Nathan James Dearden is now featured on the Sound and Music's British Music Collection

Nathan has created a profile on Sound and Music's British Music Collection and joind over 3000 British composers on this valuable platform.

About the British Music Collection

The British Music Collection has itself been on a transformational journey since its inception in a room just off Oxford Street in 1967, when it began life as part of the British Music Information Centre - a drop-in centre where users could go to see, hear and research 20th century British contemporary classical music, and network with other composers.

Under Sound and Music’s stewardship, the British Music Collection’s aims are clear: to preserve and showcase the UK's rich and evolving musical heritage, to develop its online presence, and to encourage new composers to join – making it a living and breathing archive, and a space and place for new music discovery with a growing composer community.

The physical collection has been housed since 2011 at the University of Huddersfield, and since 2015 within the University’s state of the art archive centre Heritage Quay (winner of the ‘Buildings That Inspire’ category in the Guardian University Awards in 2016). Here, members of the public can access over 40,000 scores, 21,000 recordings and a wide variety of artefacts including books, letters, photographs, vintage concert programmes and vinyl LPs.

‘The University is delighted to celebrate this significant anniversary and to continue supporting composers to add to this important collection, as well as making it freely available for use by the public as well as academic researchers.’ – Prof Tim Thornton, Deputy Vice, Chancellor University of Huddersfield

Over 2,000 people per month also visit the British Music Collection online, where Sound and Music has developed the range and richness of content as well as inviting guest curators to share their journeys of musical exploration.

From Delia Derbyshire to Matthew Herbert, from Ralph Vaughan Williams to Samantha Fernando, the British Music Collection showcases a wide and brilliant array of British composers and with hundreds of fascinating stories – but there are big parts missing in its narrative!

Susanna Eastburn, Chief Executive of Sound and Music, said: “One of the ambitions of #BMC50 is to work with our growing community to draw out and expand a wider range of diverse voices, and challenge received ideas about the history of 20th century musical development. We have already done an example of this in March 2017, when we highlighted the lack of female representation within the British Music Collection, and we’ve also had some brilliant curation from Julie Kjaer, Sarah Sayeed and Ailís ní Ríain. This feels like creatively fascinating and important work for us, and the 50th anniversary is a wonderful opportunity to explore this more deeply.”

To view the website or to create your own profile, please CLICK HERE.