Arthur Hutchings

Arthur James Bramwell Hutchings (14 July 1906 – 13 November 1989) was an English musicologist, composer and professor of music.

Life Born in Sunbury-on-Thames, Hutchings had no formal musical education but played piano and violin to a high standard and sang as a chorister. He taught, performed and composed, and was appointed organist at All Saints Church, East Sheen in 1929. While training as a teacher in London he made some key musical friendships during the 1930s: with Constant Lambert, Cecil Gray, Sorabji, Cyril Rootham (who offered advice on orchestration in 1938, the last year of his life) and Edmund Rubbra (who dedicated his Third Symphony to Hutchings in 1939).

In 1938 Hutchings became music master at Southend High School for Boys, where one of his pupils was Bernard Stevens. He wrote the school song in 1939, and in 1941 married the school secretary, Marie Constance Haverson. During this period he conducted the Southend String Orchestra. While in India he took a keen interest in the local music.

After completing his war service in 1947 Hutchings was appointed as the first resident professor of music at Durham University where in 1953 he completed a thesis on Mozart's piano concertos for his doctorate. The musicologists Peter Evans, Donald Mitchell and Eric Roseberry were among his students at Durham. Mitchell recalled that he gained a reputation for his eccentricity and unconventional approach while at Durham. "He was exuberantly pro-music and opposed, perhaps not so much to the properly academic as to the paralytic academicism. His appointment...knocked a few holes in windows that had been overlaid by blinkered, unthinking tradition".

In 1968 he was appointed as the first professor of music at the University of Exeter, retiring three years later, where he lived at 20d Larkshayes, Dalwood, near Axminster. Among his other books are The Invention and Composition of Music and Church Music in the Nineteenth Century. During the late 1970s his articles on music regularly appeared in the monthly magazine Records and Recording, as well as Music & Letters and The Listener.

Publications Schubert (Master Musicians series 1945) ‘Edmund Rubbra’, in British Music of Our Time (Pelican, 1946) Delius – a Critical Biography (1948) Companion to the Mozart Piano Concertos (1948) The Invention and Composition of Music (1958) The Baroque Concerto (1961) Church Music in the Nineteenth Century (1967) 'The Nineteenth Century', in Pelican History of Music, Vol. 3 (1968) Introduction to Constant Lambert's Music Ho! (3rd edition, 1968) 'Music in Britain: 1918–1960', in New Oxford History of Music Vol. 10 (1974), pp. 503–68 Mozart – Man and Musician (1976, foreword by Kingsley Amis) Purcell (BBC Music Guides, 1982)