# Morgan Powell and Peter Dickinson, who relished jazz as well as ‘serious’ music: Videos, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/09/10/morgan-powell-and-peter-dickinson-who-relished-jazz-as-well-as-serious-music-videos-photos/
- Published: 2023-09-10T00:02:58+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Morgan Powell Obituary – Morgan E. Powell, b. Jan. 7, 1938, to Lytle and W.O.,
caring listener, mischief maker, joke-teller, quip-slinger, ditty-singer, hug-aholic,
gentle lover of people, home and guerrilla gardener, once called a combonist tromposer,
light handed teacher, charismatic band-leader, as comfortable talking to his audience
as playing his horn (and boy, did he play that horn), died after a year of valiantly
fighting metastatic pancreatic cancer.**

He was surrounded by his family and is survived by his wife, Patricia Hruby Powell;
two daughters, Lisa (with Tom Bender) and Adriane Powell, and their children, Ryan(
Danielle), Chelsea and Chloe Bender; Dean and Madison Oakley; and three great-grandchildren,
Carter, Molly and George.

Born and bred as a cowboy in West Texas, he was something of a trombone and music
composition prodigy. Graduate of North Texas State University, he taught summer 
jazz clinics for Stan Kenton and turned down the lead trombone position in Glenn
Miller’s band, because he’d tried and didn’t like life on the road. He played in
the famed One O’Clock Band at North Texas State University led by Leon Breeden. 
Breeden would not accept Black band members because they would not be welcomed in
1960 rural Texas performance sites.

Morgan led the Two O’Clock Band, welcoming in all the Black players, who were the
better players (mostly). He taught at Berklee College of Music in Boston, then came
to Champaign-Urbana to become a professor in the Music Theory and Composition Division
at the University of Illinois. He arranged, composed and improvised music for all
his bands, including Tone Road Ramblers, Jazz Quintet (JQ), Traditional Jazz Orchestra
and One Plus One Quartet, among others. You might know him as the youngest original
member of Dan Perrino’s Medicare 7, 8 or 9.

![Getting Personal: Morgan Powell | News | news-gazette.com](https://i0.wp.com/bloximages.
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**Peter Dickinson happily mixed serial techniques with blues and ragtime. One critic
wrote: ‘Not many composers are equally at home on Radios 2, 3 and 4’**

Peter Dickinson, the composer and pianist, who has died aged 88, produced entertaining
and informative books on musical subjects ranging from Lennox Berkeley and Lord 
Berners to Samuel Barber and Billy Mayerl; his own music, influenced by studies 
in the US in the late 1950s, ranged from high art to the vernacular, allowing jazz
and popular song to sit unobtrusively among the “serious” symphonic tradition.

![Peter Dickinson obituary | Music | The Guardian](https://i0.wp.com/i.guim.co.uk/
img/media/e6828bbb0fdad9ed9265c9b581177e52ad3c4c87/0_11_3888_2333/master/3888.jpg?
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As the first professor of music at the University of Keele from 1974, he devised
a programme dedicated to the study of American music. Over the next decade many 
of that country’s leading composers visited Staffordshire including Aaron Copland,
Eliott Carter, Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

At the heart of Dickinson’s own output lay three concertos: the Organ Concerto (
1971), written for Simon Preston and the Three Choirs Festival; the Piano Concerto(
1984) for Howard Shelley that was first heard at the Cheltenham Festival; and the
Violin Concerto (1987), which was written in memory of Ralph Holmes and premiered
by Ernst Kovacic with the BBC Philharmonic. All three were released together on 
CD in 2014.

![tmg.video.placeholder.alt 62r-CuYihSc](https://i0.wp.com/i.ytimg.com/vi/62r-CuYihSc/
mqdefault.jpg?resize=640%2C360&ssl=1)

His other works include The Judas Tree (1965), a 75-minute musical drama for student
forces built around a text by the poet Thomas Blackburn; Satie Transformations (
1969-70), a homage to the French composer; and Larkin’s Jazz (1989), an affectionate
tribute to his friend, the poet Philip Larkin.

