John Hopkins (conductor)
Australian conductor and music educator (1927–2013)
John Raymond Hopkins AM OBE (19 July 1927 – 30 September 2013) was a British-born Australian conductor and administrator.
Career
John Hopkins was born in Yorkshire in 1927. He was the assistant conductor of the BBC Scottish Orchestra from 1949 to 1952 and then conductor of the BBC Northern Orchestra until 1957. He relocated to New Zealand in 1957 to succeed James Robertson as conductor of the then National Orchestra (now the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra). In 1959 he founded the New Zealand National Youth Orchestra. He was present for the orchestra's 50th anniversary season in 2009. As part of his contribution to youth music he also conducted the South African National Youth Orchestra.
Hopkins moved to Australia in 1963. As the Federal Director of Music for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), Hopkins began a number of innovations within the ABC's Concert Music Division, such as starting an Australian Promenade (Proms) series in Sydney in 1965 and broadcasting international avant-garde classical music. As a part of the Proms concerts, Hopkins programmed a variety of music, from the Renaissance, performed by the Sydney group the Renaissance Players, the then rarely performed music of Hector Berlioz, Gustav Mahler and Sir Edward Elgar, avant-garde music from overseas and Australia.
“John Hopkins (conductor)” enters the record as australian conductor and music educator (1927–2013). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Hopkins and conductor can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 12, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q6239824. VIAF identifies the subject as 117121509. The Library of Congress control number is n83066255. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927, 2013, 1949 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Hopkins (conductor)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.