Keith Falkner’s invigorating significance for the RCM in the 1960s was no less than Hugh Allen’s had been in the interwar period. Falkner came to the College after a formative time at Cornell University in the United States, whose distinguished music faculty had introduced him to American musicology and early and contemporary musical repertoires. Falkner’s very individual ‘can do’ mindset encouraged him to challenge the RCM Council to raise the money the College needed, while his wide range of personal and musical sympathies made him very approachable to the RCM students. Falkner appreciated the potential of the RCM’s historic collections, while also being aware of the significant benefit of such technological developments as an electronic music studio. Under Falkner, the RCM’s library service was rationalized, and students were encouraged to perform outside the College. Falkner linked the RCM into the Association of European Conservatoires. He increased the range of subjects students could study, to include the guitar and Baroque instruments and the number of brass and woodwind students increased. Falkner took a robust attitude to improving professors’ pay.

Willcocks led by musical example, and his performances with the College orchestra and chorus helped the success of the Centenary appeal and raised the College’s profile. Willcocks was pleased for the College to undertake concerts of repertoire he had little interest in, as long as standards were high, and so early and contemporary performance flourished. The RCM Centenary was vigorously pursued across the College, and its success raised enough money for the new, integrated, library service, new social space and to build the Britten Theatre. The second Gulbenkian Report (1978) increased public awareness of the unfavourable funding of the conservatoires compared with universities. Relations with Whitehall continued to be difficult, but in Willcocks’s time the College was at last funded to pay its teaching staff on the national pay scales for other higher education institutions.