Staff profile

Jeremy Dibble studied music at Trinity College, Cambridge (with Philip Radcliffe, Richard Marlow, Peter le Huray and Robin Holloway) and at Southampton University (with Peter Evans). Before he was appointed as a lecturer at Durham in 1993, he was a lecturer in music at University College, Cork. He teaches courses in harmony and counterpoint, musicianship, nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, and includes special topics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English song, Brahms, Britten's Chamber Operas and (at MA level) English church music. In 2010 the Royal School of Church Music awarded him a Fellowship (FRSCM) for services to church music and, in 2013, he was awarded a Fellowship (FGCM) by the Guild of Church Musicians.

Jeremy Dibble’s research specialisms lie in British and Irish music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an area which includes not only composer studies, but also musical criticism and aesthetics, church music, hymnology, song, light music, opera and instrumental music. He is best known for his monographs C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: OUP, 1992 rev. 1998) and Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (Oxford: OUP, 2002), John Stainer: A Life in Music (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), Michele Esposito (Dublin: Field Day Press, 2010) and Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), and for his edition of Parry’s Violin Sonatas for Musica Britannica (Vol. LXXX, 2003). He has also edited, with Bennett Zon, Volume 2 of Ashgate’s Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies (2002), and is musical editor of the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology (with Dick Watson), launched in 2013; he has also contributed numerous essays to books including ‘Dannreuther and the Orme Square Phenomenon’ for British Music and Culture (eds. Bashford and Langley, 2000), ‘Elgar and his British Contemporaries’ to the Cambridge Companion to Elgar (eds. Rushton and Grimley, 2005), and Chapter 8, ‘Musical Trends and the Western Church: A Collision of the Ancient and Modern’, for Cambridge University Press’s World Christianities. He has contributed many articles on British composers to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the revised Oxford Companion to Music, the new edition of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Thoemmes’ Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers and Grolier’s Encyclopaedia of the Victorian Era.He has also completed numerous editions for the RSCM Press and for OUP.

In 2011 he participated in the national symposium to mark the 150th anniversary of Hymns Ancient & Modern, and his paper formed part of subsequent publication Hymns Ancient & Modern and Henry Williams Baker: A Herefordshire Vicar and His Hymn Book (2012).

In 2012 he contributed two papers to international conferences in Paris and London on Frederick Delius and is now completing a study of Delius's musical style.Further studies in the pipeline are on the life and music of Alexander Campbell Mackenzie, the music of William Alwyn and the a study of the works of Patrick Hadley. He has also edited (in collaboration with Julian Horton) a volume of essays on British Musical Criticism 1850-1950 for Boydell (2018). 

Professor Dibble has for many years worked closely with commercial recording labels such as Hyperion, Chandos, Dutton, Regent, Herald, EMI, SOMM etc and has done much to promulgate the results of his research with leading performers and orchestras. His recent work has involved an edition of Stanford's Piano Quartet No. 2 Op. 133 with the Gould Trio for Naxos, editions of Harty's Piano Quintet Op. 12 and two string quartets Opp. 1 and 5 for Hyperion, and editions of Parry's Magnificat, Coronation Te Deum and 'England' for Chandos and the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales. He also worked closely with the Ireland Trust in a recording of Ireland's church with Naxos. He has also made orchestrations of extracts of Parry's unpublished opera Guenever and Ivor Gurney's song cycle Lights Out for the BBC Concert Orchestra with the Dutton label. In March 2012 his orchestration of Stanford's Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor was premiered by the Durham University Orchestral Society in Durham Cathedral and is now commercially available. In May 2014 his edition of Stanford's unperformed Song of the Soul was premiered by the RTE Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Dublin's National Concert Hall. This, and an edition of Stanford's The Resurrection, will form part of a recording with the London Bach Choir under David Hill. In 2018 he has been heavily involved in the centenary commemoration of the death of Sir Hubert Parry. This has included two concerts of Parry's music in Durham Cathedral in February and March 2018, the first in the presence of HRH the Prince of Wales. he has also given talks at the Barbican Centre, for the Parry Festival in Gloucester (May 2018), the Cheltenham Festival (July 2018) and the Guild of Church Musicians (July 2018). His edition of the original version of Parry's verse anthem 'Hear my words, ye people' was performed at the Proms on 27 July 2018, and he was a speaker at the Charles Wood Summer School (August 2018) and the Oxford Lieder Festival (October 2018). 