Softly spoken and somewhat academic in presentation, Dickinson was, noted Tom Sutcliffe
in The Guardian, neither revolutionary nor tearaway. Citing precedents by Bartók,
Stravinsky and Tippett, he happily mixed serial techniques with blues and ragtime
in a model that he christened “style modulation”. As Sutcliffe added: “Not many 
composers are equally at home on Radios 2, 3 and 4.”

Peter Dickinson was born at Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, on November 15 1934, the
son of Frank Dickinson, a church organist and a pioneer in the use of contact lenses,
and his wife Muriel (née Porter). His younger sister Meriel was a fine mezzo soprano
whom he accompanied in recital and for whom he wrote several works including Four
Auden Songs (1956), one of several settings of poetry.

The music of his childhood centred on competitive festivals, and on one occasion
David Willcocks awarded him first prize for his performance of Mendelssohn’s Rondo
Capriccioso at the Fleetwood Festival. His piano teacher, a Miss Constance Haslam,
berated him with admonitions such as: “F stands for forte, not feeble.”

He was educated at The Leys School, Cambridge, though his studies were interrupted
by a year in South Africa with his parents. On the voyage out he performed Rachmaninov’s
Prelude in C sharp minor in public. He disliked the acrid incense of the high-church
chapel at St John’s College, Johannesburg, and was relieved to return to the comfortable
Methodism of The Leys.

Having graduated from piano to organ he eschewed plans to study law and was instead
awarded an organ scholarship at Queens’ College, Cambridge. There he received advice
and encouragement from Berkeley, who dedicated his Chinese Songs (1971) to Dickinson
and his sister.

![tmg.video.placeholder.alt OhnXYj_i7g0](https://i0.wp.com/i.ytimg.com/vi/OhnXYj_i7g0/
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However, inquiries to Patrick Hadley, the professor of music, about matters outside
the English tradition were met with disdain. Twelve-tone music was dismissed as “
balls” and an innocent question about early-music performance style was met with:“
F— baroque”.

Meanwhile, a couple of his works were heard at the Wigmore Hall in concerts organised
by the Society for the Promotion of New Music. “My father came to one of them,” 
he wrote in Peter Dickinson: Words and Music (2016), a collection of his writings
and others’ tributes to his work. “Critics included a tramp who went to sleep at
the back snoring loudly.”

After a year teaching at a minor public school, Dickinson resumed his education 
at the Juilliard School, New York, where he encountered the music of Charles Ives,
met John Cage and was introduced to jazz. While there he composed a lively Violin
Sonata and worked as a pianist for George Balanchine at New York City Ballet.

Back in Britain he spent another year as a school teacher, this time at Hurstpierpoint
College, where he was chastised by the headmaster for playing an explosive piece
of Messiaen in chapel. Thereafter he improvised in the style of Strauss and Puccini,
to the amusement of the music students.

Happy to move on, he taught classes in improvisation and experimental music at the
College of St Mark and St John, Chelsea, and then lectured at the University of 
Birmingham before joining Keele. In 1991 he was appointed professor at Goldsmiths,
University of London, and from 1997 until 2004 was head of music of the Institute
of United States Studies.

Dickinson was a frequent contributor to Radio 3 and to Gramophone, where his music
also featured regularly on the magazine’s pages. In 1988 he was the subject of an
hour-long episode of The South Bank Show. The first of his two books on Berkeley
was published in 1988.

![tmg.video.placeholder.alt 3ZeBDcpc8fQ](https://i0.wp.com/i.ytimg.com/vi/3ZeBDcpc8fQ/
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It was followed by Marigold: the Music of Billy Mayerl (1999) and Lord Berners: 
Composer, Writer, Painter (2003) about the early 20th-century dilettante, which 
was described by Damian Thompson in The Daily Telegraph as “a delicious mess of 
a book”.

In the 1990s he worked with the musicologist Bernarr Rainbow to establish the Rainbow
Dickinson Trust, which supports orchestras, choirs, festivals and community groups.
His final project was Lockdown Blues (2021), a collection of appealing miniatures
that he composed and performed as a swing-inspired escape from the pandemic.

In 1964 Dickinson married Bridget Tomkinson, a pianist-turned-bookbinder; for the
past 30 years they lived at Aldeburgh in Suffolk. She survives him with their two
sons.

![Peter Dickinson](https://i0.wp.com/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/
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