Joan Rimmer

Joan Rimmer (11 December 1918 – 29 December 2014) was an English musicologist who specialised in the history of musical instruments (especially the Irish harp) and in historical dance forms.

She was also a pioneer in ethnomusicology who presented, in the course of 30 years, numerous programmes on traditional music from around to the world on BBC radio.

Rimmer was born in the Battersea district of London, to Marion (nee Layzell), a bookkeeper, and Edmund Rimmer, a musician, and grew up in Kensington.

At age 12, she gained a scholarship to the Royal College of Music where she later studied piano with Cyril Smith and won the Hopkinson Gold Medal, graduating in 1939.

She became a music teacher at Putney High School and Roehampton Training College while also giving public piano recitals.

In 1948, Rimmer began a long association with the BBC, which lasted about 30 years.

Initially she was a station pianist, presented educational programmes for children, and produced BBC LPs, including one with Spike Milligan.

In 1949, she married James McGillivray, then an oboist in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; and was divorced by 1962.

By the mid-1950s, her programmes were increasingly occupied with historical musicology and organology, producing programmes on bagpipes, harps, and (in 1957) on the Chinese sheng and a Chinese variant of the shawm.

Ethnomusicological subjects have always been her interest: One of her first BBC programmes was on music making at shepherds' festivals in Asturias, Spain, produced with her own field recordings.

From 1957, she was on the Committee of the Galpin Society and was its Assistant Secretary from 1960 to 1968.

She accompanied Harrison to his various visiting professorships to Stanford, Dartmouth, and Princeton during the 1960s.

At Stanford, the couple began a 20-year friendship with Frank Zappa.

Rimmer and Harrison together developed an increasing interest in ethnomusicology, with common research trips to Mexico, Central and South America, making recordings of the music-making of indigenous people.

During this time, she participated in the establishment of ethnomusicology as an academic discipline at the Institute of Ethnomusicology at the University of California where she published under her married name, Joan Harrison, on Spanish elements in the music of Maya groups in Chiapas, Mexico.

In this role, in 1961, she was responsible for the restoration and restringing of the so-called "Brian Boru harp" in Trinity College Dublin, in association with the British Museum.

Rimmer re-married in 1965, in Los Angeles, with the Irish musicologist Frank Ll. Harrison (1905–1987), then a professor at Oxford.

This led to a number of research publications on Irish harps, including the seminal book The Irish Harp (1969), the standard work on the subject for many years.

This book established today's terminology and classification of Irish harps.

This research interest led to Harrison quitting his position at Oxford in 1970 and taking up a professorship in ethnomusicology at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

At all times, Rimmer pursued her own research, now also including music and musical instruments of this country, which resulted in a noted series of publications.

In 1976, the couple relocated to Canterbury, where Harrison died in 1987.

In addition to her innovative work on musical instruments and in developing the field of ethnomusicology, in her 70s she was breaking new ground in the study of historical dance.

At the age of 80 she was still publishing research papers and was on the editorial board of the journal Dance Research.

Joan Rimmer died in Whitstable, Kent, aged 96.

(with Frank Ll. Harrison)