He has recently completed a major recording project with SOMM Recordings, the Stanford Society and Durham University of the complete string quartets and quintets of Charles Villiers Stanford. He is also closely involved with the forthcoming new recording by Chandos of Parry's oratorio Judith which was performed at the Royal Festival Hall on 3 April 2019. 

In October 2018 the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Chorus performed his edition of Stanford Mass 'Via Victrix 1914-1918' in a world premiere in Cardiff under Adrian Partington. He delieverd talks on Stanford's last opera The Travelling Companion as part of North Sussex Opera's tour of the work in November and December 2018 (https://www.newsussexopera.org/) as part of his role as President of the Stanford Society. Most recently his performing edition of Stanford's first opera The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan was performed on 28 October 2019 at the Wexford International Opera.

Supervision of research projects has included: the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Frederic Cowen, Hamish MacCunn, William Gillies Whittaker, Archibald Potter, Elgar and Wagner, Eric Coates, Chopin in England and Scotland, Poulenc's a cappella sacred works, the music of Josip Slavenski, the history of the Royal College of Music 1883-1918, Tractarian hymnody, the Symphonies of John Kinsella, the five symphonies of William Alwyn, the music of E. J. Moeran, Thomas Tertius Noble and the choir of St Thomas, New York, the concerted works of Herbert Howells, the role of the organ in nineteenth-century church music, the influence of Brahms in British music and the choral works of Gerald Finzi. More recent research projects at PhD level include the life and hymns of J. B. Dykes, Neo-Classicism in British Music,1920-1940, Alan Bush and the Folksong Movement, Thomas Cotterill and Hymnody in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In 2011 he received an Award for Excellence in Doctoral Supervision from Durham University.

• British and Irish music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• British musical criticism
• Church music

Authored book

• Style, Form and Ethos. Boydell & Brewer
• Dibble, J. (2013). Hamilton Harty: Musical Polymath. Boydell & Brewer
• Dibble, J. (2010). Michele Esposito. Field Day Publications
• Dibble, J. (2007). John Stainer: A Life in Music. Boydell & Brewer
• Dibble, J. (2002). Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician. Oxford University Press
• Dibble, J. (1992). C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (revised 1998). Oxford University Press

