Audio File
Northern School Of Music (NSM)
2019

Trefor Davies describes a typical day at the Northern School of Music in the 1960s.

Trefor: Yes, well. I’ll go through… say my day would be, when I got with Ellis Keeler quite often I was singing at half-past eight in the morning. That was… he used to say ‘middle of the voice today Trefor’. So that was a start and then I would probably…things weren’t really getting going until a little later. Half-past nine I think people started coming in, depending on what they were doing. So there would be, possibly after that, a harmony class. That would take us up until lunchtime I would think and then there would be a piano lesson. There would be sometimes a madrigal class, so we would do that. Then I’ll try to think what would we finish for… yeah, probably an aural class as well.
Heather: So it’s a full day.
T: So it’s a full day, most of the time. It wasn’t often that I hadn’t anything to do, which is good. Depending on what was happening in the afternoon, sometimes we would pop out to the local and have a quick pint, or go to the snooker hall and have a game of snooker for an hour, if we hadn’t got anything on and then… and obviously if they were working on a work to be performed outside of the college, say in the Free Trade Hall, there would be rehearsals for that. So, there was… and even members of the orchestra had to come to the choir, yes. Because I’d used to say ‘if you can’t sing it, you can’t play it’.

Part of the #NSM2020 project "A 20/20 Legacy: the centenary of the Northern School of Music" supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.