Honorary Professors

Geoffrey Norris

Geoffrey Norris is Chief Music Critic of The Daily Telegraph. He became interested in Russian affairs while still at school, and visited Moscow for the first time as a teenager. At the University of Durham his undergraduate dissertation dealt with aspects of music written by the St. Petersburg group of composers "The Mighty Handful", and he went on to pursue research on 18th-century Russian orchestral music at the Institut Teatra, Muzyki i Kinematografii in Leningrad. Much of this material was channelled into entries for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980). His association with Rachmaninoff also dates back from this period, when he wrote an article about Rachmaninoff's student opera Aleko. At the same time he looked at the revisions Rachmaninoff made to some of his published scores and wrote a piece for The Musical Times. He was commissioned to write a biographical and musical study of the composer for the Master Musician Series in 1976, which has been issued in two editions and is now reprinted by Oxford University Press. Geoffrey Norris maintains a particular enthusiasm for Rachmaninoff, on whom he has carried out research at the main manuscript repositories in the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow, as well as studying material at the family's Russian Estate and at the composer's Swiss villa, Senar. He is co-author of A Catalogue of the Compositions of S. Rachmaninoff. Aside from his regular contributions to The Daily Telegraph, Prof. Norris has written widely on aspects of 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century Russian music: he has lectured in Britain, Russia, Italy, the USA and Canada and has given broadcasts for the BBC World Service and Radio 3. From 1975 to 1977 he was Lecturer in Music History at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. He teaches at Goldsmiths College in the University of London, and is Professor at the Rachmaninoff Institute in Tambov. He is an Honorary Member of the Rachmaninoff Society.