Brian Blood D.Phil.(Oxon) B.Sc.(Hons.)
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Brian Blood was born 5 December 1947 in London, to Thomas Holcroft Blood and Margaret Elizabeth Blood (née Ross). The Blood family originated in Derbyshire, England but has had, since the seventeenth century, important Irish associations including that of its most notorious member
Colonel Thomas Blood.
As a Junior Exhibitioner at Trinity College of Music, London, he studied piano and flute while playing in a semi-professional recorder consort with his sister (Christine Blood, now Carr, formerly Musical Director of The Society of Recorder Players Wessex Branch, living now in Bishops Cleeve, Gloucs.) and two brothers, Paul, a consultant oncologist working in Victoria, Canada (100 km from Vancouver), and Peter, a barrister and managing director of Arno Consulting. Brian has two younger twin brothers, Richard and Robert. The consort, coached by Robert Salkeld and Stanley Taylor but mainly self-taught, worked together until Spring 1971.
In 1970, Brian completed a B.Sc. honours degree in physics at Queen Mary College, University of London, before working in the theoretical physics division at C.E.R.N., (Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire) near Geneva, Switzerland. Awarded a Nuffield Foundation Bursary, he returned to Q.M.C. to study Zoology & Comparative Physiology and to undertake biophysical research with Professor Trevor Shaw F.R.S (1928-1972). During this period, Brian was elected the first student College Governor, a position he held for a year (meetings taking place at Drapers' Hall), and completed seven terms as Hon. Secretary of the Q.M.C. Students Union. Following Professor Shaw's death in September 1972, Brian moved to Balliol College, Oxford University to pursue an M.Sc. in Neurophysiology, and in 1977 completed a D.Phil., on the action of cardiac glycosides on the electrical and mechanical properties of heart tissue. He held a British Heart Foundation Junior Research Fellowship while working as a member of the Cardiac Electrophysiology Group led by Denis Noble C.B.E., F.R.S. (1936-) at the University Laboratory of Physiology which now forms part of The Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, Oxford. From 1984-2004, Professor Noble was the Burdon Sanderson Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, Oxford University, a Chair financed by the British Heart Foundation. He is now Director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University and researches on using computer models of biological organs and systems to interpret function through from the molecular to the whole body levels. With its international collaborators, this team has used supercomputers to create the first virtual organ, the virtual heart. From 1993-2001 he was Secretary-General of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) and in this role he played a major part in the launch of the Human Physiome Project, a sequel to the Human Genome Project that aims to interpret genetic and protein information at functional levels all the way from cells to whole organs. For more information visit Physiome Sciences Inc. (which became Predix Pharma in 2003, and is now EPIX Pharma, EPIX Pharma). |
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From his teens, Brian Blood has worked as a professional recorder player on film, TV, radio, recordings and concerts with the Dolmetsch Consort. He has taught at all the Dolmetsch Summer Schools both before and after marrying Marguerite Dolmetsch on April 3rd. 1971. He and Marguerite first met when they were invited to perform on Mary Hopkins' first album produced by Paul McCartney at the famous EMI Abbey Road Studios. Later the Blood and Dolmetsch families worked again with Paul McCartney and, during a recording session, Linda McCartney took the photographs of Paul Blood that appear in Linda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era. In March 1978, Dr. Blood left academic life to help the Dolmetsch family continue musical instrument production after they had been forced out of their family company, Arnold Dolmetsch Ltd., by then controlled by non-family shareholder-directors. The new family firm, J. & M. Dolmetsch, quickly gained a formidable reputation as a maker of high quality hand-made recorders, in no small part thanks to the active support and encouragement of many in the early music field including the doyen of American recorder and baroque flute makers, Friedrich von Huene, Boston, Mass. U.S., as well as the many craftsmen who left Arnold Dolmetsch Ltd. to join the new firm. In October 1981, Arnold Dolmetsch Ltd. was put into receivership by its bankers and by March 1982 the Dolmetsch family had acquired all the Dolmetsch trademarks, materials, drawings, tools (including plastic recorder tooling) thereby bringing the 'Dolmetsch' split to an end. In 1989, J & M Dolmetsch, the partnership, was absorbed into Dolmetsch Musical Instruments, the company set up, by the Dolmetsch family, to acquire the assets of Arnold Dolmetsch Ltd. Brian is managing director (CEO) with responsibility for this web site, as webmaster and as the author of our online recorder method, the music theory & history online and the Physics of Musical Instruments resources, for developing and optimising recorder design, for the designs of the Gold Series recorders for one-handed players and the Millennium square large bass recorders and for editing and publishing the Dolmetsch Library Recorder Music Series. He is also the author of a number of our e-monographs.
Dr. Blood is a governor of the Dolmetsch Foundation Inc., chairman of the Southern Early Music Forum and a member of the panel of visiting conductors of The Society of Recorder Players. Brian and Marguerite have three children, a daughter, Dr. Arabella Blood, and twin sons, Jonathan and Benjamin. |
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Linda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era
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