At the age of nine, she became a junior exhibitioner at the Royal College of Music, playing the violin, and thus the Junior Department of the RCM in the 1930s shaped her future musical life; she came under the influence of Angela Bull whose children’s plays gave her a stage vehicle and soon, also, an opportunity to compose. It is curious that in a decade in which there arose at the RCM a remarkable and feisty generation of women composers – including Elizabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, and Ruth Gipps – she seems never to have really become ‘one of the gang’. As she directed her focus on the theatre, able to produce catchy numbers at short notice, and developed her technique as a pianist rather than a violinist, the disruption caused by the outbreak of war, in 1939, gave her the perfect opportunity. While still in her teens, she furthered her talents in the ambience of the RCM that followed from Sir George Dyson’s successful ambition to keep the College open throughout the war. Aged eighteen, she began to write music for Angela Bull’s Christmas plays; in 1941, the play was  The Emperor and the Nightingale  (a story by Hans Christian Andersen), and Dring directed her music on stage. During the war and also subsequently she, along with other musical entertainers, among them Donald Swann and Joyce Grenfell, contributed numbers to West End revues and shows and continued this for a very active fifteen or twenty years. After the war, when BBC television service started up again, she also wrote for this medium. Later, during the 1960s, she wrote music for ITV’s ‘Play of the Week’ and also for the theatre, and even composed an opera which, unfortunately, was not heard in her lifetime. ​ Over the last twenty years of her life, she received commissions from numerous artists for music for the concert hall, almost all of it instrumental or chamber music, for various occasions. She married the celebrated oboist Roger Lord, who for over thirty years served as Principal Oboe in the London Symphony Orchestra and for whom she wrote a variety of works and prepared many arrangements. ​ Dring died unexpectedly, of a brain aneurysm, in 1977, in the full flood of artistic creation and life. Because her music was largely produced for specific events and in response to commissions, she tended not to assemble a carefully conserved personal work file, and many scores, including much music written for television, have not been traced. Although there were one or two periods during which she enjoyed a sudden flurry of publication, many pieces are still missing. ​ She produced a huge output of songs, both serious and light-hearted, but in our programme, we have only included one original item, which was, in fact, an instrumental version of a song. (Late in her career, she came to know John Bishop and his Thames Publishing music list; it was only later that Bishop launched into a series of collections of her songs but he only completed six volumes before he, too, died. The Thames volume of her Betjeman songs, written the year before she died, gave her and them a notable, if short-lived, popularity.) Here we have an instrumental arrangement of her Rossetti setting, ‘My Heart Is like a Singing Bird’, and another, of Cole Porter’s ‘In the Still of the Night’.