The Southern Arkansas University System Board of Trustees met on December 7, 2024. During this meeting, a resolution was approved to bestow a name to Southern Arkansas University Tech s (SAU Tech) Administration Building in honor of Gaye and Gerald Manning. In recognition of the outstanding service provided by the Mannings, this building has now become the Gaye and Gerald Manning Administration Building, also known as Manning Hall.
Studying at London’s Royal Academy of Music, she graduated in 1958. Later, she taught music at Aylsham Secondary Modern School and even sang at Norwich Prison.
She studied in Switzerland with the famed Frederick Husler after which she moved to London and sang on a full-time basis.
Her London debut came in 1964 at a Park Lane Group concert and her first BBC broadcast was in 1965 – singing Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Her performance of his melodrama received widespread critical acclaim and is still regarded as a benchmark recording of the work. She performed Pierrot more than 100 times in her career and again at the Assembly House in February 2014.
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Jane Manning: always amenable and a friend to composers whatever their demands
Credit: Magnus-Lewinska, Mayotte/ Bridgeman Images
Jane Manning, who has died aged 82, was the go-to British soprano for contemporary music and an indispensable friend to many modern composers, giving the first performances of more than 350 works by the likes of Richard Rodney Bennett, Harrison Birtwistle and her husband Anthony Payne.
The critic Edward Greenfield wrote in awe of how she was able to defy the laws of musical gravity when tackling avant-garde music’s craggy altitudes. Where many singers would be fearful of damaging their voices, she was willing to try anything, with new challenges and variety bringing out the best in her.