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| Friends of Gurney Those who have Helped |
In the World of Gurney
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Contributors to the Ivor Gurney Website will be honored with a Citation of their name on the Friends of Gurney page. For more information, go to Participate in Gurney's World.
Pamela
Blevins, Contributor
David Kenneth Smith, Editor of the Ivor Gurney
Website
Anthony Boden, past Chairman of the Ivor Gurney Society
Kelsey Thornton, Contributor
Ian Venables, Contributor, Chairman of the Ivor Gurney Society
George Walter, Contributor
Pamela Blevins lives in the mountains of North Carolina where she is the co-founder and editor of The Maud Powell Signature, Women in Music magazine (website), a quarterly online publication of the Maud Powell Society for Music and Education. A keen advocate of music in education and developing ways of teaching academic subjects using music, she has long been devoted to the cause of women in music and developed the pioneering lecture series “Silent Destiny: The Woman Composer” in 1977. She has published extensively on Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott as well as on other British composers and poets including Edward Thomas, Gerald Finzi, Wilfred Owen, Ethel Voynich, and women writers in World War I. She is also an advocate of the American composer Elinor Remick Warren. She has written a new Gurney biography, Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty (further information), which explores Gurney’s life through his relationships with Marion Scott, Annie Nelson Drummond, Alfred Cheesman, and his mother, and provides a new assessment of the nature of Gurney’s mental illness. Perspectives Essays
Anthony
Boden is the past Chairman of the Ivor Gurney Society. His
publications
include F.
W. Harvey: Soldier, Poet (1988) and Three
Choirs: A
History of the Festival Gloucester- Hereford- Worcester
(1992).
He has edited collections, including Stars in a Dark
Night: The Letters
of Ivor Gurney to the Chapman Family (1986 and 2004, 2nd.
Ed.). Website | New Expanded
Edition of Stars in a Dark Night
Mark William Brown teaches English Literature at Jamestown College, North Dakota, USA. His doctoral dissertation, written at Vanderbilt University under the supervision of the late Donald Davie, was a entitled “The Poetry of Ivor Gurney: A Study of Influences.” He has published articles on Gurney in P.N. Review and Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, including “Music and Lyrics by Ivor Gurney” and “Ivor Gurney and Edward Thomas: A Distinction.”
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. His Gurney articles include “Patterns of Bright Green” and “The Rightness of Gurney.”
David Goodland is an actor and writer. He played Ivor Gurney in “Do Not Forget Me Quite” for BBC television and in “Stars in a Dark Night” for Channel 4. On stage his many Gurney productions include “Songs On Lonely Roads”, “Only the Wanderer” at London’s Wigmore Hall and, recently, “Nightwalker” with Jennifer Partridge. In addition to his stage and television work, David has made over 600 recordings for BBC Radio, and four of his own plays have been produced on BBC Radio. Recent plays include “The Life and Death of a Buffalo Soldier” (Bristol Old Vic Theatre), “Making Up” (BBC Radio), and “Mere Marriage (HTV). David has recently appeared as Laurie Lee in “Cider With Rosie” and in “Edge of Day” (national tour). He has also recorded the poetry of Ivor Gurney.
Michael Hurd is a composer, writer and broadcaster. Amongst his many publications are The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (1978) and Rutland Boughton and the Glastonbury Festivals (1993).
Penelope Joy King completed her Ph.D. in 1991 with the thesis “‘Songs from Exile’: A Critical Evaluation of the Poetry of Ivor Gurney.” She is now an English teacher and mother of two children. She has written articles on Gurney’s poetry, including “‘Honour,’ ‘heroics,’ and ‘bullshit’: Ivor Gurney’s Private Vision” and “A Tale of Heroic Courage: Some Tensions in the Concept of Masculinity in Ivor Gurney’s Poetry.”
Ben Scott is reading Communications Studies at Northwestern University. A native of Texas who has long been an armchair Civil War historian and connoisseur of Southern culture, he first encountered Ivor Gurney whilst on an exchange visit at the University of Sussex in 1997-98. He is author of articles on Gurney, including “The Obverse of the Canonical: Ivor Gurney and the American Civil War,” and “‘Glory crying for poetry’: Ivor Gurney’s American Poems” (co-author).
Nora Sirbaugh is a mezzo-soprano who teaches voice at Trenton State College in New Jersey. Her doctoral thesis for the Peabody Conservatory in Maryland, entitled “Ivor Gurney and his Vision of Gloucestershire in Music,” was on the relationship of Gurney’s music to Gloucestershire. She presented a lecture-recital on that subject, with David Goodland and Stephen Peet, at the launch of the Ivor Gurney Society in 1995. She has published a related article, “Reflections on Singing Ivor Gurney.”
David Kenneth Smith, Editor of the Ivor Gurney Website
Dr.
Smith
is Professor of Voice at Geneva College in Beaver
Falls,
Pennsylvania. He earned his D.M. from Indiana University in 1999,
with
his dissertation “An Interpretive Analysis
of
Three Early Songs of Ivor Gurney (1890-1937): Song of Ciabhan, Tears,
and Severn Meadows.” He is editor of the Clara Schumann
Website (ClaraSchumann.net)
and the Ivor Gurney Website (Ivor.Gurney.net),
and along with opera and oratorio, he sings art song, especially that
of Gurney
and the Schumanns. Biography
| Vita
|Email |Photo |Info on Dissertation
Kelsey Thornton["R.K.R."] took his degree in English at the University of Manchester, and went on to take an M. A, and Ph.D. on late nineteenth-century poetry. He taught at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne from 1965 to 1989 and the University of Birmingham from 1989 to 2000, when he retired. He specializes in 19th and 20th century poetry, has written Gerard Manley Hopkins: the Poems and The Decadent Dilemma; and has edited volumes of the poetry of John Clare, Ivor Gurney, the Penguin Poetry of the 1890s, Nicholas Hilliard's A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning and a series of 27 volumes of late nineteenth-century writers. He is currently editing the prose and poetry of Ernest Dowson, and is Editor of the annual Ivor Gurney Society Journal. Book Review on Perspectives page
Ian Venables is the current chairman of the Ivor Gurney Society. He is also a composer. He is in constant demand to write music, and his major chamber works include a Piano Quintet, String Quartet and a song cycle, Invite to Eternity, for tenor and string quartet. His recent CD recording, ‘The Songs of Ian Venables’ received outstanding reviews in ‘The Gramophone’ (‘…Venables impresses as a song writer in the line of Gerald Finzi….’) and his Piano Quintet was described by Roderic Dunnett in ‘The Independent on Sunday’ as lending ‘…..a new late 20th century dimension to the English Pastoral’. His passionate interest in poetry has led to him contributing to a recent book on the 19th century poet John Addington Symonds, which was published by Macmillan. IanVenables.com Website
George Walter is Sub-Dean (Academic Affairs) and Lecturer in English in the School of Cultural and Community Studies at the University of Sussex. He has written widely on Ivor Gurney and the literature of the Great War and his edition of Gurney’s Rewards of Wonder: Poems of Cotwsold, France, London is due to be published by MidNAG & Carcanet at the end of 1999.
Note: If
you have anything to add to a Who’s Who citation
above, or a Person you would suggest, please write to David Kenneth Smith at: ivor@gurney.net.
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