As Head of Education at Glyndebourne, Katie Tearle, now Head of Opera and Dance for Edition Peters Group, led one of the longest running and most substantial creative participation programmes in an arts organisation in the UK. She talks to Peter Wiegold about its achievements and about the structures that such a sustained programme needs. She explains why a major opera house would commit itself to such an ambitious programme and reveals details of her own role, as ‘producer’, managing not only the complexities of making new opera but also the relationships between a world class house, its composers and writers, and the participants and performers they brought to it, with their wide range of skills and needs.

A Musical Education

PW: Were you always close to music as a child?

KT: I was born into the music and theatre world. My father ran the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, which included the Ashcroft Theatre and a gallery, and I saw everything. And my grammar-turned-comprehensive school music teacher, Mrs Carroll, introduced me to the music of Varèse and Berio, and had a great love of Benjamin Britten. She made sure we had every kind of music opportunity, including being involved in operas. We used to stage things, and I was involved in a production of Noye’s Fludde at Fairfield.

PW: What did you think of Varèse?

KT: It was amazing. I actually preferred the more spatial types of music and more percussive stuff than say Hindemith – that seemed laughable to me at the age of twelve, thirteen; I couldn’t engage with it. But something that just splatters and is visceral, I loved that.

The school also worked with the composer Roland Senator, who created a new style of notation using colour, which we experimented with; he would have been considered an ‘educational composer’ then. Ronald wrote an opera called The Wolf of Gubbio for us, with a libretto by Peter Porter, which we premiered at the Fairfield and then presented for the opening of the Covent Garden Piazza in 1980. I played St Francis (with all the pigeons in the piazza!) and good friend of mine played the wolf. We felt completely involved.