Richard Langham Smith, Head of Department
Arnold Kettle Distinguished Scholar in Music

BA Hons (York), Chevalier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres, FRSA

Contact:
+44 (0)1908 653176
r.langhamsmith@open.ac.uk

Richard Langham Smith graduated from the University of York and spent a postgraduate year studying harpsichord and Baroque performance practice at the Amsterdam Conservatory. He subsequently studied with the Debussy scholar Edward Lockspeiser and in 1977 translated and edited the complete writings of Debussy (published as Debussy on Music, reprinted Cornell University Press, 1988). Performing activities included tours with two Baroque ensembles, The Lawes Consort and the City of London Baroque Ensemble, and he also held the post of Music Director for Extemporary Dance with responsibility for an Arts Council initiative to introduce more live music into contemporary dance.

He has held lectureships at the University of Lancaster and City University, and was subsequently appointed Reader in Music at the University of Exeter which has recently closed its Music Department. He began teaching for the Open University at the age of 23, having previously taught for the WEA and several Local Authority Adult Education Departments as well as for the Universities of Hull and Birmingham. At first working as a Tutor Counsellor for the first Arts Foundation Course (A100) he recently returned to the post of Associate Lecturer, teaching AA314 (Studies in Music 1750–2000: Interpretation and Analysis). He has also acted as supervisor for four PhD students. In September 2005 he was appointed Arnold Kettle Distinguished Scholar in Music on the faculty at the Open University. He has held posts as visiting lecturer at King's College London, and has been an appointed postgraduate tutor at the universities of Oxford and Melbourne, Australia. He is currently a visiting lecturer at the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge.

He is a frequent broadcaster, having contributed to radio programmes for BBC Radio 2, 3 and 4 and France-Musique and France-Culture and for television, Channel 4 and ARTE. He has lectured at the Royal Opera House, La Scala, Milan, the Opéra de Lyon, ENO, the SNO and Glyndebourne, as well as for the London Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Proms and many university lecture series. Subsequent publications have included the Cambridge Opera Guide to Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (CUP 1989) and Debussy Studies (CUP 1998). His reconstruction of Debussy's unpublished opera Rodrigue et Chimène formed the basis for performances which opened the new Opéra de Lyon in 1993, and a critical score of this was published by Durand in 2003. He was admitted to the Ordre des arts et des lettres in 1996 for his services to French culture. In 2003, he was appointed visiting Professor of Music at Gresham College, London where he delivered three lectures on Bizet's Carmen in November 2003. These are archived and may be accessed at www.gresham.ac.uk.

In 2004 he presented a conference paper in the French Music conference at the University of Melbourne and was visiting lecturer at the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland and Griffiths University and the Sydney Conservatoire. In 2006 he participated in a French Music Conference at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 2007 at the French Music, Analysis and Performance, at Brigham Young University, Hawaii.

His edition of Bizet’s Carmen (available on hire from Peters Edition) has been used by Les Musiciens du Louvre under Marc Minkowski for a series of performances in Bremen and at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, and will be used by the Orchestre Romantique et Révolutionnaire under Sir John Eliot Gardiner for a run at the Opéra-Comique in 2009, the theatre where the opera was first premiered in 1875.

Current Research

Richard Langham Smith is presently preparing a new edition of Bizet's Carmen to be published for sale by Peters Edition (supported by the Peter Moores Foundation). This is currently on hire from Peters Edition and has been used for the Chandos ‘Opera in English' recording of the work.

Publications

Follow this link for details of Richard Langham Smith's publications.