Papers of Jane Manning and Anthony Payne

The papers include annotated scores; diaries and appointment books; accounts books; contacts books; performance contracts; research notes; photographs and photograph albums; concert programmes; publicity material; press cuttings; audio and video recordings; hard drive with digitised audio; compact cassettes; compact discs; vinyl discs.

Anthony Edward Payne was born in London on 2 August 1936, the son of Edward Payne, a civil servant, and Muriel (nee Stroud). Having heard and become enraptured by Brahms's First Symphony while visiting relatives in Goldaming at the age of ten, he began to compose as a schoolboy, writing an orchestral suite and a piano sonata as a schoolboy at Dulwich College in South-East London, before undertaking national service with the Royal Signals. Payne subsequently gained a place at Durham University (1958-1961), where he was exposed to the modernisms of the Second Viennese School.
During his final term at Durham, he suffered a nervous breakdown that placed his compositional work on hiatus for four years. In the interleaving period, he established himself as a professional music critic, and worked to accommodate his love for the English Romantic traditions of Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams with a fascination for the contemporary European avant-garde. This process eventually resulted in his first mature work, Phoenix Mass, which manifested many of the qualities of his later style.
The relative success of Phoenix Mass led to commissions from ensembles including the English Chamber Orchestra and the Nash Ensemble, and was commissioned four times by the BBC Proms. Other key works include the brass band commission, Fire on Whaleness (1976); a Book of Revelation setting for chorus and organ, The Sea of Glass (1976), his String Quartet (1978), and A Day in the Life of a Mayfly (1981).. A BBC commission for the Proms resulted in Time’s Arrow (1990), a depiction of the expansion and retraction of the Universe from the Big Bang. Vocal works included the song-cycle, The World’s Winter (1976), for his wife, the soprano Jane Manning and the Thomas Hardy settings, A First Sight of Her and After (1974) for 16 voices; other compositions for Manning included The Stones & Lonely Places Sing (1979); Evening Land (1981), and a fiftieth birthday gift, Adlestrop (1989) setting text by Edward Thomas.
Payne’s celebrated reconstruction of Elgar's unfinished Third Symphony, which began as a hobby in the early 1970s, received its first performance from the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in May 1998, several months after the world premiere recording. The realisation took over five years to complete, using 130 pages of sketches left behind by Elgar after his death in 1934.
As a renowned critic and musicologist, his books on Schoenberg (1968) and Frank Bridge (1984) became standard texts, and he wrote for a variety of publications including The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and Country Life. Payne taught at Mills College,California; London College of Music, the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music, the University of Western Australia and the University of East Anglia; he was, in 1994, joint artistic director of the Spitalfields Festival with Judith Weir and Michael Berkeley. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham, Kingston and Birmingham; other honours included the Elgar Society Medal in 2011, and Fellowship of the Royal College of Music.
He married Jane Manning in 1966, and died in April 2021, less than a month after the death of his wife.

Jane Marian Manning was born in Norwich on 20 September 1938, the daughter of Gerald Manning and Lily (nee Thompson). She attended Norwich High School for Girls, and attended the Royal Academy of Music, London, graduating in 1958 and becoming an Associate of the Royal College of Music (ARCM) in 1962. She subsequently studied at the Scuola di Canto at Cureglia, Switzerland, before returning to London to study with Frederick Jackson and Yvonne Rodd-Marling.
In 1964, Manning made her debut in London at a Park Lane Group concert singing songs by Anton Webern, Olivier Messiaen, and Luigi Dallapiccola; she gave a seminal BBC broadcast of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the Vesuvius Ensemble in November 1965, and her first BBC recital, featuring songs by Peter Warlock, was broadcast in January 1967. She subsequently established herself as a leading proponent of modern music.
Manning also went on to perform and broadcast frequently across a range of repertoire, including traditional and light music. She sang Bach and Handel before the advent of the historical performance movement. Opera appearances included Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide with the Western Australian Opera Company, Così Fan Tutte, Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins and Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw.
She worked closely with composers such as Harrison Birtwistle, Richard Rodney Bennett, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Dallapiccola, Oliver Knussen, György Ligeti, Elizabeth Lutyens, Peter Maxwell Davies and Judith Weir. In 1988 she founded her own Jane’s Minstrels in London, a virtuoso British new music ensemble often encouraging work by young composers, and giving first performances and making recordings of works by Lutyens, Weir, Matthew King, Brian Elias, and James MacMillan.
Manning acted as visiting professor at Mills College, Oakland, California (1982–86), as a lecturer at the University of York (1987), as a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music (from 1995), and as an honorary professor at the University of Keele (1996–99). Despite a healthy scepticism for academia in general, she authored two volumes of Vocal Repertory: An Introduction (l1994, 1997), and Voicing Pierrot (2012), the seminal work on performing Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, this latter during a fellowship at Kingston University (2004-2007). She continued as visiting professor until 2011.
In 1990, Manning was made a member of the Order of the British Empire, and was awarded a Gold Badge by the British Academy of Composers Songwriters, in recognition of her support for British composers.
In 1966, she married the composer, music critic and musicologist Anthony Payne. She died on 31 March 2021.

The material was reordered by the depositor prior to its accession.