Chapter in book

• Dibble, J. The Last Symphonies of Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford: A Journey Towards Structural Compression. In J. Garcia, & R. Sanchez (Eds.), Symphonism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (277-290). Brepols Publishers
• Dibble, J., Houston, K., McHale, M., Murphy, M., Beausang, I., White, H., …Plummer, D. The Musical Manuscripts of Micehele Esposito@ Some New Evidence. In K. Houston, M. McHale, & M. Murphy (Eds.), Documents of Irish Music History in the Long Nineteenth Century (153-163). Four Courts Press, Dublin
• Dibble, J. (2020). Narrative and Formal Plasticity in the British Symphonic Poem, 1850-1950. In M. Allis, & P. Watt (Eds.), The Symphonic Poem in Britain, 1850-1950 (15-54). The Boydell Press: Woodbridge
• Dibble, J. (2018). Canon Thomas Hudson, Clergyman Musician, Cambridge Don and the Hovingham 'Experiment'. In L. Bodley (Ed.), Music Preferred: Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honour of Harry White (597-613). Hollitzer Verlag
• Dibble, J., Horton, J., Horton, P., Mark, C., Arrandale, K., Thomson, A., …White, H. (2018). Free Thought and the Musician: Ernest Walker, the 'English Hanslick. In J. Dibble, & J. Horton (Eds.), British Musical Criticism and Intellectuall Thought 1850-1950. Boydell & Brewer
• Thistlethwaite, N., Harper, J., Williamson, M., Smith, D., Lynan, P., Kitchen, J., …Dickinson, P. (2018). 'Romanticism, pedagogy and the English Organ: the discourse of concert and ecclesiastical repertoire - Best, Stainer, Parry and Stanford. In I. Quinn (Ed.), Studies in English Organ Music (223-249). Routledge
• Dibble, J. (2013). 'Hidden Artifice': Howells as Song-Writer. In P. Cooke, & D. Maw (Eds.), The Music of Herbert Howells (62-85). Boydell & Brewer
• Harper, J., Watson, R., Dibble, J., Malpas, A., Malpas, A., Bridges, T., …Berrow, J. (2013). A compromise between old and new? : the music of Hymns Ancient & Modern. In L. H. S. Group (Ed.), Hymns Ancient & Modern and Henry Williams Baker: A Herefordshire Vicar and his Hymn Book. Leominster History Study Group
• Dibble, J. (2012). Venice and Opera. In M. O Neill, M. Sandy, & S. Wootton (Eds.), Venice and the Cultural Imagination (43-77). Pickering & Chatto
• Dibble, J. (2011). The Church Music of John Ireland. In L. Foreman (Ed.), The John Ireland Companion (232-254). Boydell & Brewer
• Dibble, J. (2008). 'I Pant for the Music which is Divine': Shelley's Poetry and the Musical Imagination. In S. Schmid, & M. Rossington (Eds.), The reception of P.B. Shelley in Europe (278-301). Continuum Press
• Dibble, J. (2007). Charles Villiers Stanford, Music Education and the Concepts of 'Musica Prattica' and 'Musica Theoretica'. In W. Everett, & P. Laird (Eds.), On Bunker's Hill : Essays In Honor Of J. Bunker Clark
• Dibble, J. (2006). 'Musical Trends and the Western Church: a Collision of the Ancient and Modern'. In S. Gilley, & B. Stanley (Eds.), World Christianities, c.1815-c.1914 (121-135). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.2277/0521814561
• Dibble, J. (2004). 'Elgar and His British Contemporaries'. In D. Grimley, & J. Rushton (Eds.), Cambridge companion to Elgar (15-23). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.2277/0521826233
• Dibble, J. (2003). Theses. In L. Foreman (Ed.), Information Sources in Music (168-177). K G Saur
• Dibble, J. (2002). Parry's Guenever: Trauma and Catharsis. In R. Barber (Ed.), King Arthur in Music (35-50). Boydell & Brewer
• Dibble, J. (2002). Fantasy and Hybridization in the British Variation Tradition. In J. Dibble, & B. Zon (Eds.), Ninteenth-Century British Music Studies (235-250). Ashgate Press
• Dibble, J. (2001). Grove's Musical Dictionary: A National Document. In H. White, & M. Murphy (Eds.), Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture 1800-1945 (33-50). Cork University Press
• Dibble, J. (2001). The Death of a Culture: Germany and British Music before 1914. In L. Foreman (Ed.), Oh, My Horses: Elgar and the Great War (73-88). Elgar Editions
• Dibble, J. (2000). Dannreuther and the Orme Square Phenomenon. In C. Bashford, & L. Langley (Eds.), Music and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (275-298). Oxford University Press
• Dibble, J. (1999). Parry as Historiographer. In B. Zon (Ed.), Nineteenth-Century British Music StudiesAldershot (37-51). Ashgate Publishing
• Dibble, J. (1998). The Composer in the Academy, 1850-1940. In C. Acton, & R. Pine (Eds.), To Talent Alone: The Royal Irish Academy of Music 1848-1998 (400-418). Gill and Macmillan
• Dibble, J. (1998). Parry, Stanford and Vaughan Williams: The Creation of Tradition. In L. Foreman (Ed.), Ralph Vaughan Williams in Perspective (25-47). Albion Press
• Dibble, J. (1997). 'Musical Nationalism in Ireland in the 20th Century: Complexities and Contradictions'. In T. Makela (Ed.), Music and Nationalism in 20th-century Great Britain and Finland (133-144). Von Bockel Verlag
• Dibble, J. (1993). Stanford's Service in B flat Op. 10 and the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. In H. White, & G. Gillen (Eds.), Irish Musical Studies: Music and the Church (129-148). Irish Academic Press

