The New Year Fanfare, 'Cambridge Fanfare' and Fanfare ('65) were composed for the Cambridge Summer Music Schools that Pruden regularly attended, as composition tutor and conductor, during the 1960s and early 1970s. Sketches in short score of all three works are found together on a single folded four-sided leaf of MS paper: those for the New Year Fanfare and the editorially titled 'Cambridge Fanfare' are comprehensive, whilst Fanfare ('65) is only a rough draft. From contemporary accounts, it is possible to presume that the first two of these fanfares were performed at different times during the 1963 school. Certainly, the New Year Fanfare was heard at Cambridge in 1964, and a recording of the performance conducted by Gordon Webb is extant.
According to most Cambridge residents, Pruden's fanfares were composed for school opening ceremonies but Sir William Southgate, enrolled as a horn player, remembers them also as wake-up calls for the "absurdly early" breakfast hour: "They were played by members of the orchestra brass group and performed high up on the roof of the girls' dorms. I wasn't a member of the fanfare squad – in those heady days I wasn't reliable in the mornings!" Veteran Cambridge staff member Ron Dellow recalled that "the fanfares were Larry's idea. They were not so much part of a set programme as off-the-cuff compositions, done in the spirit of the moment with only basic rehearsal. They were occasional in the best sense of the word."
The New Year Fanfare was evidently composed for the school's opening concert in 1963. Pruden built the piece on the festive Wassail Song – a carol for New Year – and it was warmly received. John Jennings, a pianist and accompanist at Cambridge that year, recalls: "There was so much applause – especially for Larry's dynamic timpani playing which climaxed with an unstoppable roll at the end – that the Director (Stuart Morrison) declared the school open a second time just so the fanfare could be repeated!"; Jennings also remembers "Larry's grinning face at the end of each performance".
