankful I am that I completed my professional musical training decades ago, when they actually addressed the task for which they were created, rather than propagating woke drivel!
I shall continue to favor Parry’s music, while feeling sorry for his apparent unwillingness to be able to hear and appreciate Coleridge-Taylor’s. Prejudice is an insidious syndrome that closes minds, and apparently ears.
Finally, a voice of reason. You must be new here!
Nobody has a clue as to how to deal with the issue of our racial divide and its malignant effect on society, in my country and apparently in the UK as well. So we do what people always did when confronted with intractable crises, what the ancients did about droughts, famines, and epidemics. We resort to ritual sacrifice.
These madcap decisions are made by the faceless nonentities who run this once-great college. May we know who set this off by complaining about Parry? Which spineless committee authorised this action?
If you wanted to dispose of someone in Nazi Germany, you simply reported them to the Gestapo. You didn’t even have to accuse them of being Jewish, homosexual or mentally ill. All you had to do was whisper in their ears that the person had said ‘down with Hitler’ and the job was done.
Wokery is exactly like Nazism except that in some ways it’s worse. At least with Hitler and his henchmen, acclaimed by millions of Germans, you knew who they were and how they worked. These wokists are a pernicious and largely invisible minority who work in the dark, shutting down anyone whom, they feel, deserves to be taken out; they invent spurious evidence to support their nefarious denouncements; a single quotation is enough to trash a whole lifetime’s work.
Like the Nazis, they instil fear into their opponents, using what I call the anti-social media to spread their poison far and wide. Like the Nazis, they decry free speech other than their own. Like the Nazis, they shut down any kind of debate because they are always right. Not content with the living, like the Nazis they desecrate the dead too by destroying or defacing their statues and annihilating their work.
As for Parry (and this is wholly my own opinion, maybe not shared by other contributors to this blog) I see him as one of our greatest composers of his (and maybe all) time. When, as a youngster, I first heard ‘Jerusalem’ on the Last Night of the Proms, I thought it was magnificent and I have since luxuriated in his music by courtesy of the recording companies who have handsomely brought so many of his works to light.
There’s also a superb biography by Jeremy Dibble, from which we learn that Parry was a warm-hearted man and, despite his affluent background, a man who believed in social justice; I recollect the anecdote recalling that, as a magistrate, he had to fine a poacher and then caught up with him on his leaving the court and paid the fine back to him out of his own pocket. He supported the women’s suffrage movement, giving them copyright of his ‘Jerusalem’.
I believe that both as a musician and as a man he stood head and shoulders above any of those lickspittle wokery acolytes at the RCM who seek to sully his name. I only hope that popular pressure will have it restored.
“Wokery is exactly like Nazism except that in some ways it’s worse.” So, it is worse than genocide and starting a world war that killed about 85 million people? I am not a fan of woke nonsense, but let’s keep some perspective!
This is ridiculous as ever- yet another example of woke culture gone mad. Is there any considerable evidence to support the believe that Parry was a racist? Other than one unfortunate remark on the death of Samuel Coleridge Taylor- a composer whom he did everything to promote & became a musical father figure to. It says more about our own times than his- you make one ill advised comment & you’re suddenly labelled as Hitler. Utterly ludicrous. Those wanting more of the background on Parry should read Ivan Hewett’s excellent article on him via the DT. The article implies that the composer was much more anti the religious establishment of the time rather than preoccupied with matters of skin colour.
You’re right: “you make one ill advised comment & you’re suddenly labelled as Hitler.” The madness exists on both sides. Immediately above your comment, we find: “Wokery is exactly like Nazism except that in some ways it’s worse.”
I see this is the place to go to hear about all the evils of “woke” culture. Let me see if I got it: woke=bad; reactionary=good. Are any of the outraged commenters current or even former students, teachers, or administrators at RCM?
This equivalency may not be as evident in G.B.: the anti-woke in the U.S. are also misogynists, racists, homophobes, and conspiracy theorists. You’re defined by the company you keep.
If not for me being “woke,” I’d call NL and the rest of you white supremacist, red neck, backcountry boobs.
This posting is derived from an unfortunate article from the Daily Mail Readers’ attention is drawn to the final comments from an RCM staff member: ‘The suite of rooms is called the Parry Rooms. Individual rooms have been renamed to reflect the generosity of recent donors.’ There was no outcry from students, this is simply a Development naming opportunity. Nothing more, nothing less. End of.
Conventional maybe, but the shallow cattiness of the comment should earn him disapproval in any time. If he’s going to criticize a composer he really needs to come up with more than having chosen the wrong parents.
Has the RCM named a room after Samuel Coleridge-Taylor? That would be fitting and appropriate.
He wasn’t criticizing him – he was praising him. The quote, which is from the obituary Parry made on Coleridge Taylor’s death, may sound patronising to us, but in terms of its own time it is laudatory, and in fact it is not an unjust assessment of Coleridge Taylor as a composer. Parry was talking of Hiawatha, of which the first performance “was one of the remarkable events in modern English musical history. … [Coleridge-Taylor was] particularly fitted by racial combination to produce an exception to the conventional tendency [of the narrative cantata] …. Like his half-brothers of primitive race … [C-T] loved plenty of sound, plenty of colour, simple and definite rhythms, and above all plenty of tune.” If you have ever heard, or performed in, Hiawatha, you will understand what Parry is talking about.
Incidentally, Coleridge Taylor himself (together with Longfellow) would in today’s terms be guilty of cultural appropriation!
The lesson here, as elsewhere, is not to make ourselves hostage to fortune in the first place. We should give up honouring the deceased by way or statues, or naming buildings/rooms/spaces of various sorts. If they’ve done something worthy of remembering it’s in their works that we should remember those who have enriched their world. Parry’s music will never be diminished by a re-evaluation of his views. Therein lies his immortality. Not in having his name attached to some rooms at the RCM.
This is a complete non-story, yet another scare attempt to make people froth and shout woke. Parry’s name will remain as that of the suite – as the Mail story states, if people bother to read it.
They will still be called The Parry Rooms.
He is not being cancelled.
But the individual rooms are being named after current major donors.
They are currently East Parry, West Parry and Inner Parry. Thats a lot of Parry that can be more usefully updated to reflect and respect the people who are supporting the RCM today.
This is exactly what happens on a regular basis at sports grounds as a way of increasing revenue and recognition and seems to be a sensible approach.
I’m sure Parry’s work will appear during the coronation – although no-doubt someone will put a watch on the piece and froth that it isn’t long enough …
There is nothing wrong with moving WITH the times, Norman. It may have been ok for him to say back then, but it no longer is.
What a ridiculous, stupid thing to do. On the other hand, having four sites in the name of one person seems excessive. But that hymn is practically a national anthem.
This story is totally untrue. I have checked with the RCM
They confirmed it to the MoS.