Lacock

courses for choral
and consort singers

About us

Lacock courses were founded by Andrew van der Beek, a veteran of David Munrow’s Early Music Consort of London and other groups in the early music boom of the seventies. As well as being a player of renaissance wind instruments he has always been a keen amateur singer. Now the Lacock team also includes the soprano Lucy Brakspear, who handles a lot of the correspondence and is involved in planning, and the alto Jessica Webb, usually known as ‘Gog’, who takes care of the production of the music booklets that we print for every course.

Andrew van der Beek writes: Having given up an admittedly far from stellar career in scientific journalism in my mid-twenties, I was lucky enough to have a taste of the glamorous world of the international musician. By the mid-eighties, though, with a growing family, I was ready to find an occupation that allowed me to be at home rather more, or at least let me travel to places and at times of my own choosing. I was already a convert to the cult of the summer school, the bringing together of like-minded people from all over the world for a brief period of intensive music-making. As a science graduate with no formal musical qualification higher than Grade IV violin (with ‘merit’, mind) I had picked up a lot of my musician’s craft and had some wonderful musical and social experiences at these gatherings.

One that stands out is Dartington, pavilioned in mediaeval splendour between Dartmoor and the sea, which drew amazing talent from all over the world. Incidentally, there was the only time I have seen someone literally tearing his hair out – or at least trying to – when a distraught Peter Maxwell Davies burst into my cornett and sackbut group saying he could hear us in the nearby great hall where he was trying to rehearse with his ensemble The Fires of London. After the concert in the evening he was very contrite and said that actually cornett was one of his favourite instruments. Then there was Schloss Eldingen in the Lüneburger Heide one sweltering August, a gathering of players of renaissance instruments at a time when they were just being rediscovered, presided over by the legendary instrument builder Otto Steinkopf. There I made international friendships that have lasted all my life. Another glimpse of the magical world was at Lacoste in Provence, beneath the ruins of a castle belonging to the Maquis de Sade. I had been invited by Alfred Deller’s successors to take an ensemble of players for a performance of the Monteverdi Vespers in a refreshingly cool cavern from which limestone for the castle had been quarried. Finally, the set-up known as ‘Music Camp’, cut off from the outside world in hilltop farm surrounded by woods in the Chilterns, where everything is done by volunteers, from building the rehearsal barn to conducting The Ring cycle. It was here that Norrington and Hickox were given their first chance to conduct a symphony orchestra.

All these experiences opened my eyes to the intense pleasure that an intensive period of music-making can bring about, especially when enhanced by an interesting locale and the stimulus of new friendships. It was something that I wanted to share.

My Early Music Consort and sackbut-playing colleague Alan Lumsden provided the impetus by offering me the use of his house as a summer school venue. He had recently moved from London to an old farmhouse just across the Severn in poor-man’s Gloucestershire. He was planning to run courses there himself, but was too busy with building work to organise one just then. At the time I was part-timing with Bruno Turner’s influential publishing house Mapa Mundi and we had just brought Striggio’s 40-part motet to the world’s attention; it occurred to me that it would make an excellent subject for my first summer school. I asked my friend Harry Christophers, then a jobbing tenor in London with conducting ambitions, to direct. The plan worked: over fifty singers and instrumentalists signed up, the sun shone and we had a splendid week.

We repeated the pattern the following year with our first Monteverdi Vespers, then by 1988 we had found our own house that would serve as a summer school venue, over the border in Wiltshire in the historic village of Lacock, largely owned by the National Trust. We moved the event there in 1990. Foreign contacts from my performing days ensured that there was always a large overseas contingent, which lent a special colour to the event. A notable feature of this stage of our evolution was a series of semi-staged operas and music dramas, directed by the harpist Andrew Lawrence-King. These included Monteverdi’s Orfeo, King Arthur and Dido & Aeneas by Purcell and the mediaeval Play of Daniel, among many others. Children often played a prominent part and anyone not involved in the music was roped in to design and make the sets and costumes.

A visitor from Spain asked me for many years to organise a course in Casares, her pueblo blanco in Andalusia; eventually I went to have a look and was immediately persuaded that it would work very well and our international tradition was born. Over the years there have been Lacock courses in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Croatia, Cyprus, Cuba, Mexico and Tobago, though now we are concentrating on destinations that needn’t involve flying, in response to covid and the climate crisis. Lacock was honoured to be entrusted to lead the quatercentenary tributes to Spain’s greatest composer Tomás Luis de Victoria in his native city of Ávila in August 2011. El Festival de Música Abulense, a Lacock initiative in cooperation with Caja de Ávila, brought together sixty-six singers from fifteen countries to perform Victoria’s monumental mass Laetatus Sum in Ávila cathedral on the exact anniversary of his death. The singers were joined by the four sackbuts of il Nuovo Chiaroscuro and the conductor was Carlos Aransay.

Introducing overseas conductors to the English musical world has been an important part of our tradition. In addition to Carlos Aransay, an authority on Hispanic and Latin-American music, they include the Fleming Erik Van Nevel, director of the ensemble Currende, Graham Bier, Director of Music at Bryn Athyn Cathedral in Pennsylvania, and the Dutchman JanJoost van Elburg, who subsequently became the director of London’s specialist early music choir, the Renaisssance Singers. They join the distinguished roll of home-grown Lacock conductors, who include Andrew Carwood, Robert Hollingworth, Andrew Parrott, Jeffrey Skidmore, Justin Doyle, Eamonn Dougan and Patrick Craig.