Edited book

• Dibble, J., & Horton, J. (Eds.). (2018). British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought 1850-1950. Boydell & Brewer
• Dibble, J., & Horton, J. (Eds.). (2018). British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850-1950. Boydell & Brewer
• O'Neill, M., Sandy, M., & Wootton, S. (Eds.). (2012). Venice and the Cultural Imagination: 'This Strange Dream upon the Water'. Pickering & Chatto
• Dibble, J., & Zon, B. (Eds.). (2002). Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies Vol. 2. Ashgate Publishing

Journal Article

• Dibble, J. (2016). Context, Form and Style in Sterndale Bennett's Piano Concertos. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 13(2), 195-219. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479409816000616
• Dibble, J. (2016). Hamilton Harty's Ode to a Nightingale: A Confluence of Wagner and Elgar. Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, 11(2015-16), 57-81
• Dibble, J. (2015). War, Impression, Sound, and Memory: British Music and the First World War. Bulletin - German Historical Institute London, 37(1), 43-56

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Dibble, J. An Anthology of Edwardian Carols. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. (2018). Stanford Morning Service in B flat Op. 10. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. (2018). Stanford - Communion Service in B flat Op. 10 (with additional Kyrie by Dibble). [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. (2018). Hubert Parry - 'Hear my words, ye people' (full score). [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. (2018). Hubert Parry - Songs of Farewell. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. (2018). Hubert Parry - 'Hear my words, ye people' (vocal score). [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. (2016). John Stainer: Four Romantic Madrigals. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. (2011). 'Hail, gladdening light'' (anthem) Charles Wood. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. (2010). Communion Service in C Op. 115 Charles Villiers Stanford. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. C. (2010). Morning Service in C Op. 115 Charles Villiers Stanford. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. C. (2004). Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in G Op. 81 Charles Villiers Stanford. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. C. (2004). Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in A Op. 12 Charles Villiers Stanford. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. (2004). A Stanford Anthology. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. C. (2004). Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in D minor Thomas Attwood Walmisley. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. (2003). Hubert Parry: Sonatas for Violin and Pianoforte. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. C. (2002). Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in C Op. 115 Charles Villiers Stanford. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. C. (2002). Magnificat and Nuncu Dimittis in B flat Op. 10 Charles Villiers Stanford. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. C. (2002). 'I was glad' (Coronation Anthem) C. Hubert H. Parry. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. C. (2002). Pater Noster (motet) Charles Villiers Stanford. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. C. (2002). Magnficat and Nunc Dimittis in B flat (1877) John Stainer. [Dataset]
• Dibble, J. C. (2002). 'Lighten our darkness' (anthem) Charles Villiers Stanford. [Dataset]

Other (Print)

• Dibble, J. (in press). Dear Lord and Father of Mankind: The Origin of Parry's Hymn
• Dibble, J. (2018). Composer of the Month - Hubert Parry
• Dibble, J. (2018). In Praise of Parry 100 Years On
• Dibble, J. (2016). Ancient and Modern: The 'Janus-Like' Chemistry of Charles Wood's Church Music
• Dibble, J. (2016). In Praise of Song
• Dibble, J. (2014). 'Passion fused with a Love of Things Italian' - Walton's Violin Concerto
• Dibble, J. (2013). 'Across the fields and away into the night' : Vaughan Williams's 'Fantasia on Christmas Carols'
• Dibble, J. (2013). The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology
• Dibble, J. (2012). Man of the World: Delius the Cosmopolitan
• Dibble, J. (2012). 'Loveliest of rhapsodies': George Butterworth's 'A Shropshire Lad' Rhapsody
• Dibble, J. (2011). The world through an infant's eyes': Finzi's cantata 'Dies Natalis