Records are open to the public, subject to the overriding provisions of relevant legislation, including data protection laws. 24 hours' notice is required to access photographic material.

Anthony Edward Payne was born in London on 2 August 1936, the son of Edward Payne, a civil servant, and Muriel (nee Stroud). Having heard and become enraptured by Brahms's First Symphony while visiting relatives in Goldaming at the age of ten, he began to compose as a schoolboy, writing an orchestral suite and a piano sonata as a schoolboy at Dulwich College in South-East London, before undertaking national service with the Royal Signals. Payne subsequently gained a place at Durham University (1958-1961), where he was exposed to the modernisms of the Second Viennese School.
During his final term at Durham, he suffered a nervous breakdown that placed his compositional work on hiatus for four years. In the interleaving period, he established himself as a professional music critic, and worked to accommodate his love for the English Romantic traditions of Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams with a fascination for the contemporary European avant-garde. This process eventually resulted in his first mature work, Phoenix Mass, which manifested many of the qualities of his later style.
The relative success of Phoenix Mass led to commissions from ensembles including the English Chamber Orchestra and the Nash Ensemble, and was commissioned four times by the BBC Proms. Other key works include the brass band commission, Fire on Whaleness (1976); a Book of Revelation setting for chorus and organ, The Sea of Glass (1976), his String Quartet (1978), and A Day in the Life of a Mayfly (1981).. A BBC commission for the Proms resulted in Time’s Arrow (1990), a depiction of the expansion and retraction of the Universe from the Big Bang. Vocal works included the song-cycle, The World’s Winter (1976), for his wife, the soprano Jane Manning and the Thomas Hardy settings, A First Sight of Her and After (1974) for 16 voices; other compositions for Manning included The Stones & Lonely Places Sing (1979); Evening Land (1981), and a fiftieth birthday gift, Adlestrop (1989) setting text by Edward Thomas.
Payne’s celebrated reconstruction of Elgar's unfinished Third Symphony, which began as a hobby in the early 1970s, received its first performance from the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in May 1998, several months after the world premiere recording. The realisation took over five years to complete, using 130 pages of sketches left behind by Elgar after his death in 1934.
As a renowned critic and musicologist, his books on Schoenberg (1968) and Frank Bridge (1984) became standard texts, and he wrote for a variety of publications including The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and Country Life. Payne taught at Mills College,California; London College of Music, the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music, the University of Western Australia and the University of East Anglia; he was, in 1994, joint artistic director of the Spitalfields Festival with Judith Weir and Michael Berkeley. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham, Kingston and Birmingham; other honours included the Elgar Society Medal in 2011, and Fellowship of the Royal College of Music.
He married Jane Manning in 1966, and died in April 2021, less than a month after the death of his wife.

Jane Marian Manning was born in Norwich on 20 September 1938, the daughter of Gerald Manning and Lily (nee Thompson). She attended Norwich High School for Girls, and attended the Royal Academy of Music, London, graduating in 1958 and becoming an Associate of the Royal College of Music (ARCM) in 1962. She subsequently studied at the Scuola di Canto at Cureglia, Switzerland, before returning to London to study with Frederick Jackson and Yvonne Rodd-Marling.
In 1964, Manning made her debut in London at a Park Lane Group concert singing songs by Anton Webern, Olivier Messiaen, and Luigi Dallapiccola; she gave a seminal BBC broadcast of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the Vesuvius Ensemble in November 1965, and her first BBC recital, featuring songs by Peter Warlock, was broadcast in January 1967. She subsequently established herself as a leading proponent of modern music.
Manning also went on to perform and broadcast frequently across a range of repertoire, including traditional and light music. She sang Bach and Handel before the advent of the historical performance movement. Opera appearances included Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide with the Western Australian Opera Company, Così Fan Tutte, Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins and Benjamin Britten’s Turn of the Screw.
She worked closely with composers such as Harrison Birtwistle, Richard Rodney Bennett, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Dallapiccola, Oliver Knussen, György Ligeti, Elizabeth Lutyens, Peter Maxwell Davies and Judith Weir. In 1988 she founded her own Jane’s Minstrels in London, a virtuoso British new music ensemble often encouraging work by young composers, and giving first performances and making recordings of works by Lutyens, Weir, Matthew King, Brian Elias, and James MacMillan.
Manning acted as visiting professor at Mills College, Oakland, California (1982–86), as a lecturer at the University of York (1987), as a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music (from 1995), and as an honorary professor at the University of Keele (1996–99). Despite a healthy scepticism for academia in general, she authored two volumes of Vocal Repertory: An Introduction (l1994, 1997), and Voicing Pierrot (2012), the seminal work on performing Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, this latter during a fellowship at Kingston University (2004-2007). She continued as visiting professor until 2011.
In 1990, Manning was made a member of the Order of the British Empire, and was awarded a Gold Badge by the British Academy of Composers Songwriters, in recognition of her support for British composers.
In 1966, she married the composer, music critic and musicologist Anthony Payne. She died on 31 March 2021.

The collection includes digital audio-visual files, vinyl records and compact audio cassettes. Access to audiovisual material may be restricted due to technical requirements, please contact the Borthwick Institute for more information.

Created 31.01.2023

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A series of correspondence and additional unique audio recordings are at the British Library.

Published

GB 193