The design of a hood is not a simple matter. A number of considerations have to be addressed: materials, colours, shape. In some cases, ready-made answers are at hand through other connexions — e.g., had he been associated with any UK university, its hoods could form a base form which to work — but this was not the case here. A starting-point was provided by the fact that Karg-Elert was a Honorary Member of the RCO, and although there was no hood for that distinction in his day, there is now. It was also suggested that the colours blue and gold might figure, as they are the heraldic colours of his home town, but the number of blue and gold hoods in use in the UK is very high, and I felt it would be difficult to design anything original, and I suggested that perhaps cream brocade might be incorporated, as it is associated with music in the UK.

The HonRCO hood provided the shape of hood to use — the Burgon shape. Two suggestions were to have a gold hood, either lined with mid-blue and bound with cream brocade, or lined with cream brocade and bound mid-blue, though I was not very happy with either design. A third suggestion was cream brocade lined with a shot silk of blue and gold: this is used at Edinburgh for its DLitt hood, but the resultant colour is very muddy, and again I was not happy with it.

My fourth suggestion, which was the one un­animously approved by the Archive’s Council, involved using the shot silk lining from the HonRCO hood. This is a very beautiful silk indeed, being a shot silk of three colours, rather than the usual two. It is used at the University of Wales for lining its music hoods, and thus it adorns my own BMus hood. Wales calls it ‘pearl shot’, and this is the effect it produces — a soft pink colour, with secondary ‘notes’ of green and rose. The RCO adopted it to line the FRCO hood when they revised their hoods in 1972 (though for some reason they call it ‘maize’) and it is used in the HonRCO hood. (The silk is in fact a warp of alternate yellow and orange threads, with a weft of pale blueish-grey.)

The question of the outer shell colour was harder: the RCO puts the pearl silk inside crimson brocade hoods; at Wales it is used inside dark blue for BMus and MMus, inside crimson for the PhD in music, and scarlet for the DMus. Inside a black hood it was the original Wales MMus, and is now the Choir-training diploma of the RCO. Dark green seemed to be a fresh choice (oddly, there are few green hoods in use), and it picks up the secondary green from the lining. Thus the outer has no symbolic significance.

Ede and Ravenscroft made up the first three hoods, and, although the outer is perhaps a little lighter than I had envisaged, the result is a striking and original hood.