Humphrey Procter-Gregg

Humphrey Procter-Gregg (31 July 1895 – 13 April 1980) was an English composer and academic. Career He was born in Kirkby Lonsdale and educated at King William’s College on the Isle of Man and at Peterhouse Cambridge, where he was organ scholar. He studied music with Charles Villiers Stanford (among his last pupils), Charles Wood and Julius Harrison at the Royal College of Music in London and gained a studentship at La Scala in Milan. After graduating, he went on to work at various opera houses (including Covent Garden, Thomas Beecham’s British National Opera Company and Carl Rosa) as stage manager, producer or manager. In 1936 Procter-Gregg became Reader in Music at the University of Manchester, founding the Chair of Music as Emeritus Professor in 1954 and retiring in 1962, when he was succeeded by Hans Redlich. Hope recalled him as “very old fashioned. He just about got as far as Delius, but nothing beyond that”. Peter Maxwell Davies was even more dismissive: “Procter-Gregg hated anything by Stravinsky or Bartok, and referred to Beethoven as that dreadful German bow-wow. I went there to do composition, but he disliked me so much and he disliked the music I wrote so much and I disl