William Glock

Sir William Frederick Glock, CBE (3 May 1908 – 28 June 2000) was a British music critic and musical administrator.

Glock was born in London. He read history at the University of Cambridge and was an organ scholar at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He studied piano with Artur Schnabel in Berlin from 1930 to 1933.

Glock was music critic of the Daily Telegraph in 1934, and then of The Observer (1934–1945). He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II.

In 1949 he founded the music journal The Score, and served as its editor until 1961. He later became music critic at the New Statesman, from 1958 to 1959.

Glock became the first director of the Bryanston Summer School of Music in 1948. On the encouragement of Schnabel, he founded the Dartington International Summer School in 1953, and was its director until 1979. The summer school put on performances of works by contemporary composers and courses for musicians. Notable participants included the Amadeus Quartet, Nadia Boulanger, Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, Boris Blacher and George Enescu.

He later served as Director of the Bath Festival from 1976 to 1984.

William Glock served as BBC Controller of Music from 1959 to 1972. From 1960 to 1973, he was also Controller of The Proms, and took over personal single leadership of The Proms whereas formerly a committee had been in charge of them. During his tenure, Glock arranged performances and commissions of works by many contemporary composers, such as Arnold, Berio, Harrison Birtwistle, Boulez, Carter, Dallapiccola, Peter Maxwell Davies, Gerhard, Henze, Ligeti, Lutosławski, Lutyens, Maw, Messiaen, Nono, , and Tippett. Davies dedicated three works to Glock: Symphony No. 1 (1976), Unbroken Circle (1984) and Mishkenot (1988). In Proms programmes Glock expanded as well the presence of music by past composers such as Purcell, Cavalli, Monteverdi, Byrd, Palestrina, Dufay, Dunstaple and Machaut, as well as less-often performed works of Bach and Haydn.

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