Richard Carder is a clarinettist, composer and conductor and who has been researching Gurney’s unpublished music since 1984, following a grant from the Worshipful Company of Musicians. His edition of Gurney’s Seven Sappho Songs was published by Thames Music in 2000. This and many more of the songs have been performed at the concerts of the English Poetry and Song Society, www.musicair.co.uk of which he is chairman. He is currently researching for an MPhil on Ivor Gurney’s asylum music at Bristol University.
Roderic Dunnett is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Times, Financial Times, Guardian, Opera, Music and Musicians and The Musical Times. He wrote and presented the BBC Radio 3 series Britannia at the Opera last year and his illustrated outline biographies of Dvorak and Debussy were recently published by the Exley Press. He is an authority on the music of Ivor Gurney and has written many articles for music magazines and national newspapers as well as contributing to the IGS’s Annual Journal. (‘Patterns of Bright Green’- Vol 1, 1995 and ‘The Rightness of Gurney’ – Vol 2, 1996)
April Fredrick grew up in rural Wisconsin and began her vocal studies with Catherine McCord-Larsen at North Western College in Minnesota. She went on to gain an MMus in Vocal Performance and a PhD on the late songs of Ivor Gurney at the Royal Academy of Music, studying with Jane Highfield and Dominic Wheeler. April has performed widely as a soloist in recital and oratorio venues in the UK, including St. John’s Smith Square and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and the Holywell Music Room in Oxford. Recent performances have included Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem with David Parry and the English Chamber Orchestra and the role of ‘Zora’ in the world premiere of Gloria Coates’ chamber opera A Stolen Identity in Munich. Her first solo disc, including Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and Copland’s Eight Songs of Emily Dickinson, has been released on the SOMM label.
Rolf Jordan is a former chairman of the Ivor Gurney Society. Until recently he was the editor of the Finzi Journal and of the Finzi anthology, The Clock of the Years (Chosen Press, 2007). He was recipient of a Finzi Trust Travel Scholarship in 2008. As a writer on British music he has contributed articles to the Ivor Gurney Society Journal, the British Music Society Journal and RVW Society Newsletter. He is currently preparing a joint biography of the singer James Campbell Mcinnes and composer Graham Peel.
Tim Kendall read English at Christ Church, Oxford, and completed his D. Phil on Northern Irish poetry in 1994. After holding several short-term teaching posts in Oxford, he became the Sir James Knott Research Fellow at the University of Newcastle. In 1997 he was appointed to his first permanent post, at the University of Bristol. He joined Exeter as Professor of English Literature in 2006, and became Head of Department in 2009. Tim has published a volume of poetry Strange Land (Carcanet, 2005) and authored and edited books on Sylvia Plath, Paul Muldoon, and British war poetry. His most recent publication was The Art of Robert Frost (Yale UP, 2012), and his next will be an anthology of First World War poetry (Oxford World’s Classics, 2013). With Philip Lancaster, he is working on a 3-volume variorum edition of Ivor Gurney’s complete poetry and prose for Oxford English Texts. The first of these volumes, covering the period up to September 1922, will appear in 2014. For further information please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Kendall.
Kate Kennedy is a Research Fellow in English and Music at Girton College, Cambridge, where she is also Director of Studies in Music. She specialises in twentieth century music and literature, particularly of the First World War. She studied both English and Music at Cambridge, and continued her studies as a cellist at the Royal College of Music, before completing a masters in Biography at King’s College, London. Her PhD was on the songs and poems of Ivor Gurney. She has published numerous papers on music and literature around the First World War, and is co-editing The Silent Morning: Cultural Responses to the Armistice, 1918. She has also co-edited and contributed to a special edition of the Journal of First World War Studies, entitled ‘The First World War: Music, Literature, Memory’. She is currently engaged in writing a critical biography of Ivor Gurney to be published by OUP.