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Educational Resources

York Gate Collections

Administrator: Kim Perkins BA, ATCL
Museum Support Administrator: Joanne Gibson BMus

Telephone 020 7873 7441
Email collections@ram.ac.uk

The Academy’s ‘living museum’, the York Gate Collections, hosts exhibitions and vents over three floors of public galleries. These centre on the institution’s playing collections of stringed instruments and historic pianos as well as on its archives, library special collections, art and artifact collections. The exhibitions are open every weekday (11:30am–5:30pm) and weekends (12:00–4:00pm). Regular free public events are held during term-time. These showcase Academy research and teaching, and encourage participants to reflect on the materials and practices of music-making across the Academy’s 185-year history.

In York Gate issues of instrument making, performance and composition combine to make an active and collaborative environment for creators and scholars of all kinds and of all ages. The Academy has developed research partnerships with institutions such as Musée de la Musique (Paris), Hannover Hochschule für Musik, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tate St Ives, Library of Congress (Washington DC), Birkbeck College and University College London. TheYork Gate collaborative environment provides an important resource for all the Academy’s educational programmes, and fuels the institution’s lively performance research culture.

The Academy is committed to making all its collection materials, and their educational and artistic applications, available online. APOLLO (Academy Pictures Online) — a fast growing, high-quality digital archive at www.yorkgate.ram.ac.uk — offers virtual access to all the Academy collections.


TheYork Gate team
Amanda Glauert PhD, MA, ARCM, Hon RAM (Chair, York Gate Management Group),
David Gorton PhD, MMus, BA (Research Co-ordinator),
Frances Palmer PhD, MA, BSc, FSA, FMA (York Gate Collections Curator),
Samantha Pettit (York Gate Business Manager),
David Rattray Hon ARAM (Instrument Custodian),
Peter Sheppard Skærved LRAM, ARAM (Research Fellow),
Janet Snowman MA, Hon ARAM, FRSA (Collections Registrar)

‘Dry this academic afternoon was not! It was a privilege to attend with some twenty students a revelatory public seminar’
Musicapointers.co.uk, April 2005

(Picture: Above right: A performance/demonstration by Peter Sheppard Skaerved in the Strings Gallery)

Elena Vorotko

‘I first came to the Academy when I was sixteen, to have piano lessons while I was studying at the Purcell School. I was mesmerized by the beauty of the building and the glass doors of the classrooms, through which I glimpsed magical interactions of gestures and sounds.

Ten years on, I have done my Bachelors and Masters Degrees at the Academy and am now studying for a PhD. I’m more thrilled than ever to be able to explore the many unique and diverse opportunities here.

The gallery of historical keyboard instruments in the York Gate Collections is just one of the brilliant ideas that Academy has put into practice. For my PhD I am studying different post-1801 editions of JS Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. It becomes clear that the invention and development of the forte-piano greatly influenced how this music was interpreted, edited and performed. It is truly precious to have a remarkable playing collection of eleven forte-pianos— made in London, Paris, Vienna and NewYork and dated from 1764 to 1920—here at the Academy. Using these instruments I can gaze through the glass doors of time and hear the sounds which inspired the great composers of the past, and which provoked major pianists to form the legacies that every pianist of today has inherited through playing JS Bach. It is most exhilarating experience to share these discoveries with gallery visitors and Academy students in lecture-recitals, workshops and demonstrations.‘