Laureation address: Professor Joanna MacGregor CBE
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Music
Laureation by Dr Michael Downes, Director of Music
Tuesday 30 November 2021
Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causa, Professor Joanna MacGregor.
The last twenty-one months have been a period of existential crisis for music, demanding resilience and versatility, intelligence and imagination as never before from those who practise it. It is difficult to think of a musician anywhere in the world who better exemplifies those qualities than Joanna MacGregor: her career not only inspires all who care about music, but also illuminates how the art-form itself may continue to thrive.
Joanna MacGregor is one of the world’s leading pianists: she has performed in over 80 countries across the world, working with conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Valery Gergiev and Simon Rattle. She is renowned for her expertise in contemporary music, encouraging composers as distinguished and diverse as John Adams and Harrison Birtwistle, Django Bates and James MacMillan to create music for her, but she is equally at home in the canonical works of the piano repertoire. Her recordings include Bach’s Goldberg Variations and The Art of Fugue and the complete Chopin Mazurkas, and one of her first post-lockdown projects was to play all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas across three days at the Canterbury Festival.
For the last 20 years she has also been active as a conductor and has directed concerts with the Royal Philharmonic, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Britten Sinfonia and the Hallé, among other orchestras. She has recently taken up a new post as music director of the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra: judging on the basis of her first season, which includes collaborations with the Northumbrian piper Kathryn Tickell, MacGregor’s own orchestrations of Piazzolla and live improvisations to silent films, and culminates with her playing Brahms’s First Piano Concerto under the direction of Sian Edwards, St Andrews’ Honorary Professor of Conducting, Sussex audiences are in for an exciting time as their orchestra approaches its centenary year.
Joanna MacGregor’s genius for creating stimulating musical juxtapositions has also been displayed in her roles as artistic director of the Dartington International Summer School and Festival and of the Bath International Music Festival, as well as in events she has created for organisations including the Royal Opera House, the New York Philharmonic, and Jin Xing’s Contemporary Dance Theatre of Shanghai.
She is also deeply committed to music education: Joanna is a Professor of the University of London and Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music, where she runs an annual summer festival for young musicians, and she has written a highly praised series of teaching books for young children, entitled PianoWorld, for Faber Music. And to add yet another role to those of pianist, conductor, festival director, broadcaster, record producer, composer and teacher, in 2019 Joanna MacGregor was one of the judges for the Booker Prize.
Impressive though this list of Joanna MacGregor’s many roles is, what is truly inspiring is the use she has made of them to inculcate excitement about music in others. She has been working across multiple genres and using technology to promote music in new ways long before it was fashionable or necessary to do so. Collaborations with musicians working in jazz and pop, dance and film, folk and traditional music from across the world are a central part of her musical identity, the result of an upbringing in which she was taught the piano by ear from the age of three by her mother, for whom Bach, Beethoven and the Beatles were equally valid forms of musical expression.
An example of her ability not just to cross but to explode generic boundaries is her 2006 album, Sidewalk Dances, in which MacGregor collaborates with musicians including saxophonist Andy Sheppard and Indian flautist Shri Sriram on her arrangements of pieces by the unclassifiable American musician, Moondog. Another of her favourite collaborators is the Tunisian singer and oud player, Dhafer Youssef: their first performance together, in the 2009 London Jazz Festival, was described by The Times as "the future of music".
Merely listing collaborations and plaudits, however, doesn’t do justice to the sheer visceral sense of enjoyment in combining sounds that characterises MacGregor’s music-making. Music for her is not something safe, worthy, or respectable, but is above all fun: this belief was perhaps epitomised in her founding of Party in the City as a means both of celebrating the Bath International Festival and of drawing it to the attention of a much wider audience. She has been far-sighted, too, in her understanding of the power of technology to engage new audiences and break down barriers to musical communication, from her founding of her own record label, SoundCircus, in 1998, to her embrace of the internet as a means of supporting her students across the world during the pandemic.
If music is to survive the consequences of the pandemic and the other challenges ahead, it will only do so with the sort of energy, creativity, imagination and sheer panache that Joanna MacGregor combines in such a unique way.
Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of her major contribution to the performance and public appreciation of music and the arts, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causa, on Professor Joanna MacGregor.