page_title: Michael Tippett
section_title: Childhood and schooling
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Tippett / Life / Childhood and schooling
caption_attribution_description: English: Stamford School illuminated at night.
context_page_description: Sir Michael Kemp Tippett OM CH CBE was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime he was sometimes ranked with his contemporary Benjamin Britten as one of the leading British composers of the 20th century. Among his best-known works are the oratorio A Child of Our Time, the orchestral Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, and the opera The Midsummer Marriage.
  Tippett's talent developed slowly. He withdrew or destroyed his earliest compositions, and was 30 before any of his works were published. Until the mid-to-late 1950s his music was broadly lyrical in character, before changing to a more astringent and experimental style. New influences, including those of jazz and blues after his first visit to America in 1965, became increasingly evident in his compositions. While Tippett's stature with the public continued to grow, not all critics approved of these changes in style, some believing that the quality of his work suffered as a consequence. From around 1976 Tippett's late works began to reflect the works of his youth through a return to lyricism.
context_section_description: Shortly after Michael's birth, the family moved to Wetherden in Suffolk. Michael's education began in 1909, with a nursery governess and various private tutors who followed a  curriculum that included piano lessons—his first formal contact with music. There was a piano in the house, on which he "took to improvising crazily ... which I called 'composing', though I had only the vaguest notion of what that meant". In September 1914 Michael became a boarder at Brookfield Preparatory School in Swanage, Dorset. He spent four years there, at one point earning notoriety by writing an essay that challenged the existence of God. In 1918 he won a scholarship to Fettes College, a boarding school in Edinburgh, where he studied the piano, sang in the choir, and began to learn to play the pipe organ. The school was not a happy place; sadistic bullying of the younger pupils was commonplace. When Michael revealed to his parents in March 1920 that he had formed a homosexual relationship with another boy, they removed him. He transferred to Stamford School in Lincolnshire, where a decade previously Malcolm Sargent had been a pupil.
  Around this time Henry Tippett decided to live in France, and the house in Wetherden was sold. The 15-year-old Michael and his brother Peter remained at school in England, travelling to France for their holidays. Michael found Stamford much more congenial than Fettes, and developed both academically and musically. He found an inspiring piano teacher in Frances Tinkler, who introduced him to the music of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Sargent had maintained his connection with the school, and was present when Tippett and another boy played a C minor Concerto for Two Harpsichords by Bach on pianos with a local string orchestra. Tippett sang in the chorus when Sargent directed a local performance of Robert Planquette's operetta Les Cloches de Corneville. Despite his parents' wish that he follow an orthodox path by proceeding to Cambridge University, Tippett had firmly decided on a career as a composer, a prospect that alarmed them and was discouraged by his headmaster and by Sargent.
  By mid-1922 Tippett had developed a rebellious streak. His overt atheism particularly troubled the school, and he was required to leave. He remained in Stamford in private lodgings, while continuing lessons with  Tinkler and with the organist of St Mary's Church. He also began studying Charles Villiers Stanford's book Musical Composition which, he later wrote, "became the basis of all my compositional efforts for decades to come". In 1923 Henry Tippett was persuaded that some form of musical career, perhaps as a concert pianist, was possible, and agreed to support his son in a course of study at the Royal College of Music (RCM). After an interview with the college principal, Sir Hugh Allen, Tippett was accepted despite his lack of formal entry qualifications.
caption: Stamford School, which Tippett attended between 1920 and 1923
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