Laureation address: Gillian Moore CBE

Honorary Degree of Doctor of Music
Laureation by Emeritus Professor Garry Taylor School of Biology

Tuesday 28 June 2022

Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causa, Gillian Moore. 

Gillian Moore is Director of Music and Performing Arts at the Southbank Centre. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of visiting the Southbank Centre which sits on the River Thames in central London, it is the largest arts centre in the UK, and one of the largest cultural institutions in the world. It is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery, National Poetry Library and Arts Council Collection, and hosts 4.4 million visitors each year, with 40% of its events being free. 

The Southbank Centre is home to eight Resident and Associate Orchestras and Gillian oversees the programming of all musical events: classical, jazz and contemporary. She is committed to finding new audiences and supporting new music, and is at the forefront of addressing questions about how to ensure diversity and equality across the UK’s musical culture. The breadth and extent of events at the Southbank is astonishing. Take this month of June: some 60 events including feminist pop icon Peaches, Andreas Schiff playing all five Beethoven piano concertos, a Grace Jones extravaganza, Wagner’s Parsifal, events to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and an outdoor roller skate disco, to name just a few. 

Gillian was born in Glasgow, studied music there, and has worked throughout her career to bring music and the arts to the widest possible community. For ten years she was the Education Officer at the London Sinfonietta and was instrumental in making it the first ensemble in the UK to launch a music education programme, later becoming its Artistic Director. At the Southbank Centre she became Head of Education, Head of Contemporary Culture and then Director of Music and Performing Arts. 

Gillian Moore has a particular interest in 20th century music and has communicated eloquently about composers such as Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Igor Stravinsky, and the subsequent minimalists. In 2019 her book on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – The Music of Modernity – was published to critical acclaim. During her career, Gillian has collaborated with many of the great musical and artistic figures of our age, from Luciano Berio to Radiohead, from Harrison Birtwistle to Squarepusher, from Steve Reich to Akram Khan and has commissioned many significant new works. 

She has received many awards for her contribution to British music, has served on the jury of the Leeds International Piano Competition, the International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors, and is a regular contributor to the BBC Proms television coverage and BBC Radio 3. She was awarded an MBE in 1994 and a CBE in 2019. 

Speaking on Radio 3 about Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, Gillian said “Berg used everything in his armoury to tell complex truths about women, and men, and love, and life, in a way that transforms human experience into something transcendent, and that, for me, is what art is all about”. 

Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of her major contribution to the cultural life of the UK and bringing performing arts to as wide an audience as possible, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Music, honoris causa, on Gillian Moore.