Page 55 - Guildhall Coverage Book 2020-21

30 October 2020

London’s Guildhall School rides out Covid with Dante

Since opening in 1880, London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama has become one of the
world’s most prestigious conservatoires. Key to the school’s musical curricula is its annual
award for The Gold Medal – a performance competition that began in 1915 and had taken
place uninterrupted through 2019. However, the global pandemic has meant that the annual
May performance has been put on hold as teaching moved online during the summer term.

‘Because of Covid we needed to be swift in our response to ensure things like The Gold
Medal could occur and, importantly, that in-person classes could still take place with full
scale participation,’ says Head of Recording & Audio Visual, Julian Hepple. ‘To make that
happen, we quickly turned to Dante and Dante Domain Manager, and, in September, as we
returned to in-person teaching, we were able to hold The Gold Medal and broadcast the
performance online.’

Dante enabled the Guildhall to solve Covid-related challenges both for live performance and
virtual learning.
To adhere to social distancing requirements, The Gold Medal performances were employed
four separate rooms with he largest space populated by string instruments and piano.
Woodwind and brass were split up each into their own rooms, with 3m of space allocated
between performers, and the conductor was located in a fourth room. The challenge was to
enable full collaboration between the multiple rooms.

‘We had 90 musicians in total across the different rooms and building,’ Hepple says. ‘We
needed to manage a number of inputs and outputs across the space and have them be as
latency free as possible. They needed to be able to perform synchronously with one
another.’